http://artlife.blogspot.com/2008/10/salon-des-refuses-bill-henson.html

Susan

It does seem terribly odd for a career feminist and ethicist to regard little girls as miniature adults capable of the wisdom of Job (with a Herculean musculature to fend off all comers to boot!) – perhaps Cannold has allowed herself to become one of the ‘compulsive commentariat’, like the latter-day Germaine Greer, driven to windbag upon anything that shuffles into their field of consciousness.

The patent absurdity of this frouncing encouragement lies in its attribution of fully-fledged agency to the child (see ArtWranglers comment, 30/05/08), as if she had the capacity to make such a fateful decision in the first place.

Was Cannold aware Henson had been lurking round the family since ‘N’ was 7 years old? Henon’s ‘junkies’ show includes an image of an eight year-old posed standing naked in chicken shit. It that nice? Would you not check the artist’s oeuvre out first before handing over your child to him? Or is fame the be-all-and-end-all criterion for okayness?

Any advice these parents might give their twelve year-old daughter can only be seen as unadulterated malarkey, given that they left the decision as to whether to pose nude for a trash art photographer with plenty of form when it comes to the objectifing gaze (and that’s putting it politely – see http://www.menziesartbrands.com/cgi/dmcat.cgi?rm=browse&cat_id=83) ultimately to her.

Thus Cannold’s message to the girl (“Be proud”, perhaps meant as well-meaning words of comfort) merely demonstrates the misguided attribution of agency to a child who cannot have the capacity to understand the implications of such a decision by virtue of her age and developmental stage. The subtext is that the child’s difficulties were wholly caused by the furore over her photograph – grist to the sly suggestion that it was those concerned for the welfare of the child who had in fact hurt the child (p 72).

Dan doesn’t mention how old he was when he suffered his abuse. But the tragic fact that child sexual exploitation and abuse is increasingly widespread resists quarantining, despite the attractions of rendering the sexual objectification of little girls innocuous by comparison to violent forms of sexual abuse (of teenage boys, for example). Sexual abuse is not circumscribed by or reducible to physical assault: in just about every case it is initiated and effected by subtle, manipulative and coercive abuses of power that at the very least despoils the insouciant unselfconsciousness that makes childhood so special for the lucky ones.

What right has anyone to take this from a child? Or to permit it?

We now know that ‘violence’ can be done to children in ways not strictly physical. We also know that the whole gamut of paedophilic activities (from paedophilic voyeurism to horrific, violent abuse of children) in almost every instance begins with identical processes of ‘grooming’ – the insinuation of an adult into a trusting relationship with a child over time – involving devious abuses of power and, if required, frank coercion. There is no means of determining whether such virtually identical originary dynamics will end either in mild psychological consequences or in catastrophic, horrific outcomes. Having their origins in the same single-minded, persistent and elaborately disguised behaviours, why make exceptions?
Why ask, “Show me the damage to this child!”?

I do not believe that the community is at all fussed about “any depictions of children”. This is a red herring. The debate was never about a Victorian abhorrence of nudity per se (a well-informed and mature adult community is a little wiser than that), but was always about interrogating the relations and behaviours implied by the existence of a photograph of a nude under-age girl – an image that had ultimately found its way into cyberspace through various complicit acts of exploitation and neglect.

Nor do I believe that community questioning of the behaviours of the artist, the family and the gallery were attempts to “read…moral depravity…to turn his (Henson’s) body of work into the centre piece of a debate on child exploitation”, or pretexts for adding weight to an ongoing child exploitation debate: in my view, the debates coexist, are interrelated, but are not identical. Each is of such importance to the community that neither needs the other to add weight to it.

Nonetheless exploitation was present in spades around the making, exhibition and online publication of ‘Untitled 2007/08’, and involved many people. Yet while not all of it was conscious, and not all of it was perverse, all of it was engaged in by people who should have known better.

Sadly, community ignorance of ‘grooming’ behaviours leaves children unprotected and draws the community into unwitting complicity with child abuse (in some child welfare circles this is being referred to as the “grooming of the community”). These are the permissive, tolerant, and unglamorous conditions that make life confusing and dangerous for children and young adolescents. And they have resulted in a culture of dereliction masquerading as liberalism.

Research over recent decades has demonstrated unequivocally that child sexual abuse in its various permutations results in a range of psychological consequences from self-esteem problems and social withdrawal, difficulties with sexuality and intimacy, to severe and florid psychiatric disorder (a kind of complete, soul-destroying devastation of a person), and, in the worst case scenario, suicide. A kind of middle-level, prolonged psychological consequence of the abuse of a child’s trust is the permanent breakdown of trust in intimate relationships – leading in many instances to depression refractory to treatment.

Fortunately, child abuse is not ubiquitous – but where it is most likely to occur is precisely where proper boundaries are not firmly maintained between familial, social, educational, occupational, and cultural settings and milieus, and the unbounded world at large. The art world celebrates and privileges the transgression of boundaries, and this has created opportunities for ‘moral’ transgression and the aesthetic justification for it.

Without boundaries there are no distinctions, no differences, no gates or doors, no safety, only mergence and continuum.

Surely any basic sense of community implies a collective responsibility to protect children from harm, to ensure safe boundaries and preserve the integrity of their development and future happiness – and in this to familiarise ourselves with the changing hazards of contemporary life likely to place them in jeopardy?

Is it not at least an educated parent’s responsibility to be familiar with evidence-based knowledge (amassed since the ‘eighties) regarding the nature of ‘grooming’ behaviours, the various non-physical forms of child (sexual) abuse, and the typology of perpetrators in their ever-mutating forms and clever guises?

‘Liberal’ parenting can segue into negligent parenting; true liberalism is premised upon the establishment and preservation of firm and safe boundaries around a developing child to ensure privacy, security and safety throughout the vulnerable, formative years and the first, tentative, unaccompanied forays into life. In this there can be no place for the predations of a middle-aged man and his camera, nor the rationalising aesthetic discourses that sanction the persuasion of a twelve year-old girl – no matter how “smart” and “extremely social” her Mum thinks she is – to remove her clothes for him.

For me, at least, it’s time to ditch the squalid trompe l’oeil that is Henson’s enterprise and move on out into the light…..and nearer to what is true and good in life and art.

I was molested by a photographer in the 1980s. Nothing he did to me, the positions he put me in or the acts I was forced to perform bear any reseblance to Henson (or Hamilton, Mann, Sturges, Mapplethorpe etc). Furthermore, the professional work of the photographer who molested me would give no indication of any depravity, which is why I believe it is absurd that some people insist on reading an exploitative text into Henson’s work.

Attitudes to images of children have changed significantly in the last few years in some circles. Unfortunately many of those who purport to protect children are now claiming that any images of children have exploitative potential. Certainly paedophiles can find any image of a child arousing no matter how many layers of covering you put on the subject. I do not see this as a reason for us to then make the figure of a child taboo, and the only end I see is the image of a child becoming further fetishized and having absolutely no effect on reducing the number of children who are being abused and exploited. The more hostile attitudes to Bill Henson are just the thin edge of the wedge.

If today’s hysteria were the norm 25 years ago at the time I went through my ordeal I am certain it would have made no difference me. I still would have been degraded and molested; the fanatics and wowsers would have still been happy that they were making so much noise, and not one child would have been saved anyway.

There is a serious debate here to be had, certainly. But why are some people now so uncomfortable with any depictions of children? Why have so many decent photographers abandoned photographing children because of putrid innuendo? Why do some people still not realise that nudity is not necessarily pornographic and that nudity is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for exploitation?

All I have seen over the last few months is the stereotype of the depraved artist being trotted out yet again. I cannot see how some of the gross claims that are being made about Henson actually have much to do with protecting children from harm. It is a great diversion because some of the more apparent sources of harm are just so much more difficult to stare down.

Presumably consent has been obtained from all the parties (under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, however, parental consent is overridden), but this is an extraordinarily provocative and abusive thing for David Marr to have done. I suspect he is doing this to goad child protectionists into another stoush with civil-libertarians, as he has cunningly interpolated non-controversial Henson photographs to provide artistic (‘non- sexual’) context. This is the point where the law previously fell down, as ’sexual context’ is required by the NSW Crimes ACT 1900 – s 91H (b).

NSW law may not apply to David Marr’s book, as it has been published in Melbourne by Michael Heyward. As far as Commonwealth legislation is concerned, there are stricter provisions. The relevant section is 473.1. This link may assist with some questions people may have regarding C’wealth law:

http://www.parliament.nsw.gov.au/prod/parlment/publications.nsf/key/ChildPornographyLaw

David Marr and any other parties to the publication of this book/new photograph are in my view complicit in the ongoing sexual exploitation and abuse of this poor kid.

I am utterly appalled.

And I say bring it on.

What has been omitted from the illustrious David Marr’s CV (http://www.textpublishing.com.au/books-and-authors/book/the-henson-case) is the fact of his energetic captaincy of Watch On Censorship, which was (under the auspices of NAVA), almost single-handedly responsible for hijacking the debate from that of child protection to art censorship.

It may be recalled that, in closing his wildly free-associative speech at the MCA Forum in June, Julian Burnside (Liberty Victoria) scoffed that: “if we allow ourselves to be seduced by Hetty’s motherhood ideas, we will end up again with the bonfire of the vanities, turning our faces towards the past”.

As if it weren’t sufficient for civil libertarians to have so ruthlessly divided the community in this fashion with an art censorship ’straw man’ (somewhat understandable, given a decade of eroded civil rights under Howard, and the hamfisted Police response to community complaints in the context of totally inadequate child protection legislation), this righteous new offensive under General Marr has the insidious feel of a resupplied victorious army returning to torch the city, just for good measure.

All jokes aside, it will be interesting to see whether Marr has any sound facts and arguments to offer the community in ‘The Henson Case: Art and Panic ‘ beyond the usual raft of red herrings, abusive ad hominum attacks, fallacious non sequiturs, contradictions, and supercilious put-downs.