Some states require that photo labs report any photo that they deem suspicious to the police while others do not, but none give much help in explaining what suspicious photos of children actually look like. State law on child pornography is murky at best, and it varies from state to state. And when a photo lab sends its material to another state for developing, federal laws (which may differ from the state laws, but are equally murky) come into play.
In the absence of clear jurisdictional authority, much less clear laws, anyone snapping pictures of kids and wanting to avoid the slammer might decide to simply ask about the policies of their local labs and the corporations that direct them. How do they separate those who are simply charmed by their naked kids from those who seek to charm others for profit?
I expended no little energy trying to unearth the guidelines from the corporate headquarters of photo developing giants. I may as well have tried to get to the bottom of Cosa Nostra rub-out policies by making a few calls. I did discover that the world of photo developing is surprisingly small and, perhaps not so surprisingly, secretive.
When one talks to people at the top, as I did, one finds a penetrating and pervasive fear of public exposure. My sources promised to speak only on guarantee of anonymity. Too many lawsuits are pending and too many threats of others simmer to allow policy issues to be made public, said a top lawyer at one of the nation's largest photo developing companies.
Still, according to all my sources (which include executives on the corporate level and also five local photo-lab people incautious enough to spill the beans), the correct procedures for handling questionable photographs are never clear and they vary -- even within the same corporation -- according to state law. They do not pertain to erotic pictures of adults unless they appear to depict rape or some other illegal activity. (Or unless one of the adults could be mistaken for a child.)
Kids are different. Naked kids under the age of 5 or 6 are probably OK, so long as nothing else in the picture invites suspicion. Nudity in older children may be a problem -- or maybe not. It is up to the lab person or a supervisor to consult his or her own sense of propriety and moral sensitivities, as well as any rough-and-ready training that has been given in how to determine whether a photo constitutes child pornography.
Actually, given that the focus of the law has shifted from the photo to the reaction of the viewer, the wise technician will consult his or her loins: A turn-on means porn.
In any case, it seems obvious that only a society under great stress, wanting to look at kids' bodies and blame it on somebody else, would tolerate dissemination of its policing functions to photo development clerks. We put photo labs in the position of resolving a massive cultural confusion that is both vicious and duplicitous.
No one, of course, is allowed to say that improper snapshots are not a problem -- much less that child pornography in all forms is nothing but an urban legend. Nevertheless, according to state police officials in
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Even so, one might argue that amateurs are pros-in-the-making and that the problem of distribution is not solved by such a distinction. But as Philip Stokes, a photographer and senior research fellow at Nottingham Trent University, points out, although it may be true that somebody guilty of assault on a child has nude photos of children, that does not allow us to reverse the argument and say that possession of such photos means someone is contemplating the act. One might as well assume, he says, that anyone possessing antique magazines is on the road to burglary.
The truth is that true research in this area is impossible, given that it's illegal to look at anything that is or might be child pornography. As a result, nobody knows exactly what child pornography is, what forms it takes, where it is, how much of it exists -- or even if it exists. We seem happy that nobody knows: That way we can take our fantasies, project them onto phantom demons (the child pornographers) and feel righteous.
As for kiddie porn developed by mainstream photo labs, I would bet that it hardly exists at all. Oh sure, you may be able to find a case or two, but, allowing for a certain hyperbole on my part, I would say that we are off on another loud ride into fairyland, duplicating our earlier trips into satanic ritual abuse and recovered memory accusations.
We know that kids are not harmed by family snapshots or any other kind of photography this side of snuff films and photographs that document actual cases of assault, rape and other forms of violent coercion. So when was it, exactly, that the law lost the ability to tell the difference between a family snapshot and kiddie porn?
The latest wave of confusion comes from two developments in the '80s and early '90s: New laws were passed to differentiate child porn from unapologetic adult hardcore porn, and a new philosophy of pornography emerged that insisted that a potentially lurid photo can be considered not just illegal but a criminal assault on its subject.
We owe the latter assertion to the lamentably influential anti-porn feminists Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. They argued that porn (originally adult heterosexual porn) constituted not just image but action -- action identical to sexual assault that is repeated each time the photo is distributed or viewed. (They did not, however, bother to define "pornography"; they assumed we all knew it when we saw it, which, in turn, ensured that we could never really know when we were not seeing it.)
Child protection experts used these arguments to redefine activities that looked vaguely pedophilic as criminal actions. Child pornography became tantamount to murder. Lloyd Martin, the infamous LAPD officer who was considered a national expert on the dangers to children throughout the '80s, popularized the equation. Any form of pedophilic activity, he announced, is "worse than homicide."