When it’s you pressing the shutter, it’s all happy and completely innocent.  But what about when you don’t know who that guy is taking photos of your kid?  From the Guardian UK,

Requests to take pictures had to be made in writing to the headteacher, but in almost all cases were refused “due to the safeguarding of all children”. In spite of repeatedly taking the issue up with the school and governing body, these parents have been denied photographs of their children at sports days and Christmas plays – even at the PTA craft fair.

Such a blanket ban is relatively rare, but the issue of photographing children has become fraught in schools all over Britain. Ten years ago, nobody thought twice about photographing children on the football field. Now every click of the camera is overhung with a cloud of possible ill intent. Who is photographing that child and why? What will they do with the photo? The epitome of innocence – parents recording their child’s nativity play – has become subject to the strictest regulation.

The problem becomes more acute when children are involved in sports, as the people doing the photographing of children are not necessarily from your school, but the other as well. This not only means you don’t know who is taking pictures, but to the extent you know and trust the parents of children are “your side,” you have no particular reason to trust those you don’t know.

A secondary school teacher from Hertfordshire, who wishes to remain anonymous, says that he was only allowed to photograph his own school’s pupils at sports events, so “if there are three kids on a medal platform, you have to take your child away from the platform and photograph them separately”.

The Child Protection in Sport Unit recommends that you “avoid full-face and body shots” and that children in swimming costumes should only be shown “from waist or shoulder up”. These rules create a stilted genre of child photography, where children are pictured on their own or at designated “photo moments” at the end of the play or match, rather than in the thick of events.

As schools will often sell photos or videos to parents while denying them the opportunity to take their own, the assumption is that these new rules are intended to provide a revenue stream for schools.  After all, $15 DVDs of the class play or the 7th grade soccer match certainly seem a bit greedy.  And it’s hardly outside the realm of possibility that schools have seized upon the issue to provide a secondary benefit of making a few quid.  But it’s not just that. 

The spread of photo bans is not really a response to child abusers stalking school sports days. Instead, it reflects the contamination of everyday adult-child relations – and the new assumption, as the children’s author Philip Pullman put it, that “the default position of one human being to another is predatory rather than kindness”. Any adult looking through the viewfinder at a child is viewed as potentially sinister and in need of regulation.

The rationalization for such pervasive regulation of ordinary parental activities is do it for the children. Yet, this isn’t quite as crazy as it seems.  While this sort of regulation is absurd when it comes to “us,” it’s not nearly as absurd when it comes to “them,” the adults whose purposes are unclear.  Indeed, we may have no reason to suspect that they’re pedophiles (or anything remotely evil), but wonder whether they will inadvertently post images to the internet of our children which we would prefer not be posted.  After all, they’re our children and who knows how careful (or careless) they will be with the images.

Yet the idea of being unable to take photos of your child in her class play, or at a little league game, seems absurd.  Imagine having to bring your lawyer along to interpret the regulatory forms in triplicate needed so you can sign off before receiving your photographing permit?  Have we seriously come to this?  While the story is out of United Kingdom, there is nothing about it that doesn’t suggest it couldn’t happen here. In fact, it surprised me that it hasn’t already, and I fully expect someone to tell me that it has indeed.

In a few hours, my plan is to take a few well-conceived pictures of my son walking to receive his high school diploma. There’s a decent chance a few other kids will find their way into my pictures.  There a decent change that my son will end up in some other parent’s pictures as well.  We’ll just have to take our chances, and pray they won’t end up on some high school graduate porn website.  That’s my default, not because I trust other people implicitly but because I can’t imagine going through life any other way.

H/T Ed at Blawg Review