Picturing Childhood

Picturing
Childhood
The Myth of the Child
in Popular Imagery

Patricia Holland
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Contents

Acknowledgements vi

Preface: Twenty-first-century childhood and the routine spectacular ix

Introduction: Pictures of children: images of childhood 1

1 There’s no such thing as a baby…or is there? 25

2 Superbrats in the charmed circle of home 51

3 Ignorant pupils and harmonious nature 75

4 The fantasy of liberation and the demand for rights 95

5 No future: the threat of childhood and the impossibility of youth 116

6 Crybabies and damaged children 143

7 Gender, sexuality and a fantasy for girls 178

Postscript: Escape from childhood 205

Index 207
Acknowledgements

This book is the result of a long-term project of collecting and studying pictures
of children. It is a sequel to What is a Child? (Virago, 1992), which itself grew
out of an exhibition, Children Photographed, mounted in 1976 by the late Jo
Spence and Andrew Mann of the Children’s Rights Workshop, together with
Christine Vincent, Diana Phillips and Arthur Lockwood of the design group Ikon.
They first aroused my enthusiasm for the rich and provocative field of pictures
of children, with all its implications and ramifications, and their work in
collecting and discussing imagery over the intervening years made an invaluable
contribution, which is now also reflected in Picturing Childhood. The exhibition
Seen but not Heard? curated by Andrew Dewdney at the Watershed Gallery in
Bristol in 1992 developed the ideas further.
I should like to thank Pauline Trudell and Arthur Lockwood for continuing
conversations and new insights, and Arthur for his contribution to design and
layout; also Vicki Annand for sharing her collection of pictures with me when I
was writing What is a Child?; Christine Woodrow from the University of Central
Queensland, Australia; Heather Montgomery and Megan Doolittle from the
Open University, and Máire Messenger Davies from Cardiff University for
background information, reading chapters and making comments, as well as
fruitful discussions and general support. I would also like to thank all those who
have invited me to give lectures and presentations on the subject in Britain
and Australia. Particular thanks to students from the Early Childhood Studies
Scheme at London Metropolitan University, who have enthusiastically hunted
out pictures and press cuttings for me. Thanks, too, to Phillipa Brewster of
I.B.Tauris for supportive and patient editing and generally making sure the
book happened.
Some of the material in Picturing Childhood draws on my previous work
published in What is a Child?; ‘Childhood and the uses of photography’, in
Patricia Holland and Andrew Dewdney (eds) (1992) Seen But Not Heard?
Childhood and the Photographic Image, Bristol: Watershed Media Centre; ‘Living
for libido or Child’s Play 4: The imagery of childhood and the call for censorship’,
in Martin Barker and Julian Petley (eds) (1997) Ill Effects, the Media/violence
Debate, London: Routledge and ‘Looking at babies: pleasures and taboos’, in

vi
 ACKNOWLED GEMENTS vii

Catherine Fehily, Jane Fletcher and Kate Newton (eds) (2000) I Spy: Representations
of Childhood, London: I.B.Tauris.
Finally I should like to thank all those organisations, companies and
individuals who have given permission to reproduce their visual material to
illustrate the arguments in this book; they are credited beside each illustration.
Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders of the visual
material and we regret any errors or omissions that may inadvertently remain.
Catalogue cover, courtesy of H&M. Photographer Oscar Falk.
 Preface

Twenty-first-century
childhood and the routine
spectacular

Picturing Childhood is the result of more than twenty years of interest in popular
media imagery. It draws on my large and eclectic collection of pictures of
children made up of postcards and greetings cards old and new, photocopies
from library books, scraps compulsively ripped out of newspapers, fat copies
of glossy magazines, advertisements, bedraggled packages from supermarket
shelves, museum kitsch and all those brochures, catalogues, charity appeals and
other printed material that come unsolicited through the letterbox. Increasingly
it includes references to less tangible images on websites, or sent by e-mail. The
collection continues to grow, part of an obsession I can’t get rid of. Because of
its ephemeral quality the older papers are yellowing and crumpled, and the
whole lot is a disorderly mess. Reduced to two-dimensional surfaces, well fed,
smiling babies and little girls in fairy tutus share cardboard boxes with the
suffering children from international conflicts and the angry youngsters in
inner-city streets. Every year I mean to put aside time to sort it out properly, but
I never quite get round to it.
My collection is more serendipitous than scholarly, made purely for my own
amusement, with no claims to either sociological status (no careful sampling, no
systematic organisation, no key words) or artistic or antiquarian authenticity.
Postcards and cheap art reproductions sit comfortably alongside originals I have
casually acquired from junk shops or market stalls. I don’t set particular store
by age or rarity. Instead I’m fascinated by trivia, by the everyday, by common
knowledge, and what I would like to describe as the ‘routine spectacular’. Even
so (in a sneaking fascination for the old), I do value the rose-embossed birthday
card showing a toothy infant in a high chair which was sent to my elderly aunt

ix
x PICTURING CHILDHOOD

on her first birthday in 1919, and the little girl with a fetching look and her head
to one side which was published in Paris and posted in Lisbon in 1920. I am
amused by the pair of sepia pictures labelled ‘sorrow’ and ‘joy’ in which a toddler
in a night-cap first squats miserably over his potty, then grins with a sense of
relief and achievement, and I am intrigued by a carefully staged stereograph in
which a well-dressed group of women gather around a new arrival. But as far as
I am concerned, a reproduction of a Victorian postcard will do as well as the
original – in fact better, because it draws attention to two different historical
circumstances rather than one. The social circumstances and ways of thinking
in which pictures such as these originated are indeed fascinating, but what is
more to my purpose is the appeal they have in the present day and the ways in
which they are recycled and re-staged. The historian Raphael Samuel described
this process as creating ‘theatres of memory’.
My collection is roughly organised by topic and also by date, since my assess-
ment of what topics are important changes and it is easier to start a new pile
every now and then (‘sweetness’ has given way to ‘sexiness’; ‘free schooling’ to
‘tests and examinations’). However, from the top of a recent pile I pick, pretty
well at random, the 2001 autumn catalogue for the fashion chain H&M, and am
reassured that contemporary childhood is indeed a blissful affair. The children
pictured in these pages are active, out of doors, fascinated by the world around
them (a boy peers at a frog in a jar), windswept, heterogeneous (there are boys
and girls, a child of apparently mixed-race origin, a child of oriental origin), all
bursting with health and energy. And, of course, they are beautifully dressed in
a varied wardrobe of clothes that are warm, hard-wearing, good quality and
stylish. What more could anyone want?
Picturing Childhood starts from the pleasure I continue to take in my
collection, and draws out from this minor amusement what I hope will be a
more serious commentary on the nature of childhood itself. Despite a twenty-
first-century mood of cynical iconoclasm, I do not want to defuse the pleasure
of these images but to try to make sense of that pleasure. This is not primarily
an academic book. It does not observe academic conventions, and tries to avoid
academic language. I hope it will appeal to all readers who are concerned about
childhood and contemporary debates around pictures of children. However, it is
written in the context of two newish academic disciplines: a ‘new’ sociology of
childhood, which considers childhood as a social phenomenon freed from the
value-laden, instrumental preoccupations of developmental and educational
approaches; and a burgeoning literature on visual culture, which specifically
detaches a study of the visual from its art historical roots, and celebrates the
proliferation of popular visual forms. In that spirit, pictures that are made
 P R E FAC E xi

specifically as works of art will not be the central focus of my discussion. I am

more interested in those little treats or shocks which we encounter everyday
than in the one-off and deliberately remarkable.
Picturing Childhood is an updated version of What is a Child?, published more
than a decade ago. When that book was first conceived, the ‘new’ sociology of
childhood was in its early days, influenced by a clamour of voices from outside the
academy which demanded a demystification of received ideas and an unpre-
judiced way of looking at children and childhood. Voices came from the free
schooling movement, the children’s rights movement, the student movement. The
discipline was influenced by academic radicalism, 1970s feminism and a growing
sensitivity to cultural diversity. At the same time, a number of social historians
were setting out to write history ‘from below’ – grounded in the everyday
experience of ordinary people – and had begun to research a specific history of
childhood itself, separate from the histories of education or ‘the family’. A history
of children’s daily experiences has been extremely difficult to trace, since children
themselves have had little or no access to those public forms of expression that last
down the ages. It became necessary to make a distinction between a history of
children and children’s experiences, and a history of ‘childhood’ – which is
effectively an account of adult views of what children are and how they should
be. Such views have gone through many transformations, and the imagery of
childhood reflects those changes. Phillipe Aries’s controversial claim that
childhood is a slippery thing and a recent, Western invention was based on his
study of the Western art tradition. Picturing Childhood takes as its subject matter
those debates and mythologies which have circulated in Britain from the 1970s up
to the present, with an occasional glance further back into history. It accepts that
the study of childhood includes a re-evaluation of children’s place in society as
well as an assessment of adults’ changing attitudes to children.
Despite the optimism and child-centred nature of the new approach, calling
the nature of childhood into question has given rise to a complex of new fears.
Alongside the joyous images from advertising and consumer magazines, many
contemporary narratives of childhood are bleak and deeply disturbing. Amidst
the unprecedented prosperity of the Western world, we are told stories of
children who are dangerous and who are themselves in deadly danger; we hear
of children who are both damaged and damaging; of children who are sexually
or intellectually precocious, and of others who are aggressive, assertive or out of
control. The children who murdered the toddler James Bulger; the ‘Rambo
Boys’ who massacred their classmates in Jonesboro, Arkansas; Jon-Benet
Ramsey, the six-year-old beauty queen in lipstick and high heels who was herself
murdered; the Palestinian baby dressed as a suicide bomber; the wild children,
xii PICTURING CHILDHOOD

like ‘Balaclava Boy’, who terrorise inner-city estates; these children seem to have
rejected childish qualities. If children represent the future, there seems to be
little faith in what that future might bring.
And the imagery itself has become a focus of concern. What sort of
exploitation is involved when children, the most powerless group in society, are
pictured for the pleasure and delight of adults who potentially have total control
over them? When I look at my collection of postcard children, made up of
purely hedonistic images, I now find myself looking with the jaundiced eyes of
an age which no longer draws strength from mythology and is acutely aware of
the darker side of fantasy. Contemporary debate has drawn attention to illicit
adult desires which lurk below the surface, and suggests that the most innocent-
seeming image may feed or provoke them. Across the appreciation of every
chubby infant falls the shadow of other pictured children – particularly those
sexualised children whose images are circulated on the Internet. Can an adult
man in this day and age enjoy an image of a naked baby, a pre-pubescent girl or
a feminised boy without fearing an accusation of paedophilia? If the clear eye of
the catalogue baby or the cheeky smile on the picture postcard is created by a
lascivious adult or is provoked by a callous photographer, does that alter our
enjoyment of it?
We live in an age which has learned not to trust its reactions, afraid of being
exploitative and of being exploited. The tendency in the press and in everyday
conversation is towards cynicism. The urge is always to deconstruct, to search
behind every attractive surface in order to avoid being deceived. Should we
interpret that smiling boy on the travel advertisement as an invitation to sex
tourists – even an unconscious one? My news cuttings include many items
concerning moral debates around such pictures. In March 2001 the police
threatened to shut down an exhibition because of Tierney Gearon’s oversized,
brightly coloured snapshots of her children, particularly one in which they flaunt
their nakedness, their faces, disturbingly, covered by masks; in 1995 a British
newsreader was arrested when the processing laboratory reported the family snaps
of her seven-year-old daughter in the bath as ‘indecent’; the society photographer
Ron Oliver had his negatives confiscated by the Obscene Publications Squad
and was threatened with prosecution because he photographed other people’s
children naked; the respected artist and historian Graham Ovenden was suspected
of being part of a child pornography ring, partly because of his collection of
Victorian photographs. In the light of such concerns, when we look at everyday
mass-produced and mass-circulated pictures of children, should we always be
troubled rather than charmed or delighted? These will be amongst the questions
addressed by this book.
 P R E FAC E xiii

Many present-day images knowingly trespass on dangerous ground. In

the art world and in news and advertising, there has been growth in imagery
that deliberately sets out to shock, in an undisguised attempt to cut though
the visual babble of the everyday urban scene. In the face of critique, rather
than creating works that are more ‘realistic’ or restrained, some artists have
sought themes that are even more outrageous and exuberant. Childhood has
become an overt focus for challenging taboos, and artists such as the Chapman
brothers, whose work includes models of children in obscene and sexual poses,
and Paula Rego, whose frank exploration of the darker side of familiar nursery
rhymes deals with violence, pain and sexuality, go straight to the heart of
contemporary fears. The scandalous image suggests that children may well be
corrupt after all.
There seems to be a need to violate innocence – or perhaps it is a recognition
that innocence will in any case be violated, and that dreaded moment must be
rehearsed in fantasy and imagery. Childhood has come to embody the thrill of
the forbidden and the excitement of taboo. It was Sigmund Freud who taught
us that a horror story about childhood is at the roots of our self-awareness. Such
a horror story needs forms of expression that go beyond everyday realism.
There is something very odd about taboos. They do not warn us off a topic,
as is normally thought; they attract us to it. They signal with bright and flashing
lights that here is something we will all be fascinated by, and then (as in the 1997
London Royal Academy Sensations exhibition, where controversial work by
the Chapman brothers and others was put in a ‘special room’ which visitors
were warned was not suitable for children) they hide it away to tantalise their
audience further. Instead of averting our eyes, we rush to see, but our looking is
of a special sort, tempered by fear. Taboos are badly kept secrets. Attention is
drawn to a taboo act through the proliferation of taboo speech: on television,
in the newspapers, on the Internet – everywhere. Taboos are temptations, but
breaking one does not serve to dissolve it or make it disappear. It merely
heightens the moral and cultural dilemmas that generated it in the first place.
To challenge a taboo is to strengthen it and to reinforce its power.
The shiver of horror that Freud described as characteristic of taboo may
come from an appraisal of the content of an image, but it also lurks in fears of
what that image may conceal, and the emotions and forbidden desires that the
image may provoke. The lamented loss of innocence is not only the innocence
of childhood, but the innocence of the adult gaze. At the dawn of the twenty-
first century, the revelation of impurities at the heart of our popular pleasures
has led to a crisis of looking. The use of the Internet and the proliferation of
digital technologies has increased the fears which our culture brings to the
xiv PICTURING CHILDHOOD

manner in which we do our looking, aware of the myriad uncontrollable ways

in which it is possible to respond to any image.
What are we to make of this strange new mood? Must we reject its easy
pleasures and condemn its risky explorations? Out of respect for children, must
we all become puritans or moralists? The crisis over childhood, reflected in the
popular media, is real. Children are getting older younger. But it could also be
seen as a crisis over what it means to be an adult at a time of rapid social change.
In my view, repressive attitudes may well represent a panic-stricken and some-
times vicious response to the increasing power and visibility of children in the
public world. Examples of such changes include: long-standing abuses against
children being brought to light and abusers forced to face the costs; a questioning
of the automatic power of those in authority over children – whether teachers,
parents, social workers or school bullies; the fact that children are listened to with
greater respect by journalists and in television programmes; and the moderate
success that has been achieved by campaigns for children’s participation in
many different fields.
Picturing Childhood is about construction rather than deconstruction. I
want to make it clear that when I speak of ‘imagery’ and ‘mythologies’ I am not
asserting that these things are necessarily wrong or untrue. Sometimes the
grimmest of fantasies reflect the real world only too well. Sometimes an image
may be stereotyped or biased, but even pictures which are not an accurate
representation of the ways things are, I will argue, express important realities
about contemporary life. Rather than pointing out how images mislead or
deceive, this book will be looking at the attitudes and ideas which construct the
image, and how those attitudes and images together put pressure on real flesh-
and-blood children. Picturing Childhood seeks to explore the ways in which the
popular imagery of recent history has influenced contemporary definitions of
childhood. This means that a clear distinction needs to be made between the
study of the lives of real flesh-and-blood children and a study of the history and
influence of the concept of childhood, to which images have made a powerful
contribution. Rather than seeking to criticise and control the content of an image,
we should be asking what the circumstances are within which pictures are
created, and why they are greeted with pleasure or judged unacceptable.
We must always remember that while individual pictures may portray real
children – each child unique and individual – the imagery shows us an abstract,
shifting and heavily ideological concept. This book looks at the ways in which
the imagery of childhood moves beyond pictures of children to tell stories, spin
mythologies, and bring its own visual delight. As both routine and spectacular,
it tells of the dream of childhood and its persistent nightmare.
 P R E FAC E xv

Notes on Preface

p.x Raphael Samuel: (1994) Theatres of Memory, Vol.1: Past and Present in
Contemporary Culture, London: Verso.
visual culture: Nicholas Mirzoeff (1999) An Introduction to Visual Culture,
London: Routledge.
p.xi the ‘new’ sociology of childhood: Allison James and Alan Prout (eds) (1990)
Constructing Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociological
Study of Childhood, London: Falmer.
a history of ‘childhood’: Hugh Cunningham (1995) Children and Childhood in
Western Society since 1500, London: Longman.
Phillipe Aries’s controversial claim: Phillipe Aries (1960/1973) Centuries of
Childhood, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
James Bulger: murdered by two 10-year-olds in 1992. See Chapter 5.
‘Rambo Boys’: this was how the Mirror labelled 11-year-old Andrew Golden and
13-year-old Mitchell Johnson. 26 March 1998.
Jon-Benet Ramsey: murdered in 1996. See Chapter 7.
the Palestinian baby: a picture found by Israeli soldiers in July 2002. Guardian,
28 June 2002.
p.xii ‘Balaclava Boy’: Guardian, 15 May 2000. See p.122 and Chapter 5.
images are circulated on the Internet: see Chapter 6.
Tierney Gearon: Guardian, 10 March 2001. See p.123
a British newsreader: Independent, 6 November 1995.
Ron Oliver: Alex Bellos, Guardian, 5 February 1994.
Graham Ovenden: and Robert Melville (1972) Victorian Children, London:
Academy Editions. On child photography and the law, see David Newnham and
Chris Townsend, ‘Pictures of innocence’, Guardian ‘Weekend’, 13 January 1996.
p.xiii Paula Rego: (1994) Nursery Rhymes, London: Thames and Hudson.
Freud described as characteristic of taboo: Sigmund Freud (1913/1985) Totem
and Taboo, Harmondsworth: Penguin Freud Library.
p.xiv Getting Older Younger: the title of a television programme dealing with advert-
ising to children. BBC Bristol for BBC2 (1999).
Illuminated poster advertising Daily Telegraph, mid-1990s.
 Introduction

Pictures of children:
images of childhood

PA R T 1 : T H E I M A G E WO R L D : S E N S E A N D
S E N S UA L I T Y F O R O U R T I M E S

The ecstasy of communication

In contemporary society, images of children are part of a populous world of two

dimensions that threads through the living world of flesh and blood. Especially
in the metropolitan centres of globalised society, every individual is surrounded
by representations and images which stand as an arrogant assertion of social
wealth. Pictures on the page or screen; advertisements on street hoardings or the
sides of buses; posters in the underground; front pages on newsagents’ stands;
jokes in the card shop; packaging in the supermarket: these are public pictures
designed for public spaces, whether in decaying inner cities, spruced-up country
towns or suburban shopping parades. (The Henley Centre for Forecasting
estimated that an average ‘mobile citizen’ could expect to see 1300 advertise-
ments in a day.) In addition, television, video recorders, computers, mobile
phones and digital technology bring public images into the private spaces of
the home, causing the boundaries between public and private to shift and blur.
These are available pictures, which feed comfortably into the consciousness of
the age. The modern communications industries provide a repertoire of visual
excitement that is at the same time both dazzling and absolutely mundane and
taken for granted. Occasionally it is remarkable and shocking; more often, it is
easy and unemphatic in its omnipresence and attractiveness. Childhood lends
itself both to spectacular presentation and to the sort of comforting and engaging

1
2 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

routine imagery that attracts readers to a newspaper, or to Parents magazine, or

to a hurriedly chosen postcard for a friend.
When urban dwellers look around themselves they see material phenomena
– buildings, traffic and other people – and two-dimensional reproductions of
material phenomena – pictures of buildings, traffic and other people. Many writers
have argued that the persistence of this second world of images represents an
unprecedented shift in human experience and modes of perception. The fact of
being surrounded by – permeated by – imagery has radically changed the ways
in which the world is perceived, and the ways in which individuals relate to each
other. Jean Baudrillard called it an ‘ecstasy of communication’. And this is not a
system we can detach ourselves from or step outside, since its meanings touch our
very sense of ourselves and our place in the world. In the following chapters I shall
be tracing the presence of children in this image-world, specifically in relation to
institutions – the family and the school – and to some of those ideologies which
have attached themselves to childhood, playfulness, innocence, victimisation
and bad behaviour. But first, in order to give a grounding to those discussions,
I want to use this introduction to consider more closely the available imagery of
childhood itself, and to lay out the ways in which I intend to approach it.
In this first section I shall be looking at the special nature of public available
imagery, and at how it both creates conceptual meanings and carries a powerful
emotional charge (its sense and its sensuality). My focus will be on imagery in
use. In the second section I shall consider childhood in relation to those visual
technologies which have characterised modernity and post-modernity – in
particular photography and digital media; the first constructing a version of
innocence, the second decisively undermining it. Finally I shall be considering
contemporary fears around the concept of childhood itself, and its challenge to
established boundaries between adults and children.
Contemporary imagery has a sort of double presence, in which the image is
at the same time both ephemeral and persistent. Routine imagery is not designed
to be looked at with particular attention. Its nature demands that it should be
treated with careless disregard – caught sight of rather than stared at. Magazines,
sweet wrappers, greetings cards are waste paper that is screwed up in the hand or
discarded in the dustbin. Advertising hoardings are whisked past at car-speed or
hurried by on foot with hardly a glance. The pictures on a website scroll swiftly
past at the touch of a mouse. Yet, despite its disposability, the imagery has a
curious continuity. Just as one picture is thrown away – a newspaper goes into
the nearest bin, the packaging is torn off a new toy – another newspaper, more
packaging, a new magazine, with similar if not identical pictures, will come
instantly to hand. A specific picture may be half remembered, lingering in the
 INTRODUCTION 3

mind as an impression only and difficult to find again once lost, yet many a key
image remains as familiar as if it were always present. So, when we isolate a single
birthday card or advertisement for critical comment, it can rarely bear the weight
of the study. In any case, to select out a single picture changes the nature of the
experience. How can one or even a dozen pictures represent that massive flow
which permeates contemporary existence? I intend to consider public imagery
as a total phenomenon, something that is made up not of singular, precious
pictures, but of multiples in time and space. I am interested in those pictures
which are duplicated thousands, if not millions, of times, and in the spread of
imagery as it is repeated in many different contexts. I will be following certain
resonant images as they circulate through the media, and observing the ways in
which they mutate as they are reflected back and forth between newspapers and
advertisements, from the pages of magazines to picture postcards, packaging,
wrapping paper and so on. Focusing on still imagery rather than moving pictures,
I shall be drawing attention to key images, resonant images and sets of images.

Imagery in use

My discussion will be less concerned with the accuracy or otherwise of pictures

of children than with their place in this handy universe of images. Pictures of
children contribute to a set of narratives about childhood which are threaded
through different cultural forms, drawing on every possible source to construct
stories that become part of cultural competence. These stories without a single
author explore the potent themes I am taking up in this book – family relation-
ships, sexuality, nature, schooling and education, violence and the very limits of
humanity itself. They organise patterns of expectation which sediment into a
broader set of public meanings and become an active part of the mapping of
social, political and emotional worlds. They make it possible for daily lives to
continue and meaningful actions to be undertaken, as we half-consciously refer to
them for guidance on behaviour and relationships. Viewers of the pictures become
joint authors of the stories through the pleasures of recognition and re-use.
Even the most personal forms of experience and the tales we tell about ourselves
are partly shaped by public imagery and publicly available narratives. These
pictures become our pictures, these stories our stories. This is imagery in use.
Much effort has been wasted in pointing to the gap between image and
reality, or in arguing that representations are not accurate, or are stereotyped, or
do not portray life as it is. But I shall not be looking for resemblances (as we
would if looking at family photographs), since advertisements, greetings cards
4 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

and the rest seldom represent real children in the real world. Instead, I will give
an account of a more interactive approach, in which contemporary meanings
are a way of responding to the modern environment. I do not plan to discuss a
picture as a passive portrayal, but to see it as a contribution to an imagery which
is always dynamic, in which meanings are created between an image and its
makers and its users. I shall be asking who has the resources to produce these
images? Who constructs their meanings? What sort of claim do they make to
authenticity – to some sort of rooting in the realities of life (as opposed to being
an accurate copy)? I shall be asking questions about the context within which a
picture is circulated, and about the multitude of different ways in which it can
be dealt with and interpreted by its viewers and handlers.
Above all, I shall be drawing attention to images rather than concentrating
on individual pictures. I use ‘image’ in this context to refer to a repeated,
generalised representation, which can be teased out of a sequence of pictures or
traced across multiples of similar pictures which appear in different media.
As they move between definite social contexts, individual pictures frequently
float away from their origins to be re-used in a variety of different narratives.
Advertisements imitate a family snap; a cherub is reproduced on wrapping paper
and also appears on a Christmas card or is mocked in a cartoon. The ‘family
image’ or the ‘cherubic image’ both have their own well-worked history to which
each new context refers. My aim is to trace key images of children as they are
made publicly available in this way, and become resonant images, repeatedly
reflected through many different pictures.

Making sense

Public imagery is ‘available’ in two senses: its physical accessibility and its
conceptual utility as a ready reference, making an easy contribution to the
construction of contemporary thoughts and ideas. Pictures on a page linger as
images in our minds, so that a mental construct such as that of ‘childhood’ is
always partly visual. A resonant mental ‘image’ may generate new ‘pictures’ for our
use. Within this system a familiar typology of childhood has evolved creating a
cultural image-bank – a sort of quick-access pictorial vocabulary. Key images
emerge which resonate between the different media, condensing into them-
selves the most emphatic of repeated meanings. These include the wide eyes of
the appealing child; the crouched body of the abused child; the structured
placing of the child within the family; the ambiguous sexuality of the pre-
pubescent girl; the ignorant child in need of education; the playful child in the
 INTRODUCTION 5

home and the violent boys on the streets. I will be exploring the ways in which
some of these key images make sense in the following chapters.
Presentations of public imagery characteristically combine pictures and text,
relying on the exchange of meanings between the two (I use the word ‘present-
ation’ to refer to the overall combination of pictures and words in, for example, an
advertisement, a newspaper page, or a birthday card). A single picture may be
difficult to make sense of without language to direct its viewers towards a range of
possible meanings (the caption on the news photograph, the punning slogan on
the advertisement). But when a picture reflects one of the key images, it may also
act to concretise and give substance to the meanings evoked by the words (of
course those catalogue children are pleased with their new clothes – their smiles
and their body language confirm it). The definiteness and visible presence of a
picture may well appear to halt the slipperiness of language, to pull meanings
together and bind them so that they appear natural and irresistible.
This imagery obsessively sorts and classifies, as if afraid of interpretations
which might run out of control. With absolute conviction it stresses those visual
indications which separate children from adults, work from play, happiness
from unhappiness, appropriate from inappropriate appearance and behaviour.
Sometimes pictures differentiate sharply between girls and boys; at other times
the signifiers of age dominate those of gender. I shall be tracing their meanings
through these contrasts and demarcations. I shall also be looking for inter-
relationships between sets of pictures. As they cluster together, pictures gain
meaning from their proximity to each other – the advertisements in a baby
magazine influence the glossy features; the newspaper photograph of the child
who has been abused gives rise to anxieties about the pert pre-teen in the
catalogue. The significance of any single picture or visual representation is never
complete, because it always refers to other pictures or other texts.
A proliferation of imagery does not mean a proliferation of sense. Instead
of expanding meanings, the imagery frequently strives to fix and limit them. In
the following chapters we will sometimes find a pictorial attempt to buttonhole
the viewer, to pin them down, as it were, and trap them within a restricted
field of meaning – ‘school’ is so often indicated by children in uniform with
their hands raised that it is difficult to imagine in any other way; a group that
contains a man, a woman and a couple of children is instantly read as a ‘family’,
however they may be arranged within the frame. The exciting variety of the
visual surface may well turn out to be a distraction from what is effectively an
insistent repetition of the same conceptual message. Instead of allowing space
for understanding to develop, all too often images appear to secure meanings
within a structure of power which sets out to establish its own regimes of truth.
6 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

Yet meanings remain slippery things which can never be finally established.
Pictures can always be recycled in a new context, and different individuals and
social groups will set out to make sense of them in a variety of ways. Public
imagery carries its meanings within a total environment – but the environment
itself is always in flux. The imagery is an important part of negotiations around
social meanings, continuously creating new versions of contentious concepts such
as ‘childhood’. This tension between the fixing of meanings and the potential
for richness and ambiguity will be illustrated in the following chapters, as we
observe the flexible manipulability of the image-vocabulary, and trace the changes
that have occurred over the last decades.

Sensuality and spectacle

However, I do not want to be carried away by the semiotics of images and the
construction of meanings; instead I intend to keep a balance between sense and
sensuality. Whatever the conceptual meanings that engage the mind, there is
always something more, which Roland Barthes described as an erotics of the
text. Although Barthes was discussing literary texts, the point applies even more
strongly to the visual, which enables a static moment to interrupt the eager flow
of narrative and the incessant demands of understanding. Visual imagery gives
us pause. It offers a time out, however short, from the onward movement of
rational thought. The emotional charge can open up unpredictable vistas. It may
be a moment of celebration, of unquestioning affirmation, or it may be a
moment of hesitation and disturbance, allowing the otherwise inexpressible to
be hinted at. The power of the visual may resist attempts to reduce it to verbal
sense and can put pressure on understanding in ways that seem beyond language.
Always offering something more, always reaching towards the unconscious, the
work of the visual cannot easily be accounted for.
Pictures offer both reality and illusion. They are both more representational
than language and more fantastic. A picture can pull a moment out from the
passage of time and hold it static for our delight. It can offer us visions – of
places we have never visited, people we will never meet, experiences we have
only dreamt of, fantasies the more powerful for their seeming reality. Pictures
act in what appear to be contradictory ways. Sometimes they seem like a
window on the world, separating us from it, enabling us to observe and hence
control it (and we will observe many ways in which the imagery of childhood is
constructed as a way of controlling that difficult state). At other times they are
more like a mirror in which we see ourselves reflected, so that we seem to
 INTRODUCTION 7

become part of the scene in front of us. An anonymous child laughing on the
front page of a toy catalogue may on some occasions seem like an indulgent view
of our earlier selves, on others like an obstreperous son or daughter pushing
their luck. (A cover of The Parents’ Guide plays on this ambivalence, captioning
a curly haired, wide-eyed cover-child ‘Tantrums. How to keep your cool’.) In
public pictures a ‘model’ – an abstract individual, pictured in an advertisement
or a magazine spread, who represents no one in the real world – may serve very
well for an ideal self, and help us imagine ourselves as we would love to be – part
of that tanned family on the holiday beach, say, or the modern mother with the
perfect baby, suave, competent and glamorous.
Most of the images I shall be discussing here are desired images. They are the
images which viewers long to see, and which give back a sense of stimulation or
well-being. Many writers have tried to enumerate or identify these intangible
pleasures – Barthes’s alphabetic list in The Pleasure of the Text is one attempt to
grasp at the unsayable and ungraspable. Sergei Eisenstein wrote that he constructed
his films as a ‘montage of attractions’, with each shot exhibiting a feature which
will shock or amaze the audience, so that nothing is redundant. In one of her
books on fairy stories, Marina Warner notes a Sanskrit critic who identified nine
rasas which give power to a text. They are ‘wonder, joy, sexual pleasure, pity,
anguish, anger, terror, disgust and laughter’. In looking at the details of the
spectacular presentation of pictures of children I shall be looking for their
attractions, their rasas and their specific pleasures – even if they are forbidden
images and the pleasures are guilty ones.
As we have seen, there is a sense in which pictures appear to pin down and
concretise language. The powerful affirmative quality of a picture may pre-empt
questioning and offer a positive assurance that accompanying words seem
powerless to contradict. But in another sense they add an irreducible ambiguity.
The appealing eyes and puckered mouths of the children in the baby magazines
stir a different part of our consciousness. Conceptual meanings cannot be
constructed without the repression of the inconvenient, the contradictory, and
of that which is too disturbing. The spectacular allows such material to be
expressed, without necessarily demanding to be recognised. It ensures that, even
in their realist modes, pictures never merely reflect the material world. The
imagery always draws on and nourishes the fantasy world of human longings. It
mediates between memory and dreams. The nostalgia of imagery is part of the
nostalgia each of us feels for a lost moment of satisfaction and a longing for a
future of reconciliation and peace. This is a powerful theme in the imagery of
childhood which we will be exploring in later chapters.
8 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

PA R T 2 : T H E I N N O C E N T E Y E
AND THE CRISIS OF LOOKING

The innocent eye in search of the innocent subject

It is not possible to make sense of the contemporary imagery of childhood

without looking back more than 150 years to the mid-nineteenth century, when
the ideal of a protected childhood was taking hold amongst the newly prosperous
middle classes. ‘Childhood’ was part of a more comfortable lifestyle based on an
ideal of domesticity and privacy. In the newly built suburbs, middle-class
children could be kept apart from the turbulent world of commerce and toil,
and spending time with your children could become an enjoyable leisure activity.
Such domestic pleasure would be all the greater if childish qualities denied to
adults were actively cultivated in children. The moral purity campaigner Mary
Whitehouse echoed a nineteenth-century spirit when she characterised the
qualities of childhood as ‘joy and guileless innocence’. Raymond Williams has
pointed out that at any point in time there exist ‘residual’ cultural forms, which

Back of a carte-de-visite, London, 1901.

 INTRODUCTION 9

linger from a previous age and are concurrent with ‘emergent’ forms in which
new styles develop. As we will see in the coming chapters, many contemporary
attitudes and expectations still refer back to that lingering nineteenth-century
moment when the cult of childhood blossomed in literature and the visual media.
John Tenniel’s illustrations for Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through
the Looking Glass; John Everett Millais’s Cherry Ripe, the most reproduced
painting of the nineteenth century; Little Lord Fauntleroy in his velvet suit
and lacy collar; Julia Margaret Cameron’s misty photographs of cherubic
infants all continue to carry a powerful visual reference as the quintessence
of childhood.
It was a time when the new technology of photography was becoming ever
more accessible. The ability to record with an apparently unmediated accuracy
developed in parallel with the cultivation of a romantic sensibility, which
rejected the ugliness and functionality of industrialisation. Both were visible in
attitudes to children and childhood – a new rationalism, which set out to record
and improve children’s objective conditions, and a romantic notion of child-
hood as a holy state, undistorted by contact with adult sexuality or commerce.
The claims made by the photographic image to innocence, authenticity and
simplicity paralleled the establishment of innocence as a quality of childhood.
Julia Margaret Cameron and Oscar Rejlander both made allegorical pictures
showing ‘photography’ as an infant art. High-street photographers decorated
the backs of their portrait cards with chubby cherubs, sometimes, as in
Rejlander’s Infant Photography, wielding an artist’s brush, demonstrating the
continuity between photography and painting, at other times operating a
camera themselves.
‘Unlike adults, children face the camera innocent of all but the present
moment, and often with a striking purity of motive,’ wrote Susan Kismaric,
curator of a 1980s exhibition at the New York Museum of Art. Just as the
innocent camera asserts the right to record things ‘as they are’, regardless of the
subject’s wishes, ‘innocent’ subjects are those who make no attempt to shape
their own image. They relinquish control not only to the photographer, but
also to the technical and industrial structures that determine what type of
photography is possible. Given this unequal relationship, it is hardly surprising
that children, the least powerful of all social groups, have made ideal subjects.
All too often, the adult gaze seeks to put children in their place and to conform
their image to expected patterns. The look is a dual one of power and pleasure:
the power which comes from adults’ superior knowledge of their subject, the
pleasure of the beauty and seductiveness of childhood. Subject to an adult gaze,
children must accept that power and grant that pleasure. They must allow their
10 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

‘innocence’ to shine through. But, as it will become clear throughout this book,
the innocence of the child and that of the photographic image have proved
equally deceptive.

Exploiting innocence?

Photography and photographic technologies brought a new precision to docu-

mentation, while the amazing accuracy of the photographic record changed the
ways in which memory and observation could operate. In the words of a Nikon
advertisement, we could now ‘make today’s moments tomorrow’s memories’,
and family albums could preserve a visible trace of earlier generations. But that
same nineteenth-century moment brought other, less intimate changes to the
ways in which the world is perceived. In this respect technology was brash and
commercial rather than pure and innocent. The nineteenth century already had
a thriving market in prints, especially copies of popular paintings made from
engravings or woodcuts, but photographic technologies provided the means by
which image-making could become a modern industry. Many different types of
pictures could now become cheaply available for commerce and entertainment.
The mass culture that is a central feature of the modern world would be
unthinkable without the industrialised production of photographic images.
Even before the coming of such twentieth-century phenomena as the snap-
shot, the paparazzi and the glossy consumer magazine, photography was an
unashamedly populist medium. It brought a multitude of small, accessible
amusements, which appealed beyond the ranks of the respectable middle classes.
Photographic cards showing celebrities were mass-produced from the 1860s for
collecting in albums or giving to friends. A picture of Queen Victoria’s daughter-
in-law, the Princess of Wales – the Princess Diana of her day – carrying one
of her children piggyback, was amongst the most popular, selling over 500,000
copies. The aim was instant appeal, and, of course, children were the most
appealing of all.
This imagery of easy access and undemanding format outraged the modernists
of the first half of the twentieth century. Pictures which were reproductions,
mass-produced and appreciated purely for pleasure brought condemnation
from intellectuals as fake art, debased taste or kitsch. Widely distributed popular
art needed to be ‘pretty and elegant’ according to Alexis de Tocqueville, who first
described the phenomenon in America in the 1830s. And ‘pretty and elegant’
pictures of children continued to enjoy a huge popularity, ranging from repro-
ductions of paintings (Millais’s doe-eyed and frilly-bonneted Cherry Ripe) to
 INTRODUCTION 11

Photographic postcard, Lisbon, 1920.

carefully staged picture postcards like the one I bought in a Lisbon junk shop,
showing an ‘angel’ with feathery wings watching over a child doing her best to
ignore the photographer and pretending to be asleep. Matei Calinescu describes
kitsch as ‘efficient’ art and as ‘hedonistic’: an art that easily produces its effects
of sentiment and pleasure. ‘Beauty’, he notes, ‘turns out to be rather easy to
fabricate’. For the critics of kitsch, adherence to an austere artistic modernism
meant rejecting that other more pervasive form of modernity, the democratic
modernity of mass availability and popular appeal. Kitsch art, including popular
pictures of children, was a form of visual pleasure which could easily slide into
a working-class front parlour. Kitsch combined brash vulgarity with what some
saw as the embarrassing pretentiousness of the aspirant classes. But hedonistic
pictures of children could be seen as containing elements of the rational as well as
the romantic. They were one way of expressing a longing for a better world, and
part of a more indulgent attitude towards real-life children. Shorter working
hours and increasing prosperity meant that by the last decades of the nineteenth
12 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

century a greater proportion of the population of Western nations had time for
recreations that were previously confined to the middle classes – and more time
for their children. Kitsch was both a central aspect of modernity and part of the
widening cult of domesticity which put children at its centre.
But the decisive development in the commercialisation of public imagery was
the development of an advertising industry serving an economy increasingly
based on mass consumption. The proliferation of public promotional images
went hand in hand with the expansion of the private domestic realm as a site of
consumption. Advertisers, publicists and marketing companies soon became the
prime producers and distributors of pictures, anxious to latch on to, and also to
exaggerate, the tastes of the era. In the 1890s the Pears Company bought the
reproduction rights to Cherry Ripe, while another of Millais’s hugely popular
child paintings, the ethereal Bubbles (originally entitled A Child’s World), was
used to advertise that important domestic convenience – soap. The image of
innocence was an eminently exploitable commodity. It could be associated with
cleanliness and purity, and could contribute to the new marketing technique
of branding. Promotional culture meant that viewing an image now required
increased sophistication. The viewer must learn to separate the attractive content
(sweet child) and the promotional message (buy this soap). It was becoming
difficult to take any picture simply at its face value; the seeds of cynicism and
irony had been planted.

Photography, digital imaging and the crisis of looking

A set of residual images which hark back to the nineteenth century linger as a
backdrop to the dominant imagery of the twenty-first century. But the romantic
cult of innocence has given way to an anxiety about childhood corruption
which verges on the hysterical, while the rational investigation of children’s lives
across the globe daily reveals conditions which are often degrading and deeply
shocking. ‘Childhood’ is valued, possibly more than ever before, but it is
perceived to be either in crisis or dying.
In the photographic media, too, any residual claims to innocence have finally
disappeared as digital technologies reinforce a view long argued by critics, that
no picture is independent of human intention. Kitsch has been replaced by irony,
‘bad taste’ by camp cultivation of bad taste, romanticism by nostalgia, and there
is an acute awareness of the sales pitch behind every commercial image, however
engaging. While the fantasy of a carefree and appealing childhood continues to
generate a rich and gratifying body of hedonistic imagery, the image has become
 INTRODUCTION 13

a playful one, exploiting the contemporary delight in pastiche, uninterested in

accurate representation and unashamed of digital manipulation. In later chapters
we will be considering various ways in which digital technologies have trans-
formed available imagery. In particular they have given increased control to the
producers of a picture, since computer technologies make it possible to eliminate
chance and to create a photographic image that is ‘just right’. Computer-generated
pictures may have no single referent in the world; they may be constructed from
fragments, representing nothing but the buzzing and interrelation of many
historical images. Faced with such intricate mechanisms of control, visually
sophisticated viewers move between mistrust and cynicism – a crisis of looking.
However convincing a picture, there is either a fear of being taken in by its
deceptive techniques or a conviction that anything can be enjoyed – whatever the
content – since nothing refers beyond itself.
Paradoxically, at the same time, particularly in press photography, there has
been a renewed drive towards documentary realism. Possibly as a reaction to this
digital instability, there is an urge to get behind this too-perfect image, backed up
by a continued conviction that photography really can probe and record actual
conditions, and can reveal the ways in which the lives of real children fall short of
the ideal. There are ways in which a photograph still attaches itself to the world
in ways that are unmatched by any other visual medium. A photograph of a child,
however manipulated, however artfully formed, means that at some point in time
a real child was in front of the camera. So when pornographic photographs of
children are distributed via the Internet, the fact that their distribution is via
digital technology does not detract from public outrage. The public is convinced
that these pictured abuses really happened. In investigating child pornography,
police officers have said that they are not considering an image, but evidence of a
crime. It is still possible to look at a photograph in this literal way, to peer through
the picture, as if through a window, to see the pictured child.
The nineteenth-century rationalist legacy of scientific observation which
photographic techniques made possible (possibly best exemplified by Charles
Darwin’s photographic cataloguing of the human emotions, and his minute daily
observations of his own child) has been pushed even further by the technologies
of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The most mundane of minute-by-
minute moments of everyday life can be recorded on CCTV, or with concealed
cameras or by night imaging. Children’s behaviour and their interaction with
their parents is scrutinised as never before – and made publicly available on
television or in the newspapers. The drive for objective scientific knowledge has
dissolved the boundaries of the human body and recorded the earliest moments
of conception and foetal development. Improved X-ray techniques and magnetic
14 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

resonance imaging have made bodily structures and internal damage visible.
‘Science’ has renewed its nineteenth-century claims.
In the meanwhile, children have begun to take the initiative for themselves.
In striking contrast to those ‘pretty and elegant’ children who passively presented
themselves to be looked at, concerns now centre on children’s own looking.
Television, video, the Internet and other unpredictible digital technologies have
all been described as a corrupting influence. The worries have increased as
screen media have become ever more accessible and, above all, interactive.
Children may appear immobile in front of the small screen (risking ‘mouse
elbow’ and ‘video eyes’ according to one report), but the fear is that their activity
may be intense. Perhaps the Internet is putting them in touch with a huge
network of unknown influences beyond adult supervision, or perhaps, with fingers
on the games console, they are effectively entering a violent three-dimensional
world which responds to their actions. The identity of a far-from-innocent
twenty-first-century child seems to merge with those strange luminous identities
created on the screen.
Every public picture is directed at a specific audience and carries an
expectation of who its viewers will be. The space in front of the picture frame –
whether on a screen or a printed page – was originally occupied by the picture-
maker – photographer, artist, web designer, advertiser – and is designed for
occupation by the picture-viewer, who may be projected in a variety of different
roles: as caring parent, censorious critic, charitable donor, anxious teacher, eager
consumer – or even a child. A complex structure of looking is brought to any
picture, whatever technology has been used to construct it, which always involves
doubts, judgements and uncertainties about the status of the image and about
its subject. It may well leave little room for manoeuvre by those subjects –
particularly when they are children.

PA R T 3 : C H E AT E D O F C H I L D H O O D ?

Blurring the boundaries

As I flick through my collection of news cuttings, a glance at the headlines

demonstrates the concern that children’s ‘childhood’ can all too easily be taken
from them. ‘The end of childhood?’ signalled ‘parents’ hopes and fears for the
schools revolution’; ‘Give children the chance of being children’ headed a
letter about upbringing; ‘The corporatisation of childhood’ was an article on
consumerism; ‘So old and yet so young, pity our lost children’, on teenage
 INTRODUCTION 15

parents; ‘Let our kids enjoy childhood’ introduced a speech in which ‘the world
of TV, media and the pop music industry were blamed for conniving in the
encouragement of a premature pseudo-sophistication which cut short the span
of a child’s innocence that could never be retrieved’; and the first article by
Rowan Williams, after his appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury, was headed
‘The loss of childhood: why we must preserve innocence’.
When the categories of childhood and adulthood are confused, it seems,
disaster ensues. Those who ‘blur the boundary…may be cheating children of
childhood itself,’ wrote Mary Whitehouse. ‘In failing to treasure our children’s
childhood we are destroying not only their future but our own. We are like
lemmings. We’ve got a death wish on us.’ In the games played with the public
image, this death wish is both challenged and kept at bay. In the following
chapters we will be observing some different contexts within which the bound-
aries between ‘adult’ and ‘child’ are constantly challenged and re-negotiated.
One consequence of firm boundary maintenance is to create a childhood
which is not only different from adulthood, but is also its obverse. In this view,
childhood should be everything adulthood is not: children are powerless and
dependent on adults; they are without knowledge and need to be educated;
economic and sexual activity is prohibited for them – and so on. Yet these
negative definitions allow abstract ‘childhood’ to become a depository for many
precious qualities that ‘adulthood’ needs but which are incompatible with adult
status; qualities such as impulsiveness, playfulness, emotional expressiveness,
indulgence in fantasy, sexual innocence. Hence the dichotomy child/adult parallels
other dichotomies which have characterised Western discourse: nature/culture,
primitive/civilised, emotion/reason. In each pair the dominant term seeks to
understand and control the subordinate, keeping it separate but using it for its
own enrichment.
The child in the picture opens a door to a libidinous existence, a life without
constraints, a life of possibilities now forbidden. When children accompany
adults in a picture, it is they who display what Barthes described as ‘euphoric
values’. Their expressiveness invites a reciprocal expressiveness from adults who
look at them. They are a signal for a release of emotions. But together with
ecstatic fulfilment comes the threat of total disruption. Childhood poses a
challenge to the hard-won stability of adulthood. From the engaging innocents
in the baby books to the clued-up kids of contemporary advertising, behind
many an attractive picture of a child lies the desire to use childhood to secure the
status of adulthood – all too frequently at the expense of children themselves.
One argument developed throughout this book will be that the uses of public
imagery are part of a continuous adult effort to gain control over childhood and
16 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

its implications – both over actual children and over a personal childhood which
adults must constantly mourn and constantly reinvent. The effort that goes into
negotiating the difficult distinction between adult and child is both social and
psychical. The interplay between the two dimensions means that adult dominance
over children is likely to be accompanied by a particular pleasure of achievement,
since it also implies gaining control over one’s own persistent and troublesome
childhood. Children bear the burden of a nostalgia for a remembered childish,
impulsive self – an ambivalent nostalgia which becomes clear in the recurring
moral panics around the potential uncontrollability of real children. Crises of
childhood usually turn out to be crises which are all too adult.
Ultimately, childhood cannot be contained, the boundaries will not hold.
The relationship between childhood and adulthood is not a dichotomy but a
variety of fluctuating states, constantly under negotiation. The presence of a
child – with its potential for blurring boundaries and confusing meanings – can
all too easily upset an adult search for stability. While pictures remind us that
childhood is never fully left behind, we are also reminded that adults’ inner
childhood is nothing like these delightful images. Wishful desire is balanced
against realistic disappointment. To quieten the anxiety, the image continues to
be smoothed over and beautified. For all its modernisation, the imagery of
childhood retains a powerful nostalgia, which refers to a harmonious and
comfortable world before industrial civilisation, when plenty did not depend on
work or wealth. In a set of images which will recur throughout the book, we will
find a rural idyll still celebrated on milk cartons, bread wrappers, supermarket
labels, advertisements for foodstuffs and in high-gloss magazines about country
living. We will find a domesticated nature which provides for the needs of
culture – where civilisation is firmly in control. Imagery made possible by the
most highly developed technology re-creates pre-technological values, scarring
over the wounds. In the constant renewal of childhood, this lost harmonious
past remains forever present and promises a future in which innocence may be
regained; in a world dominated by commercial imagery, a child claims to be
outside commerce; in a world of rapid change, a child can be shown as
unchanging; in a world of social and political conflict, a child may be damaged
but remains untainted.
But as the image of a child promises a richer world, in the same moment it
threatens the security of the world we have. Children introduce disorder and
pollution into a comfortable everyday life, and this theme runs alongside the
idyllic beauty of childhood. The bodies of young children are leaky; they do not
respect established boundaries. They wet the bed, spew up their food, have
no respect for tidy kitchens or hoovered carpets. They roll in mud, have
 INTRODUCTION 17

uncontrollable tantrums, cover themselves in paint and bloody their hands and
knees in falls and fights. Even worse, they spill out onto the streets, where their
behaviour is threatening and sometimes dangerous. We will be looking more
closely at a powerful set of public narratives which speaks of little monsters,
threatening their parents, refusing all constraints and calling for extremes of
punishment and control. Consumer imagery of mini-gangsters and precocious
temptresses plays with the danger, taunting it, keeping it at bay. But when the
paradoxes of the ‘natural’ are replaced by the paradoxes of civilisation, when
children move beyond constraint and surveillance and run together in the urban
streets, the fear is genuine. This is where we will find the terrifying image of
youth, of children alone together beyond the reach of family or school, sufficient
in each other’s company. Such an image creates a mythological conflict between
spontaneity and control.
At some points, in posing questions about rationality and order, the image
is able to leave aside the distinction between child and adult, and scrutinise the
margins of humanity itself. Misbehaving children are compared to animals
or said to be close to madness. They may be described as inexplicably evil. By
persistently drawing attention to the boundary between the natural and the
human, and throwing up questions about the legitimacy of control, the presence
of a child holds the potential to throw adult civilisation itself into question.

Creating a child-shaped space

Turning from the psychical to the social and historical dimensions of the relations
between children and adults, it becomes clear that definitions of ‘childhood’
have been constructed and maintained through a firm institutional separation
from the adult world. From the turn of the twentieth century, as a protected
childhood gradually became possible for almost all children in the prosperous
West, children were gradually expelled from public spaces, where they had had
a raucous independent presence, and confined to spaces designed especially for
them. Compulsory education in purpose-built schools came to occupy their
days; homes became increasingly child-centred as the domestic ideal spread
throughout the population; an enlarged state intervened more actively in their
welfare, and provided health care in clinics and hospitals. The public imagery
of childhood discussed in this book has been institution-based, and, in turn,
the physical spaces of the institutions have been affected by the prevalent image
of childhood. As specially designed locations – schools, nurseries, adventure
playgrounds – have been created, the layout and equipment provided, together
18 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

with the codes of behaviour deemed suitable, have also indicated a conceptual
space and suggested a particular view of childish lives. The institutions of child-
hood have established a set of overlapping but socially workable definitions.
As we will see, the imagery which accompanies them frequently seems more
concerned with the construction of a suitably child-shaped space than with the
individuality of the child who is slotted into it. A child-shaped space may be
resented by real-life children who resist being squeezed into a mould, but children’s
lives are inevitably constituted in interaction with the expectations created.
Imagery may well aspire to an abstract universal concept of childhood, but
it is inevitably placed within a specific historical moment, and itself contributes
to political and social contestation. An institutionally based image of childhood,
central to a rational, modernist, structured society had its apogee in the mid-
twentieth century, but it was increasingly challenged by a more fluid and subversive
set of images. As we have seen, by the end of the century the most fertile source
of public imagery of children was produced as a necessary part of a prosperous
consumer-based economy. The ecstatic smiles of the children who sell toy
animals, talking dolls, plastic building bricks, designer baby clothes, party gear,
breakfast cereals, illustrated books, bouncy castles, miniature cars and dumper
trucks, Barbie tricycles, soft drinks, video games, dressing-up sets, fairy wings,
trainers that flash with coloured lights, Pingu videos and the rest of the exotic

Catalogue, Autumn 2002, courtesy of Blooming Marvellous.

 INTRODUCTION 19

paraphernalia of contemporary childhood are familiar from display advertise-

ments, catalogues, supermarket posters, flyers, mail-order brochures, pop-up ads
on websites and a mass of other promotional outlets. And, of course, children
feature prominently in advertisements for cars, household goods, computers and
innumerable other products intended for adult use. The commercial image
follows its own laws and acknowledges no limits beyond itself. It envisages a
blissful world of plenty in which pictures of children are commodities which
enhance the desirability of other commodities, and in which children are
increasingly targeted as consumers with money to spend. At points the children
themselves seem lost amongst their possessions. With its prosperity, its resources
and its unashamed hedonism, the consumer image has invaded the institutional
spaces of schools, hospitals and welfare advice as well as expanding the possi-
bilities of childish play, fashion, food and other pleasures. At points it even
seems to have achieved the impossible task of preserving free-flowing, libidinous,
childish values throughout adulthood.
But the gap between wishful desire and realistic disappointment has
intensified. While the consumer image has become ever more euphoric, in stark
contrast the image of a child suffering from harsh conditions or damaged at the
hands of adults has been pushed into public consciousness through the national
press. The new realism in photojournalism has highlighted children who have
moved beyond the institutions designed for them – children sleeping rough,
drug abuse amongst children, children as the victims of physical and sexual
abuse (pictured with their identities concealed), and violent youngsters posing
a danger in the streets and on the estates. Enhanced ability to travel and to
transmit photographs from hitherto inaccessible parts of the world have meant
that major disasters across the world have become painfully visible. In wars,
famines or extreme poverty, children have been the first to suffer, and pictures
of emaciated children close to death have become the symbols through which
the magnitude of those disasters have penetrated Western media. This group
of suffering children are not placed within a neat institutional context, nor are
they of any use to the driving forces of commerce. Children from the under-
developed world, children who are poor, children who are sick, harmed or
disabled pose problems for the dominant image, yet they are, in a curious way,
necessary to it. Their experience means that they cannot be the bearers of joy
and guileless innocence, yet their weakness is an essential part of childhood.
They are extreme exemplars of children’s dependent status. They stand as a
warning to children who dare to resist their childish position.
20 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

Behind the childhood masquerade

The imagery of children/childhood is part of an elaborate drama in which

children perform well-known roles. Girl children in particular are expected to
present themselves as an image, and to learn a special sort of exhibitionism in
order to act out the charming ‘childish’ qualities adults long to see. Refusal to co-
operate – grumpy behaviour, rudeness to adults – may well invite punishment
and a forced return to childishness in tears and humiliation. The child models
who people advertisements are experts in this role, but they are treading on
delicate ground. Children are in a double bind. When they knowingly invite
the adult gaze, when their beauty is no longer self-absorbed, and when they
deliberately put themselves on display, the result is a loss of innocence and of
childishness itself. Engaging in a tactful masquerade for the benefit of those who
aim to control and enjoy them, the children in the advertisements may well pose
the question who has the right to look and under what circumstances?
The image of childhood poses the problem of generations, of continuity
and renewal. Children are expected to mature into the established patriarchal
order, yet they stand as a threat to that order. Their challenge may be interpreted
as an instability which must be repressed in the interests of civilisation, or it may
be seen as a challenge in the name of a better society. Paul Goodman, whose
Growing up Absurd was first published in 1956, is amongst many who have
argued that ‘childlike’ values should permeate and improve society as a whole.
Children would retain their ‘right to wildness’ and relations between children
and adults would cease to be based on coercion and domination. But any right
is meaningless if it is merely expressed by adults on behalf of children. The point
when the popular concept of childhood breaks down is when it runs up against
children’s own expression. This is not because children’s expressions have special
qualities which differ from those of adults, but because they come from a radically
different perspective with very little outlet in contemporary media. When spaces
have been found for children’s voices, they pose a very different challenge to the
boundary between childhood and adulthood than the death wish envisaged by
Mary Whitehouse.
Over history, children have been the objects of imagery, very rarely its makers.
Their voices have had only limited access to the channels that produce public
meanings, and even then the tools that are available to them have been inevitably
honed by adults. Like all groups without power, they suffer the indignity of
being unable to present themselves as they would want to be seen or, indeed, of
even considering how they might want to be seen. Until very recently they have
been defined as incapable of meaningful expression. They have not been in a
 INTRODUCTION 21

position to manufacture a public image for themselves, and have had little
control over the image others make of them. Children are, in the words of James
and Prout, a ‘muted group’. They may say of adults, as the great Caribbean writer
Franz Fanon wrote of ‘the white man’, that he ‘had woven me out of a thousand
details, anecdotes, stories’. Without any input from children themselves, child-
hood can only remain an impossible concept, always mediated by adulthood, its
‘guileless innocence’ searched for but never found.
When children’s voices are effective, adults’ definitions are of necessity less
rigid. They are not necessarily replaced by other definitions but by an approach
that is sensitive to the ever-shifting perspectives of meaning. (The aid agency
Save the Children concluded their guidelines for journalists and photographers
with a picture of a boy with a video camera pointing back at the viewer.) In such
a context an imagery of childhood can reach beyond the adult attempt to
dominate and define. The boundaries are challenged, not in the name of rigidity
and death, but of change, development, flexibility and life.

NOTES ON INTRODUCTION

p.1 The ecstasy of communication: ‘That’s the ecstasy of communication: All secrets,
spaces and scenes abolished in a single dimension of information’, Jean
Baudrillard in Hal Foster (ed.) (1985) Postmodern Culture, London: Pluto, p.131.
Henley Centre: Nick Cohen, ‘Class struggle’, Observer, 9 September 2001.
p.2 imagery in use: in a similar spirit Sarah Kember focuses on the ‘social and psy-
chological investment’ in the new technologies she discusses in Virtual Anxiety,
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998.
p.4 images in our minds: see W.J.T Mitchell (1986) Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Chapter 1, ‘What is an image?’.
p.5 A single picture may be difficult to make sense of: Roland Barthes wrote of press
photographs, ‘the text loads the image, burdening it with a culture, a moral, an
imagination’. Writing of advertising photography, he notes two functions of the
linguistic message in relation to the iconic (representational) message, that of
‘anchorage’ and that of ‘relay’. Roland Barthes (1977) Image, Music, Text, trans.
Stephen Heath, London: Fontana, pp.26, 38. Victor Burgin expanded on the
point: ‘Visual and non-visual codes interprenetrate each other in very extensive
and complex ways’, Victor Burgin (ed.) (1982) Thinking Photography, London:
Macmillan, p.83.
obsessively sorts and classifies: Mary Douglas (1966) Purity and Danger: an
Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, on the cultural significance of the classification process, in which things
out of place are perceived as ‘dirt’.
p.6 semiotics of images: Umberto Eco (1977) A Theory of Semiotics, London:
Macmillan; Mitchell (1986) above.
an erotics of the text: Roland Barthes (1976) The Pleasure of the Text, trans.
Richard Miller, London: Jonathan Cape.
p.7 The Parents’ Guide: May–June 2001.
22 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

‘montage of attractions’: Sergei Eisenstein (1943/1986) The Film Sense, trans.

Jay Leyda, London: Faber and Faber, pp.181–83.
Marina Warner: (1998) No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock,
London: Chatto and Windus, p.7.
p.8 an ideal of domesticity and privacy: Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall (1976)
‘The charmed circle of home’, in J. Mitchell and A. Oakley (eds) The Rights and
Wrongs of Women, Harmondsworth: Penguin; F.M.L. Thompson (ed.) (1990)
The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750–1850, Vol. 2, People and their
Environment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Witold Rybczynski (1986)
Home, London: Penguin.
‘joy and guileless innocence’: Mary Whitehouse, ‘Today’s children are deprived
– of their childhood’, Daily Express, 1970s.
Raymond Williams: (1981) Culture, London: Fontana, p.204.
p.9 John Tenniel’s illustrations: these examples and the nineteenth-century visual
image of childhood are discussed by Anne Higonnet (1998) Pictures of Innocence:
the History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood, London: Thames and Hudson; for
the literary image, see Peter Coveney (1967) The Image of Childhood,
Harmondsworth: Peregrine; Jackie Wullschlager (revised 2001) Inventing
Wonderland: the Lives of Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, J.M. Barrie, Kenneth
Grahame and A.A. Milne, London: Methuen, Chapter 1.
Rejlander’s Infant Photography: (1856) and Cameron’s Cupid’s Pencil of Light
(1870) are discussed by Lindsay Smith in The Politics of Focus: Women, Children
and Nineteenth Century Photography, Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1998, p.88–92.
p.10 the ways in which memory and observation could operate: Jonathan Crary
(1990) Techniques of the Observer: on Vision and Modernity in the 19th century,
London: MIT Press; John Tagg (1988) The Burden of Representation, London:
Macmillan; Walter Benjamin (1936) ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical
reproduction’, in Hannah Arendt (ed.) (1999) Illuminations, London: Pimlico.
Photographic cards showing celebrities were mass-produced: Audrey
Linkman (1993) The Victorians: Photographic Portraits, London: Tauris Parke.
The Princess of Wales with her baby is on p.68.
p.11 picture postcards: became possible with the introduction of the postage stamp
and the development of printing techniques. They first went on sale in the
1870s and gained huge popularity from the 1890s. Martin Willoughby (1992)
A History of Postcards, London: Studio Editions.
rather easy to fabricate: quoted by Matei Calinescu (1987) Five Faces of
Modernity, Durham, US: Duke University Press, p.230.
p.12 Bubbles: see p.196. The picture was sold to the Pears Company in 1886 for £2200.
In the age of high colonialism, soap also signified ‘whiteness’. Anne McLintock
(1995) describes Pears’ promotion as ‘commodity racism’: ‘Soft-soaping
Empire: commodity racism and imperial advertising’, in Imperial Leather: Race,
Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest, London: Routledge.
either in crisis or dying: Phil Scraton (ed.) (1997) Childhood in Crisis, London:
UCL Press; Neil Postman (1983) The Disappearance of Childhood, London:
W.H. Allen; David Buckingham (2000) After the Death of Childhood: Growing
up in the Age of Electronic Media, Cambridge: Polity, Chapter 2.
digital technologies reinforce a view: Martin Lister (ed.) (1995) The Photographic
Image in Digital Culture, London: Routledge.
p.13 In investigating child pornography: see Chapter 7 for a further discussion of
this point.
 INTRODUCTION 23

Charles Darwin: ‘My first child was born on December 27th 1839 and I at once
commenced to make notes on the first dawn of the various expressions which
he exhibited’. Darwin’s observations were published as ‘Biographical sketch of
an infant’, in Mind, 1877. See Christina Hardyment (1993) Dream Babies:
Childcare from Locke to Spock, London: Jonathan Cape, pp.104–5.
CCTV: see Chapter 5 for a further discussion of the James Bulger case. Also
Kember (1998) above, Chapter 3. She discusses magnetic resonance imaging in
Chapter 4.
their interaction with their parents is scrutinised: in television programmes
such as Professor Robert Winston’s Child of Our Time, which follows children
born in the year 2000 (BBC 2000, 2001, 2002).
p.14 ‘mouse elbow’ and ‘video eyes’: a report from the medical journal Paediatrics
International, quoted in Independent, 17 February 2002. Photograph: John
Lawrence. See Buckingham (2000) above.
‘The end of childhood?’: Guardian ‘Education’, 29 February 2000.
Give children the chance: Metro, 6 December 2000.
‘The corporatisation of childhood’: Deborah Orr, Independent, 2 November 1999.
‘So old and yet so young’: Express on Sunday, 24 August 1997.
p.15 ‘Let our kids enjoy childhood’: Westminster Record, June 2002.
Rowan Williams: Times, 23 July 2002.
primitive/civilised, emotion/reason: Richard Appignesi,‘Some thoughts on Freud’s
discovery of childhood’, in Martin Hoyles (ed.) (1979) Changing Childhood,
London: Writers and Readers.
‘euphoric values’: Roland Barthes (1977) ‘Rhetoric of the image’, in Barthes
(1977) above, p.34.
p.16 Wishful desire is balanced against realistic disappointment: Adam Phillips
(1998) The Beast in the Nursery, London: Faber and Faber, p.3.
p.17 little monsters: Marina Warner (1994) Managing Monsters, London: Vintage. See
Chapter 5 for a further discussion of ‘bad’ children and the image of youth.
they had had a raucous independent presence: James Walvin (1982) A Child’s
World: Social History of English Childhood 1800–1914, Harmondsworth:
Pelican; Hugh Cunningham (1991) Children of the Poor, Oxford: Blackwell;
Anna Davin (1996) Growing Up Poor, London: Rivers Oram.
confined to spaces designed especially for them: Allison James, Chris Jenks and
Alan Prout (1998) Theorising Childhood, Cambridge: Polity, Chapter 3,
‘Childhood in social space’; Douglas (1966) above; Michel Foucault (1977)
Discipline and Punish, London: Allen Lane. See also the dispute over the layout
of primary classrooms discussed in Chapter 3.
p.20 Paul Goodman: (1956) Growing up Absurd, New York: Random House.
When spaces have been found for children’s voices: Bob Franklin (ed.) (2002)
The New Handbook of Children’s Rights: Comparative Policy and Practice, London:
Routledge.
p.21 ‘muted group’: Allison James and Alan Prout (eds) (1990) Constructing and Re-
constructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Study of Childhood,
London: Falmer, p.7.
a thousand details, anecdotes, stories: Franz Fanon (1952/1970) Black Skin,
White Masks, London: Paladin, p.79.
Save the Children: Focus on Images, 1991. See Chapter 6 and p.206.
‘Tea for two’, greetings card, USA, 2000. Photograph © Valerie Tabor Smith, used with permission of Art Impressions, Inc.
 1
There’s no such
thing as a baby
…or is there?

Hedonistic babies: kitsch and taboo

Babies are probably the last group of children whose image may be enjoyed
without guilt for their purely sensual pleasure. A huge amount of money, time
and effort goes into producing luscious, luminous pictures, widely distributed
and desired by many. Yet the contemporary image of babyhood does not speak
of nature, but of sophistication and artifice.
‘When I first put a baby in a flower pot I thought, “isn’t that just divine.
Just look at them!”’ says photographer Anne Geddes. Her colour-saturated
greetings cards show quaint babies and sugary-sweet babies, naked babies and
babies in fantastic costumes. Here’s one on a bed of roses; here’s another
curled up asleep, wearing cherubic wings, apparently part of a statue; here are
three chubby infants peeping out of a nest like newly hatched chicks. In one
of her most popular pictures no less than one hundred babies peer out of
terracotta flower pots, their fleshy pinkness reflecting the earthy pinkness of
the pots. Frequently the faces show blank astonishment, and the effectiveness
of an image depends on their cuddly helplessness. Anne Geddes’s work is
prolific and her inventiveness is endless, but she is not the only contemporary
photographer who has dragged babies into the realms of the bizarre and
grotesque. Despite the softness of babyhood, many contemporary pictures are
hard-edged. Their carefully controlled effects stand as a tribute to present-day
knowingness and cynicism. My postcard collection includes babies in
sunglasses, babies dressed up as adults, babies whose captured expressions
provoke adult laughter, as well as sugary-sweet babies decked out with wings

25
26 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

and surrounded by flowers. In this manipulated world, sentiment and whimsy

is frequently tinged with irony.
Yet, walking the streets, city-dwellers may raise their eyes just a bit above the
level of the crowds and traffic jams and enjoy the sight of many babies from an
earlier era whose sensuality is less self-conscious. These babies embellish statues
of dignitaries and decorate the facades of important buildings. With plump
little stomachs and unashamed nakedness they support medallions, nuzzle up
to the curving stonework and romp across decorative friezes. Their irreverence
softens the formality of public spaces. Some of them have wickedly impish faces,
reminding us of the Victorian cult of goblins and fairies, of paintings by Richard
Dadd, illustrations by Arthur Rackham and Christina Rossetti’s eerie poem
‘Goblin Market’. Even though they are made of stone, these babies are warmly
associated with bodily pleasures. They are placed amongst swags of foliage,
grapes, curling acanthus leaves and other reminders of natural abundance.
Classical themes evoke sunshine, relaxation, good food and endless playfulness,
as if the dignified architecture of civic pride has met up with the era of the
Mediterranean holiday.
The addition of wings raises to mythological status creatures who might
otherwise seem too cuddly and domestic. Wings confirm the place of babies
in the dignified history of Art with a capital ‘A’. From the Renaissance to the
nineteenth century, putti, cherubs and other mythological babies have acted
as fleshy and secular observers to the painted as well as the sculpted drama,
distanced from the gutsy activities of the adults, they puff across the sky in
a cloud or gather in clusters in the corner of a canvas. Of course, classical art
also turned loveable babies into the mischievously sexual Eros and the more
domesticated Cupid, aiming at vulnerable lovers with bow and quiver. The
similarity of Eros to the holy cherub has provided a visual vocabulary which
keeps sexuality hovering on the borders of consciousness. When a mythological
baby is carved or painted it can be given an adult knowingness and facial
expressions difficult to achieve with photography. These mythological babies
have a virile independence, with no apparent need for parenting or protection.
Pictures of babies continue to provide an excuse for what Phillipe Aries
was happy to call ‘ornamental nudity’, and the energetic image of babyhood
which dignifies public life has long been a resource for popular image-making.
As technological developments enabled the mass distribution of prints and
postcards, celebrated works gained notoriety through multiple reproductions,
and baby pictures became an indispensable part of kitsch modernity. From
Victorian lacy greetings cards and prints in illustrated magazines to twenty-first-
century Christmas cards, the image of a quasi-mythological baby has been part
 THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS A BABY … OR IS THERE? 27

of everyday enjoyment. The tourist and heritage industries have taken up the
task with enthusiasm. The Victoria and Albert Museum greeted the millennium
with a calendar for the year 2000 featuring cherubs lifted from classical and
religious paintings, including Raphael’s familiar pair from the base of the Sistine
Madonna. Chin on hand, their expressions testify to a tolerant detachment from
the curious eccentricities of the adult world. They have become some of the best-
known pictured infants, reproduced and recreated many times over the years –
from Oscar Rejlander’s reconstruction made in 1857 (a copy was bought by
Prince Albert), to a US postage stamp, and an irresistible 1995 television
commercial for St Ivel baby and toddler yoghurt, ‘pure enough for little angels’.
My collection of babies includes the curious, the nostalgic and the everyday:
curiosities such as a photomontage published in 1880 which assembles fifty
howling mouths and scrunched-up eyes, captioned ‘Good night’, and Douglas
Tempest’s suggestively captioned toddlers for comic seaside postcards in the 1920s.
The nostalgic include Rose O’Neill’s ‘kewpie’ – a saucer-eyed little thing, with
chubby stomach, a pointed wisp of hair on top of its head and tiny blue wings
just behind its neck – a hedonistic baby if ever there was one. Hovering between
playful realism and complete fantasy, the kewpie was one of the earliest baby dolls
to be mass produced. Amongst the everyday babies there are those who have sold
products over the years, such as the Fairy Liquid infant who strides around the
container with great assertiveness, despite his old-fashioned fluffy nappy. Packages
such as Cow and Gate baby food and Johnson’s baby powder are a testament to
the long-standing importance of baby appeal to calculated marketing.
In Western countries at the beginning of the twentieth century, there was a
notable gap between the hedonistic image and the lives of the vast majority of
children. A move towards representations that were closer to everyday life was
driven by the use of photography both as a record and a campaigning tool.
Photographs from the 1910s and 1920s document mother-and-baby clinics and
illustrate campaigns around mother and infant welfare. The babies in these
pictures are frequently thin and sickly – less a chubby cherub than a creature
with physical needs. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the romantic
and the realistic had come together to create a contemporary image in which
glowing health and physical beauty are taken for granted. My contemporary
pictures are as luscious and delectable as the cherubs from an earlier age, but are
presented as real-life not fantasy babies, most of them pulled from the glossy
pages of publications for parents. The glorious colour and the comfortable
lifestyle they evoke is balanced by practical advice on problems such as sleepless
nights and teething. These are consuming babies, their image directed at parents
for whom there appears a real possibility that reality may match the ideal.
28 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

Hedonistic babies have cheerfully addressed a diverse audience. Decorative

infants such as Anne Geddes’s fantasies, architectural stone babies and Raphael’s
reproduced cherubs are designed to give pleasure to all who make use of public
spaces. But consumer pictures are more precisely directed and more individually
based. They carry powerful messages about the social positioning of babyhood,
about the nature of the home, and above all about those who are expected to care
for babies, in particular their mothers. Unlike the image of the ornamental
cherub, contemporary babyhood is rarely imagined as resilient and independent.
Balancing between the public and the private, the imagery of babyhood
runs straight up against major questions about the limits of human life itself.
Babies may be central to the image of a domestic haven, but they bring a hint of
insecurity to this very safe place with their nakedness, their closeness to the
unspeakable moments of life and death, and their ability to drag humanity away
from civilisation and back to the earthy reality of bodily functions. In the
photographic image, nakedness has itself become suspect, vulnerability more
obvious, and the possibility of exploitation only too real. Hedonism and kitsch
have come up against the electric atmosphere of taboo, in a strange overlap
between pleasures and fears. Political dramas and moral dilemmas around
conception, pregnancy and birth run as a disturbing undertow to the long-
standing image of babyhood designed purely for pleasure.

Making babies: the unborn

Photographic technology has revolutionised the concept of the beginning of

life by providing a visual image of a human creature from the very moment of
conception. The records in the family album now begin before birth with the
image of an ultrasound scan. Lennart Nilsson’s celebrated photographs of the
foetus floating as if in space were first published in Life magazine in 1965; 25
years later, the Sunday Times devoted a colour spread to the same photo-
grapher’s vastly magnified images of the instant when a sperm pierces an egg.
Those strange, convoluted landscapes hold an abstract beauty, but the now
familiar image of a young human months before birth carries a more personal
power. Life in the womb can stand for total satisfaction. The curled-up foetus
suggests perfect peace and security, surrounded by its supernatural aura, revelling
in its nakedness and fluidity. ‘For nine months he gets everything he needs from
one place,’ declared the caption of a 1990s advertisement for the superstore
Children’s World, beneath an image of a thumb-sucking tranquil creature, ‘Why
change the habit of a lifetime?’
 THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS A BABY … OR IS THERE? 29

Advertisement, 1990s.

Yet the peace of the image belies the turmoil which surrounds the realities of
conception and birth, as well as the political and technological disputes within
which they are embedded. As the visible foetus gained a new public presence, its
luminous image floated calmly at the heart of one of the most intense disputes
of the last quarter of the twentieth century, and posed impossible questions
about the status of life itself. To whom does this foetus belong? The Children’s
World advertisement referred to the mother in oblique and humorous terms
(‘For nine months he’s got it all worked out. Food, clothes, furnishings and
transport all under one convenient roof ’). No maternal container was visible
around the floating infant. Feminists of the 1970s were not satisfied to be an
invisible ‘convenient roof ’. They saw enforced pregnancy and motherhood as one
of the shackles from which women must be freed. For them the unborn child is
30 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

clearly part of the body of the mother. The ‘pro-life’ opposition argued that the
child belonged either to god or to society – but either way it had a separate
existence which must be protected, if necessary, against the interests of the
woman who bore it. As more information came into the public realm concerning
the intricate development of the child prior to birth, the early feminist demand
for abortion on demand developed into a more complex argument around
reproductive rights – for a woman’s right to control her own body and make her
own decisions on her fertility. But for anti-abortion campaigners, the humanity
of the foetal image has continued to be a highly charged emotional centre. ‘A
foetus is a baby – don’t forget’ was the caption on a 1970s leaflet showing a bin
bag apparently full of aborted babies. In 2002 the ProLife Alliance sought to base
a party political broadcast on a series of bloody and emotive pictures of aborted
foetuses. Both the BBC and ITV argued that the pictures were unacceptable and
transmitted the broadcast without them. However, a Court of Appeal ruled that
the decision not to transmit the pictures was ‘censorship’ and the pictures rapidly
entered the public domain via the Internet.
Although the rights of the unborn child have been a rallying cry for those
who would define women primarily as mothers, technological developments
have, in effect, begun to remove the foetus from the ‘possession’ of the woman
who bears it. A view of the beginning of life as mystical and natural has been
shaken by the ability to separate insemination from conception and pregnancy
from motherhood. In a confusion of parental bodies, in vitro fertilisation,
artificial insemination by donor (AID), surrogacy, egg sharing and other dev-
elopments in genetic science mean that the creation of a child may be a carefully
controlled process in which the producer of the egg and the producer of the
sperm do not automatically become mother and father of the resulting child. In
this context, the images of sperm and egg take on a new meaning and the
solitary foetus must now be reinterpreted as an isolated creature who is, almost
literally, up for grabs. Aminatta Forma writes of the shifting definitions of
‘motherhood’; in surrogacy the ‘natural’ mother is the one who donates, while
the surrogate mother is devalued, whereas in an ‘egg donation programme’ the
woman donating the genetic material has no rights over the future child. In
both cases it is the woman who is using her body as a source of income – often
from a poorer society – who forfeits the right to ‘motherhood’.
The consequence of consumer choice in reproduction is that the possibility
of purchasing the perfect baby has come closer. Just as digital imaging can
produce a perfect picture, headlines predict a future in which all babies will be
designer babies, constructed out of carefully selected genes. News items describe
prospective parents choosing the sex of their child, or specifying the qualities of
 THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS A BABY … OR IS THERE? 31

their egg or sperm donor – such as sportiness, musicality or physical attractive-

ness. One sperm bank in the US holds the sperm of Nobel Prize winners,
Olympic athletes and outstanding sportsmen. Being human has been finally
detached from the biological, and perfection appears a real possibility. The ideal
image has influenced the construction of flesh-and-blood babies.

Making babies: birth

If the fantasy of a peaceful life in the womb has not been unduly disturbed by
the technologisation of conception, it is most definitely broken by the violent
imagery of birth. Birth has long been a taboo subject for pictorial presentation,
since it must deal with the private parts of the female body, associated with
horror and disgust as well as the fascination of the forbidden. Representations
of birth have traditionally been hedged around with warnings and explanations.
In 1991, when the garment manufacturer Benetton used public hoardings
for a poster campaign showing a baby at the moment of birth, there was a sense
that public decency had been breached. The baby’s face was crumpled, the
umbilical cord still attached, and the body streaked with blood and messy
substances. The image spoke of pain and distress. The Advertising Standards
Authority received 800 complaints – an unusually high number. Benetton’s
advertisements at the time were designed by the charismatic Oliviero Toscani,
who specialised in the outrageous. This was one of a series of advertisements
based on ‘found images’ which showed traumatic moments in human life,
including an equally notorious photograph of a man dying of AIDS. The public
unease came not only from the prominence of taboo images, but from the
double function of the posters – to shock, and to advertise cheap-and-cheerful
clothing. Private moments were wrenched from their context and thrust into
public spaces, so that passers-by were forced to contemplate mortality and bodily
pain while lightly making their consumer choices. However, a new-born,
complete with umbilical cord, was by no means new to advertising imagery. In
1989 Yorkshire Television had offered no fewer than four full-colour births on a
single poster. The image of a baby as it first leaves the womb, which had once
been considered for professional eyes only, had already become public currency
as a symbol of a hopeful beginning. But, like the Toscani poster with its glistening
bodily fluids, these pictures distanced themselves from the terrifying and messily
feminine processes of birth itself by excluding the woman whose labour this was.
Just as the foetal image has directed visual empathy away from the woman
towards the unborn child, the imagery of birth has played down the experience
32 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

of the mother to focus on the new-born. In 1956, Grace Robertson – one of the
few women documentary photographers working at the time – shot a sequence
of pictures following a birth for the prestigious news magazine Picture Post. But
the magazine ‘feared the realistic shots of a young woman in labour would alarm
too many readers!’ and the sequence was not used. By contrast, Frederick Leboyer
used photographs to demonstrate the trauma of birth from a baby’s perspective.
In a powerful image, a doctor triumphantly holds up a screaming child by its
legs, like a fisherman’s catch. In the picture, the agonised face of the new-born is
ignored by the celebrating adults. By isolating the face of the child in another

out
r, Birth With
olm.
I.M.S. Stockh
erick Leboye
tana, 1977).
s from Fred
Violence (Fon
Photograph
Cover of The Nuclear War Game (Longman, 1983).
 THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS A BABY … OR IS THERE? 33

frame, and reversing the image so that it is no longer upside down, Leboyer forces
the baby’s distress onto the attention of his reader. Instead of a doctor’s trophy,
we now see a small human. (The British peace movement took up the image and
adapted the crumpled face and helpless arms of the baby into the mushroom
cloud of a nuclear explosion, a symbol of the ultimate in human vulnerability. It
became a giant backdrop to a rally in Trafalgar Square in 1980, and appeared on
a book cover in 1983.) The image of the tortured face of this new-born infant was
the antithesis of the beatific foetus, but Leboyer demonstrated the possibility of
a continuing foetus-like peace, through another visual comparison – juxtaposing
the face of a baby who had experienced a peaceful birth with the serene face of
the Buddha. Leboyer’s work was highly influential in the move to make child-
birth techniques gentler and less technological, but once more the humanising of
the child had problematised the position of the mother. This time she was not a
‘convenient roof ’ but some kind of monstrous machine which crushed and
pushed the baby unwillingly into the world.
In 1976, Parents magazine published another landmark documentary
sequence, a second-by-second series of photographs showing the bloodstained
head of a baby as it emerged. These pictures showed sex organs and pubic hair,
but the viewing public were protected from the mother’s agonised effort. In the
final picture she lies comfortably against the pillows as the midwife hands her the
infant. The medical context, the clinical observation, the empiricism and rational
sequencing of the series has the effect of demythologising and normalising the
moment of childbirth. In the late 1970s Parents had been relaunched and was
realigning its audience from a rather patronising advice culture, appropriate to the
post-war era, to a late-twentieth-century promotional one, with much more
colour and a glossy format. The new magazine was based on a German model and
used many pictures from European sources. Unlike its rivals, it took its visuals
seriously. In the context of feminist campaigns, the magazine faced the taboos
head on and sought out images that would show childbirth under women’s
control. Amongst its full-colour features there was a ‘do-it-yourself’ birth in which
the mother had no assistance, and a ‘primitive’ birth in which a French model
chose to have her baby in the ‘traditional’ way amongst a nomadic tribe in North
Africa. More conventional variations ranged from caesareans to high-tech births
with epidural and forceps. With its frank discussions of children’s sexuality,
together with a relaxed celebration of nakedness, the magazine was seen by
conservative critics as part of the unwelcome counter-culture of the hippy 1970s.
The twenty years which separated the photographic sequences in Picture Post
and Parents had seen the coming of high-quality colour printing in magazines
and the launch of colour supplements to Sunday newspapers, which balanced
34 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

powerful photojournalism with increasingly sophisticated advertising. The proli-

ferating consumer publications were precisely targeted at specific audiences,
their visual style set by the advertisements which occupied a high percentage of
their pages. There has been a growing market for baby-care advice (but not,
interestingly enough, for advice on bringing up older children). By the late 1980s
there were nine paid-for baby magazines, most of them printed in lush colours
on quality paper. By the year 2000 that number had increased to 15, (and the
magazines have been joined by publications sponsored by supermarkets, such
as Tesco’s Baby Club and Sainsbury’s Little Ones). This all-powerful consumer
context has, to a certain extent, succeeded in calming the unwelcome irruption
of painful reality. The dominant imagery of giving birth and caring for a baby is
now placed firmly against a supportive background of purchasing and con-
sumerism. Advice and promotion imperceptibly interweave, and interchangeable
pictures of happy, healthy babies illustrate them both – pictures which attempt
to incorporate sufficient realism into a fantasy of perfection.
Birth does not easily lend itself to hedonistic imagery, but in the pages of
Practical Parenting, Mother and Baby and the rest, pain and problems have come
to sit easily beside advertisements for soya milk, bootees and Baby Gap. At the
same time, the magazines remain a contemporary forum for gossip and the
exchange of experience, including childbirth stories. Practical Parenting has an
‘Ask our midwife’ letters page; Mother and Baby investigates ‘10 top birth
secrets’. In the spirit of consumer choice, features compare hospitals and birth
styles. The tone is intimate and informal, and pictures are often those sent in by
readers. These tend to show the moment after the birth when the baby rests
comfortably on the mother’s body. Ultimately, this is the desired image, in
which the feared crisis of birth is transformed into an image of calm, and
turbulence is pacified. The spirit of kitsch overcomes the dangers of taboo.

Mother, breast and bottle

I once risked the remark ‘there’s no such thing as a baby’, meaning that if you set out
to describe a baby you are describing a baby and someone. A baby cannot exist alone
but is essentially part of a relationship.
D.W. Winnicott

When a new baby makes its first public appearance, it is in the arms of the woman
who bore it. Midwives, doctors and professional helpers are no longer needed,
and the faces of woman and baby can now be shown in mutual satisfaction.
Mothers on the covers of 1970s magazines (Princess Anne, Esther Rantzen) took
 THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS A BABY … OR IS THERE? 35

up the traditional posture, cradling the infant in their arms. By the 1990s they
were more likely to turn towards the camera, displaying the little creature
(Duchess of York with Princess Eugenie). The early 2000s found Mandy Smith on
the cover of Hello! bent over the naked body of her baby in a more artful pose.
The key image of mother and infant, ‘a baby and someone’ in Winnicott’s words,
remains secure, and the celebrity baby remains a staple of engaging babyhood.
Although there is a baby at the centre of each of these presentations, in this
pictured moment the imagery is working on the meaning of ‘woman’ in order
to ensure a convincing transformation into ‘mother’. In the 2000s, the visual
possibilities for ‘motherhood’ are wide and varied, but, despite cynicism and
doubts, the presence of a baby continues to change the nature of the woman
whose arms encircle it. In her study of the myth and cult of the Virgin Mary,
Marina Warner describes the fourteenth-century transformation of Mary from a
transcendent queen into the ideal of feminine humility and submission, brought
about when she was regarded above all as a mother: ‘In motherhood Mary was
glorified, and through her position before her child became more glorious for her
humility’. Outside the Roman Catholic Church, thousands who would otherwise
take no part in the cult of Mary as Madonna continue to circulate her picture.
In a familiar Christmas-card image, mother and baby are placed beyond the
everyday world, sanctified with a halo, associated with the solemn, if childlike,
aspects of Christmas and the hushed intensity of the art gallery. The holiness of
the couple is secured by their freedom from worldliness and sexuality. They have
aesthetic as well as exemplary value. The private relationship of mother and baby
gains a public dimension which places it firmly in the context of culture, and puts
a tangible pressure on women who live out the social reality of motherhood.

Christmas cards from the 1970s to the 2000s.

36 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

In an intimate image, more frequently exemplified by anonymous mothers,

the crook of the woman’s arm, instead of serving to display the baby to the gaze
of the onlookers, draws the child inwards, supporting it in the act of suckling.
This resonant image tends to be shaped by the curve of the woman’s arm and the
downward tilt of her head, so that her gaze is totally concentrated on the baby.
The image creates an exclusive couple, as if unaware that they are the objects of
contemplation. The egg-shaped logo of the National Childbirth Trust fuses them
into one. An advertisement from 1991 and a medical expert from 1981 are
amongst many who emphasise the point: ‘A mother and her baby. Two people
who, for the next few years of their lives, will be inseparable. Emotionally.
Physically’; ‘You will find yourself completely preoccupied by him. You and your
baby are not yet wholly separate people, and in some ways you never will be.’
Pictures of active mothers and babies refusing to be shaped by the curve of the
image can be read as a resistance to the pull of these powerful pressures.
But while the effect of such imagery is to shrink the possible meanings of
‘woman’ to those associated with ‘mother’, at the same time it encourages
an infinite expansion of the possible meanings of ‘baby’. When you hold a
baby, ‘you’ve got the whole world in your hands,’ warns an advertisement for
Infa-care bath products. The baby represents the potential of all humanity. In
contemporary baby magazines the child is almost as likely to be a ‘she’ as a ‘he’
(Tesco’s Baby Club notes ‘for consistency we use “she” to refer to baby throughout
the magazine, but all information applies equally to boys!’), but until very recently
writers have found it difficult to reconcile the expansive universality associated
with babyhood with the feminine pronoun. ‘It is tedious to put “he and she” and
it also saves confusion when “she” is the mother,’ the BMA told their readers
tetchily in their 1976 leaflet for mothers. In a 1991 pamphlet, the Child Accident
Prevention Trust put the explanation at its starkest: ‘This booklet refers to all
babies as “he” or “him” to make for easier reading’. This universal ‘he’ who makes
for easier reading and must be defined in antithesis to ‘she’, the mother, is not the
‘he’ of a potent and active masculinity but seems to represent a more generalised
‘he’, a god-like manifestation of humanity itself who, merely by existing, can
command service and nurture from ‘she’. At this point ‘she’ seems little more than
an encircling and protecting environment, Mother Nature, the providing earth.
At the centre of this set of pictures is that highly charged object, a woman’s
breast. Pictures of breastfeeding mothers show a three-way relationship – not
just between woman and baby but between woman, baby and breast. That part
of a women’s body which is overlaid with innumerable taboos and fascinations
must here be seen as chaste and desexualised. The breast poses a problem for the
image, just as it poses a practical problem for women who want to feed their
 THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS A BABY … OR IS THERE? 37

babies on a day trip or a shopping expedition. We are assured, however, that this
breast is quite different from the provocative breasts of the topless sunbathers,
joke-shop falsies, the partygoers who allow them to ‘pop out’, or the top shelf at
the local newsagent. Unlike the arrogant breasts on page three, these visible
breasts are not an assertive element of female display. Indeed, ‘as she prepares to
feed him…her breasts change in appearance in a subtle and beautiful way,’ the
BMA informed new mothers. (The pamphlet was anonymous, but the sentence
has an almost prurient feel, if for a male observer.) The imagery must struggle
to retain ‘mother’ as an asexual category, despite – and partly because of – the
exposure of her breast. This struggle over meanings centres on the visible
contact with the baby. Although writers such as Sheila Kitzinger have discussed
the sexual component of the experience of breastfeeding, the cultural expect-
ation is that the visible touch between this ‘he’ and this ‘she’ will repress the
sexual implications of that antithesis. The baby (a person) is presented as the
object of ‘her’ love and concern, but the breast (part of a person) is the object of
‘his’ desire. Their relationship is not reciprocal. In the psychoanalysis of Melanie
Klein, the breast appears as a separate entity with which the baby builds a
relationship before becoming aware of the mother as an individual.
In a famous passage from his Three Essays on Sexuality, Sigmund Freud
wrote, ‘No-one who has seen a baby sinking back satiated from the breast and
falling asleep with flushed cheeks and blissful smile can escape the reflection
that this picture persists as a prototype of the expression of sexual satisfaction
later in life’. Although the analogy between mother and lover is disguised by an
array of taboos and prohibitions, it emerges in the sense of nervous impropriety
behind a headline such as ‘How could I know it was the wrong baby at my
breast?’ and the saucy joke behind a 1991 advertisement for Triumph nursing
bras: ‘There are times when you can allow the man in your life to choose your
bra’. A 1984 advertisement for Cow and Gate baby foods, which shockingly
showed the breast as nothing but food – ‘May we suggest the liver and bacon to
follow?’ – won advertising industry awards for both effectiveness and creativity.
In these ways the sensuous touching between lips and breast has been carefully
negotiated. The baby is allowed full flow of ‘his’ emotions, but the mother must
temper hers in the knowledge of her responsibility and service. Viewers of these
presentations are expected to appreciate the satisfactions experienced by the
baby and disavow their own erotic response. Perhaps for this reason, the woman’s
presence in the image is, once more, a precarious one. While seeking to present
the satisfaction of the nursing couple, the picture of the suckling baby is
frequently cropped, so that only baby and breast are included. The woman’s face
remains outside the frame and her ambivalent emotions invisible.
38 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

Advertisement, early 1980s.

The bottle enters the popular imagery of babyhood very much as second
best, usually in advertisements for formula baby food or the paraphernalia
which accompanies bottle feeding. In an advertisement for Babysafe products,
the artificial nipple intrudes into the image of breast and baby, accompanied by
text which admits that ‘breast is best’ while it offers itself as a humble but
adequate substitute. As breastfeeding declined in Britain throughout the 1980s,
campaigners from organisations such as Baby Milk Action pointed to pressure
from the powdered-milk manufacturers and to ‘glossy little brochures featuring
smiling babies and baby milk brands which are placed on maternity ward
bedside tables’. Such promotion is specifically forbidden under the World Health
Organisation code established in 1981 after the exposure of methods used by
Nestlé to sell formula baby milk to mothers in poorer parts of the Third World.
(In July 2001 a group of actors and comedians boycotted the prestigious Perrier
awards at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe because Perrier is produced by Nestlé.)
In 1989 the Health Visitor journal rejected an advertisement for Farley’s Ostermilk
which showed two tins placed in the two cups of a bra because, they said, it
associated formula too closely with breast milk. Throughout this debate, the
breast remains a protected value, defended against its sexual connotations,
forming a secure link between mother and baby.
 THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS A BABY … OR IS THERE? 39

Nature, science and magic

The rival claims of breast milk and formula throw into relief a long-running
tension between those two props of modernist thought, the ‘natural’ and the
‘scientific’. Yet these two discourses of modernity have both been tempered by
references to an older, and possibly more reassuring, appeal – to magic, religion
and the supernatural. ‘It is a gift bestowed by nature. That special something
which bonds mother and baby. That magic touch that brings comfort to the
distressed child.’ So wrote Edward Vale on the occasion of Prince William’s
christening on 5 August 1982, addressing the Daily Mirror’s three million readers
of assorted ages and sexes. At about the same time, ‘a professor of obstetrics and
gynaecology’ addressed the much more specific audience of women who were
about to become mothers in an advice leaflet. ‘Having a baby is a recurring
miracle and still the biggest event in a woman’s life,’ he reassured them, ‘don’t
worry if you do not feel a great surge of mother love. This unique bond between
mother and child takes a little time to develop.’ Both writers managed to hold
together references to the supernatural – ‘that magic touch’, ‘a recurring miracle’ –
with the natural – ‘a gift bestowed by nature’ a ‘unique bond’ and with science.
‘Bonding’ became the buzzword of the 1980s, based on an influential book by
two Australian paediatricians. Penelope Leach described how the bond between
mother and child depends on an exchange of looks: ‘His responses create a self-
sustaining circle, his smiles leading to your smiles and yours to more from him’.
‘Failure to bond’ was to become a convenient explanation for all sorts of problems
between parents and children. Research reported in the British press in 1977,
accompanied by diagrams, claimed that only some babies fulfil the criteria for
bonding, with dire consequences for those who do not conform. According to the
researchers, small chins and wide eyes make a more effective ‘trigger’ for mother
love. ‘We ought to consider the possibility that if their baby has a face that does
not trigger the benevolent instinct, the brutal behaviour of their parents (that is
child-batterers) would then be cruel and appalling, but in the precise sense of the
word, natural.’ The fear that without the ‘trigger’ to secure the ‘bond’ – natural,
yet confirmed by science – women may escape the duties of motherhood, was
reiterated by the hospital which provided photographs of babies in intensive care
for their mothers to keep with them, to assist the bonding process: ‘If the bond is
loosened, a demanding baby can be too much for a mother to tolerate’.
Thus the faces which gurgle from Junior Disprol packets, Fisher Price
advertisements and the magazine shelves at W.H. Smith are the faces of beautiful
babies, their beauty judged by their rounded symmetrical faces, their small
chins, their sparkling eyes and their appealing expressions. ‘Because the agency
40 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

insists that the babies in the ads have to be just right, casting is a tricky business,’
wrote Gail Kemp in the advertisers’ journal, Campaign. Yet the image of a baby’s
face, smiling wide-eyed directly out of the picture, is an image which seeks to
bond with all viewers, placing us all, for that particular moment, in the position
of mother. Paradoxically, this resonant image, with its carefully researched
‘trigger’ for mother love, has effectively broken the uniqueness of the bond,
since its magic is re-created for all potential consumers. When D.W. Winnicott
wrote of a ‘baby and someone’, he had mother or carer in mind. In the consumer
world, that ‘someone’ may be the purchaser of the magazine, or of the perfect
babyfood or of the financial Baby Bond.
By the 1990s, the ‘fashion’ for voguish parenthood meant that the image of a
baby was promoting a wide variety of products, from lambswool jumpers to
perfume and high-performance cars, aimed at men as well as women. Concern
was expressed that the practice was an exploitation – not only of the pictured
babies, but also by causing an unfair arousal of parental emotion. The advertisers’
professional magazine Campaign invited comments from its readers on the issue.
The not-so-serious replies it received were summed up by the ‘baby’ who wrote,
‘Some people are simply jealous of our success and glamorous lifestyles’.

Magazine cover, London, 1998, courtesy of Time Out.

 THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS A BABY … OR IS THERE? 41

Agencies continue to produce catalogues with ranks of aspirant baby models,

and advertisers vie with each other for the most gorgeous baby face – but the
symmetrical faces, the wide sparkling eyes and the appealing expressions remain
remarkably repetitive. ‘Just right’ also turns out to mean that the babies are
of an incredible whiteness; the eyes are usually blue and the faces the softest of
pinks. It was not until the end of the 1980s that the occasional black baby began
to appear in advertising and in the editorial pages, and things have hardly changed
in the early 2000s.

Any baby can easily be spoilt

Although the perfect baby smiles the delighted smile that mothers long to see,
even advertisers with plenty of resources and cash know that this image can only
be achieved through hard work and at the expense of many tears and tantrums.
The perfect image can all too easily be spoiled. Truby King, the austere mentor
of an earlier generation of childcare experts, was obsessed with the possibility
of ‘spoiling’. ‘Any baby can easily be spoiled and made a cross, fretful and
exacting little tyrant,’ he wrote in 1912. Pictures of babies in their fretful and
tyrannical moods are less frequently visible and are rarely allowed to dominate
a page. A bawling baby may bring disruption so awful that it is best dealt with
by resorting to comedy, and desperate babies become a handy metaphor. ‘Only
reality looks more real,’ claims a 2001 advertisement for Hewlett Packard inkjet
printers, promoting a technology which produces ‘outstanding photographic
images’, including the comic realism of a bawling child. ‘Take cover now,’ cries a
leaflet for Cornhill life insurance, under a cartoon image of a cavernous mouth,
vibrating tonsils and food flying in all directions. The peaceful image may be
restored either by one of innumerable branded products – Anebesol, Dinnefords,
Colic Drops – as well as life insurance, health care and the advice of experts. The
situation is made light of and things are soon put right.
The imagery continues to imply that it is up to the mother to maintain
harmony within the domestic setting. Yet, in the advertisements, such as one
for Asilone soothing medicine, she is turning her gaze out of the frame
towards the viewer, looking beyond the self-sufficiency of the nursing couple.
The baby also looks beyond its mother, as if it too is appealing to the world
beyond. When ‘Mum needs help’; when she lacks the expertise and equipment;
when ‘a cuddle isn’t enough’, another character in the story, although not
always a visible one, is called on to restore order. In advice literature, a doctor,
nurse or health visitor puts in a helpful appearance; in consumer imagery this
42 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

role is played by the product. Either way, the autonomy of motherhood is once
more thrown into question.
When the imagery is dominated by its welfare aspects – for example in
advertising for medicines, toiletries and other products concerned with health
and hygiene – a clinical eye supervises the parental eye. The normative regime of
science enters the home – and the imagery – in the guise of professional advice.
Professional scrutiny sets standards as growth and development are measured,
monitored and assessed. ‘You and Your Baby will help you because it is written
by experts who will tell you what is normal and what is not,’ was the confident
assertion which began a late-1970s BMA booklet. In Parents magazine of the
1940s, the professional was an SRN (State Registered Nurse) or a doctor, usually
uniformed. The white coat and the stethoscope have had a long life as guarantors
of health and hygiene. By the 2000s, the advice is cosier, the gap between medical
expert and ‘patient’ has closed, and the professionals present themselves as friends
rather than harsh teachers. Nevertheless, the baby never totally leaves the discursive
space of medicine and welfare, where close observation and the measurement of
change are all-important. The repertoire of the baby magazines includes checklists
of the expected stages of development, offered both as yardstick and as reassurance.
Each expected change has its own appropriate visual representation. The editors
of the Time-Life book Photographing Children long ago alerted amateur photo-
graphers to the opportunities: ‘A general itinerary of his [sic] rapid journey from
infancy and babyhood into childhood has been plotted by the Yale University
Clinic of Child Development after close observation of thousands of children. Each
of these stages of development provides valuable insights as to what to look for as
photographic behaviour.’ In the contemporary resonant image of babyhood,
such is the interplay between a normative medical discourse and a sensuous
pleasurable one, that the distinction between them has all but disappeared.

Fathers and the reconstruction of parenthood

Winnicott’s observation that ‘there’s no such thing as a baby’ has gained a new set
of meanings as the image of parents and their babies has moved through a series
of transformations in recent decades. As with all images of children, the resonant
meanings of babyhood carried by the changing image only make sense in the
context of the changing relationships around it – albeit pulled in different
directions as several different trends run in parallel. Perhaps the most striking
change has been the arrival of fathers as an expected part of baby imagery, and
men’s very public desire to be seen sharing the pleasures – if not always the
 THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS A BABY … OR IS THERE? 43

stresses – of the early years of parenthood. Even so, as we have seen, the actual
presence of the mother and her servicing role remains taken for granted to the
extent that her visual representation is frequently unnecessary. Images of the
foetus render transparent the woman who carries it; images of childbirth and of
breast-feeding focus on the baby rather than the mother; consumer imagery
shows babies gazing out of the frame towards a space assumed to be occupied by
a loving, purchasing mother. These resonant images may centre on babies, but
they are laden with implicit information about mothers and their duties. Yet in
parallel with a renewed acceptance of a traditional, biological role, motherhood
has undergone intensive social restructuring. One powerful theme from the
1990s celebrates the successful working mother. She is the soldier kissing her
baby goodbye as she leaves for the Gulf War; she is high-flying business executive
Nicola Horlick with her numerous children; she is the fashionable woman who
wants to carry on wearing the kind of clothes she wore before she was pregnant;
and she is the target readership of She. At that magazine’s relaunch in May 1990,
it told its advertisers that a ‘massive, growing, attractive and affluent market’ is
made up of women who ‘juggle their lives’, balancing committed motherhood
with work and an active social life: ‘You need the juggler and we’ve got her’. By
the 2000s the desirability of such a pressured lifestyle had been questioned, and
‘downshifting’ was recommended. Rather than kissing your baby goodbye, or
balancing it on your hip with the phone tucked under your chin, the preferred
image for media-conscious mothers was now to be seen out and about with their
babies in tow. The daily business of being a mother became part of an energetic
discussion in the broadsheet press as a new generation of high-profile women
writers shared their experiences of motherhood with the public at large. (‘I
feverishly take photographs of us doing things together so I can say, “There we
were”,’ wrote BBC arts correspondent Rosie Millard.) One consequence of these
changes in attitude was that the visual interest could be drained away from the
baby to the confident, smiling, attractive mother pushing the buggy.
Of course, these very visible mothers continue to represent the ‘affluent
market’. Poorer women, who have always worked, and not always from choice,
are not seen to share in this new, publicly expressive motherhood, and we are
almost never shown babies in the care of the nannies or childminders who
so often make the image possible. These other workers only become publicly
visible in the recruitment literature, or when inadequate or abusive carers hit the
headlines. An imagery based on consumerism finds little space for low-paid,
working women – however important their role.
However, plenty of space is made for the new fathers. Until relatively recently,
male medical advisers appeared in advertisements and advice literature rather
44 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

more frequently than fathers, but it is no longer surprising to see a man as the
adult half of a baby/parent couple. In the mid-1980s, Mother – the oldest of the
baby magazines – ran a regular column by ‘role-reversing father’ Stephen Lugg,
coyly pictured at his typewriter in a frilly apron. But the newly emerging image
of fatherhood was a rather more sensuous affair. In 1986 one of the most
successful posters sold by Athena was ‘L’enfant’, a dramatically lit black-and-white
photograph showing a muscly young man with stylishly tousled hair cradling
a baby, whose look is of pure amazement. ‘Alienated, self-absorbed manhood is
becoming redundant as a marketing tool,’ stated John Hegarty of advertising
agency Bartle, Bogle, Hegarty. Advertisers identified a ‘thirtysomething’ culture,
‘a slackening of the fierce ambitions that gripped the ’80s’, a more home-centred
and relaxed approach, seeking pleasure with the children. Fathers were almost
ousting mothers in their anxiety to be a nurturing parent and to play a caring
role. Some pictured fathers clung on to their besuited yuppie style (as in the
Lanvin advertisement), but when in 1990 the Times announced its ‘new baby’ –
its Saturday magazine – it was a man naked from the waist up who caressed the
infant on its posters. In 1991 the Body Shop promoted a ‘labour day pack’ with

Advertisement, 1997.
 THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS A BABY … OR IS THERE? 45

photographs in sculptural black-and-white in which the arms encircling the

wriggling infant were unmistakably male. Babyhood legitimises nakedness, and
this new-age, neo-Romantic vision allowed men too to share the pleasurable touch.
But while parenthood continues to be asserted as a choice, and young and
articulate celebrities – women and men – are pictured with their babies in a
newly confident way, commerce is already working to direct the baby’s gaze
beyond its parents towards the world of consumer goods. The hedonistic image
of babyhood is increasingly confined to a purchasing context. These delightfully
smiling faces, appealingly naked bodies, and the romping, tumbling, wriggling,
playful pictures which have made the imagery richer than ever before, are
presented within this limited social framework. In Western economies, baby-
hood is part of commodity culture. Even more alarmingly, babies themselves are
on the brink of becoming commodified. Medical intervention into the processes
of conception and birth means that, for a price, babies can be constructed out
of minute elements of genetic material almost as a digital image is put together
out of tiny, discrete elements. A computer-generated baby – self-absorbed in a
strange and ghostly dance – became a late-1990s hit on the television show Ally
McBeal. This uncanny and rather threatening fantasy, which haunted a working
woman who dreamt of motherhood but shied away from it, was in many
different ways a significant sign of the times.

Notes on Chapter 1

p.25 There’s no such thing as a baby: quoted from R.W. Winnicott (1964) The Child,
the Family and the Outside World, Harmondsworth: Pelican, p.88.
Anne Geddes: quoted from the documentary series Myths of Childhood,
Producer: Anna Grieve, Film Australia, 1997. In an interesting reflection on the
ways in which the circulation of pictures is controlled and licensed in the con-
temporary world, the Anne Geddes company would not give permission for
any of her greetings cards to be reproduced in this book. ‘Anne’s images can
only appear in material related to her, her work, and the Anne Geddes brand,’
wrote her New York representative.
p.26 Richard Dadd: (1817–86) painter of immensely detailed and complex fairy
scenes. See Susan P. Casteras (2002) ‘Winged fantasies: constructions of child-
hood, innocence, adolescence, and sexuality in Victorian fairy painting’, in
Marylin R. Brown (ed.) (2002) Picturing Children: Constructions of Childhood
between Rousseau and Freud, Aldershot: Ashgate.
Arthur Rackham: (1867–1939) watercolourist and illustrator, including J.M.
Barrie’s Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, 1906.
Goblin Market: published in 1863.
Mediterranean holiday: contemplating Della Robbia’s ‘divine babies’ which
decorate the fifteenth-century building which now houses the UNICEF Innocenti
Research Centre in Florence, Judith Ennew made a link to the history of
46 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

children’s rights. ‘It is believed that these babies gave Eglantyne Jebb the idea
for the emblem of the first five-point declaration on the rights of the child’, in
Bob Franklin (ed.) (2002) The New Handbook of Children’s Rights, London:
Routledge, p.388. See also Chapter 6.
‘ornamental nudity’: Phillipe Aries (1960/1973) Centuries of Childhood,
Harmondsworth: Penguin, p.42.
p.27 Sistine Madonna: Anne Higonnet (1998) Pictures of Innocence: the History and
Crisis of Ideal Childhood, London: Thames and Hudson, pp.44, 72.
howling mouths and scrunched-up eyes: Oscar Rejlander’s photograph of a
crying infant, nicknamed ‘Ginx’s baby’, sold sixty thousand prints and a
quarter of a million photographic cards. Lindsay Smith (1998) The Politics of
Focus: Women, Children and Nineteenth Century Photography, Manchester:
Manchester University Press, pp.86–87. See also Higonnet (1998) above,
especially Chapter 3.
Douglas Tempest: designed the ‘Kiddy’ series of comic postcards for Bamforth
and Co. during the 1920s. The company was founded in 1870, the same year that
the postcard was launched, and became notorious for its saucy seaside jokes.
kewpie: Caroline G. Goodfellow (1998) Dolls, Princes Risborough, Bucking-
hamshire: Shire Publications, p.17. Caroline Goodfellow is the curator of dolls
and toys at the Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood.
photography both as a record and a campaigning tool: Val Williams (1986) dis-
cusses the work of photographer and Suffragette organiser Nora Smyth in Women
Photographers: the Other Observers 1900 to the Present, London: Virago, pp.40–46.
campaigns around mother and infant welfare: on concerns with infant welfare
in the early part of the twentieth century see Anna Davin’s classic article
‘Imperialism and motherhood’, History Workshop Journal, Vol.5, 1978, pp.9–65.
p.28 Lennart Nilsson’s: in Pregnant Pictures, London: Routledge, 2000, Sandra Matthews
and Laura Wexler discuss the breakthrough in foetal photography and the pro-
duction of the ‘foetal spaceman’ by Lennart Nilsson (A Child is Born, 1965), and
Geraldine Lux Flanagan (The First Nine Months of Life, 1962). They refer to
Rosalind Petchesky (1987) ‘Fetal images, the power of visual culture in the
politics of reproduction’, which discusses the apparent autonomy of the foetus
and the absence of the woman in these images, pp.11, 195–99.
p.29 Feminists of the 1970s: see Lynne Segal (1987) Is the Future Female? London:
Virago, for an account of the various trends of feminist thought, especially
pp.64 and 82–83 for the National Abortion Campaign and the Reproductive
Rights Campaign.
p.30 A foetus is a baby: leaflet published by the Society for the Protection of Unborn
Children, 1970s.
ProLife Alliance: the party political broadcast was transmitted in Wales, 6 June
2001. Daily Telegraph, 15 March 2002. ProLife Alliance: www.prolife.org.uk.
Aminatta Forma: (1998a) Mother of All Myths, London: Harper Collins. Also
‘Wanted the perfect baby’, Independent on Sunday, 19 July 1998b.
headlines predict a future: ‘Couples pick sex of baby for “ideal family”’, Daily
Telegraph, 5 July 2001; ‘End Test Tube Chaos. In Britain today it is harder to rent
a video than to get fertility treatment’, Daily Express, 22 January 1998. The
accompanying picture of a baby born to a 60-year-old mother was captioned
‘The innocent’.
p.31 One sperm bank in the US: quoted by Forma (1998b) above.
horror and disgust: Julia Kristeva (1982) Powers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection,
New York: Columbia University Press. Barbara Creed (1993) expanded on the
 THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS A BABY … OR IS THERE? 47

idea of women’s bodies as a source of horror in cinema in The Monstrous-

Feminine: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis, London: Routledge.
The Advertising Standards Authority received 800 complaints: the authority
upheld the complaints and the advertisers agreed to withdraw the poster.
For other comments on Benetton advertising see Les Back and Vibeke Quaade
(1993) ‘Dream Utopias, nightmare realities: imaging race and culture within
the world of Benetton advertising’, Third Text, no 22; Anandi Ramamurthy
(2nd edition 2000) ‘Constructions of illusion: photography and commo-
dity culture’, in Liz Wells (ed.) Photography: a Critical Introduction, London:
Routledge.
p.32 Grace Robertson: quoted by Val Williams (1986) in Women Photographers: the
Other Observers 1900 to the Present, London: Virago, p.138. Two of Robertson’s
birth photographs are reproduced on p.141 of that book.
Frederick Leboyer: (1974/1991) Birth Without Violence, London: Mandarin.
p.33 British peace movement: on the cover of Adam Suddaby (1983) The Nuclear War
Game, London: Longman.
monstrous machine: see Creed (1993) above, Chapter 4, on ‘Woman as monstrous
womb’.
another landmark documentary sequence: April 1976. I am grateful to Isobel
McKenzie-Price, editor in the 1990s, for allowing me to look through the col-
lection of back issues of Parents, and to Máire Messenger Davies for discussing
her time working on the magazine.
‘do-it-yourself ’ birth: ‘Birth without help’, May 1976; ‘Primitive childbirth’,
January 1977. It may be relevant to note that a United Nations Development
Programme report published in 2002 stated that death during childbirth in the
Arab countries is double that of Latin America and four times that of east Asia.
Ziauddin Sardar, ‘Self-assessment, warts and all’, New Statesman, 15 July 2002,
pp.15–16.
frank discussions of children’s sexuality: for example, ‘Talking to children
about sex’, May 1976; ‘The sensual child’, October 1976; ‘How a child develops
sexuality’ and ‘When girls masturbate’, November 1976.
p.34 sufficient realism: Isobel McKenzie-Price described her aim as steering a careful
course which avoids both pictures of children which are so perfect that parents
would be intimidated by them, and the sort of gritty realism that readers might
find depressing (interview with Patricia Holland, 1992).
I once risked the remark: Winnicott (1964) above.
Princess Anne: on the cover of Woman, 4 February 1978.
Esther Rantzen: on the cover of Woman’s Own, 29 April 1978.
p.35 Duchess of York: on the cover of Tatler, September 1990.
Mandy Smith: on the cover of Hello!, No 666, 12 June 2001.
Marina Warner: (1985) Alone of All Her Sex, London: Picador, p.183.
p.36 ‘completely preoccupied by him’: British Medical Association (1981) You and
Your Baby, p.5. Working as a journalist on baby magazines in the 1970s and
1980s, Máire Messenger Davies posed feeding one of her younger children with
her husband and the older children as part of the image. A male expert used
the picture in a lecture she attended and, without knowing she was its subject,
criticised the picture because it lacked that total absorption between mother
and infant (personal communication).
advertisement for Infa-care: baby bath, Woman’s Own, 1970s.
‘It is tedious to put’: Dr Shelagh Tyrrell (1976) You and Your Baby, London:
British Medical Association.
48 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

p.37 page three: Patricia Holland (1983) ‘The Page Three Girl speaks to women, too’,
Screen, 24, No3 May/June, reprinted in Paul Marris and Sue Thornham (eds)
(1996) Media Studies: a Reader, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Sheila Kitzinger: (1984) ‘The Psychology of Breastfeeding’, in Breastfeeding: a
Challenge for Midwives, Melbourne, International Council of Midwives. See
also her influential Experience of Childbirth, London: Gollancz, 1962.
Melanie Klein: Hannah Segal, ‘Introduction’ to Melanie Klein (1987) Love, Guilt
and Reparation and other Works 1921–1945, London: Virago, p.ix.
Three Essays on Sexuality: Sigmund Freud (1905), quoted by Adam Phillips
(1998) The Beast in the Nursery, London: Faber and Faber, p.45.
‘the wrong baby at my breast?’: Today, 11 August 1990.
Cow and Gate baby foods: advertisements by Abbott Mead. Campaign, 19 May
1989.
p.38 The bottle enters: see Christina Hardyment (1993) Dream Babies: Childcare from
Locke to Spock, London: Jonathan Cape, for a history of changing fashions in
relation to bottle and breast feeding.
World Health Organisation code: Rebecca Eliahoo, ‘WHO battles for breast
feeding’, Marketing Week, 6 March 1981.
boycotted the prestigious Perrier awards: Independent, 31 July 2001.
Health Visitor journal: quoted by Dinah Hall, ‘When milking profits breast isn’t
best’, Sunday Correspondent, 26 November 1989.
p.39 ‘a professor of obstetrics’: (1980) The Baby Book, London: Charing Cross
Hospital Obstetrics Department.
an influential book: John Kennell and Marshall Klaus (1976) Maternal Infant
Bonding, see Aminatta Forma ‘The baby bonding myth’, Independent on Sunday,
12 July 1998.
Penelope Leach: (1979) Baby and Child, Harmondsworth: Penguin, p.16. (Penelope
Leach was less emphatic in the 1997 update of the book.)
We ought to consider: research from the American journal Animal Behaviour, on
which facial characteristics of an infant were considered most attractive. ‘Nearly
700 psychology students were asked to rank a collection of drawings of babies
in order of “cuteness”.’ Quoted by Tony Osman, ‘Survival of the cutest’, Sunday
Times, 21 August 1977.
If the bond is loosened: ‘Image of Love’, Mother, No 496, July 1978.
Because the agency insists: Gail Kemp, ‘Shock tactics that produce great ads’,
Campaign, 25 March 1988.
p.40 Baby Bond: offered by the Tunbridge Wells Equitable Friendly Society as a tax-
free savings plan exclusively for children in 2001.
‘Some people are simply jealous’: Kevin Pilley, ‘Ad world gives birth to baby
power’, Campaign, 6 January 1990.
p.41 Truby King: quoted by Sheila Kitzinger, Independent ‘Magazine’, 5 May 1990. His
influential Feeding and Care of Baby was first published in New Zealand in 1913,
and in many subsequent editions up to 1945. See Hardyment (1993) above, p.176.
‘a cuddle isn’t enough’: advertisement for Dinnefords, 1974.
p.42 checklists of the expected stages: Hardyment (1993) above, p.162.
Time-Life: (1971) Photographing Children, Netherlands: Time-Life International,
pp.92–93.
if not always the stresses: Ben Summerskill, ‘Why new dads have all the fun’,
Observer, 2 June 2002 quotes a survey carried out by the Future Foundation
which tracked parents across Britain over 10 years. ‘Having children involves
much smaller changes for men, but they still derive almost all the benefits.’
 THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS A BABY … OR IS THERE? 49

p.43 Images of the foetus: Matthews and Wexler (2000) above, p.198.
as she leaves for the Gulf War: ‘Mum’s off to battle’, Today, 25 August 1990.
the kind of clothes she wore: ‘We started the company in 1983 when we couldn’t
find fashionable maternity wear in the shops’, wrote Vivienne Pringel and Judy
Lever of the Blooming Marvellous catalogue. www.bloomingmarvellous.co.uk.
‘You need the juggler’: the new editor Linda Kelsey wrote that she and the
Creative Director, Nadia Marks, ‘in common with many of She’s staff and
contributors, are nothing if not jugglers. And I believe we can make She even
more relevant as the magazine for women of the ’90s who juggle their lives’, She,
May 1990.
high-profile women writers: amongst them Rachel Cusk, A Life’s Work: on
Becoming a Mother, Fourth Estate, 2001; Naomi Woolf, Misconceptions, Chatto
and Windus, 2001.
Rosie Millard: Evening Standard, 19 June 2002.
p.44 Mother: finally closed in 1990.
‘L’enfant’: photograph: Spencer Rowell. Lindsay Baker, Guardian ‘Weekend’,
10 November 2001.
John Hegarty: quoted by Sarah Mower, ‘Macho man gives way to caring father’,
Independent, 6 November 1989.
p.45 Ally McBeal: the computer-generated dancing baby was developed by a com-
puter animation company, Kinetix, as a screensaver, then used in the popular
American TV drama series. Jonathan Margolis, ‘Dancing Baby’, Daily Mail
‘Night and Day’, 20 September 1998.
Brochure, 2001.
 2
Superbrats in the charmed
circle of home

PA R T 1 : C R E AT I N G A C H I L D - S H A P E D S PA C E

From cereal packets to jigsaws

Of those contemporary Western social institutions which place and contain

children, families are at once the most private and the most public. A family is
inward-turning, a site of closeness, intimacy and emotional intensity amongst
its members (hatred as well as love). But families are also shaped by legislation
and social policies (child benefit, inheritance laws, measures to encourage single
parents back to work, the availability of health care, to mention some diverse
examples). They are subject to ideological pressures from politicians and
reformers – especially those for whom ‘preserving family values’ is at the heart
of a moral society, and they are the focus of a barrage of persuasion, inform-
ation and seduction from advertisers of all sorts. The public imagery of children
in a family setting reflects these varied pressures, which sometimes pull together,
and sometimes act against each other. Meanwhile, the image of the child within
a family is pulled between willing acquiescence and rebellious independence.
The idea of what it means to be a ‘family’ is highly unstable. Families come
in many forms, including multi-generational families, single-parent families
(with parents of both sexes), gay parents, reconstructed families of divorced
couples (identified by a 2002 survey as ‘jigsaw families’), adoptive families and
many others. Even the biological limits have been challenged by the technologies
of conception discussed in Chapter 1. Nonetheless, the available imagery
continues to provide an immediately recognisable visual statement which has

51
52 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

remained remarkably consistent over the years. What has been described as the
‘cereal-packet family’ can be found in advice brochures, in advertisements for
cars, holidays and household goods, and in features on insurance and other
money matters. It appears in news items and illustrates magazine articles. It
sometimes shows a ‘real’ family, but the classic presentation tends to be posed by
a group of models, each of whom can be carefully selected to fit the pattern. In
this image a small group of people of assorted ages and genders touch and
clutch each other, sometimes smiling at each other, sometimes at the camera.
Presented as a single unit, they are linked together by glance or touch. Such
pictures are like diagrams, and may indeed be simplified to a line-drawing or a
silhouette. They indicate possible relationships between basic family positions,
with children at their centre (see pages 58 and 62).
A pared-down version of this image contains four carefully differentiated
positions. Alignments tend to be within the genders. Older boys line up with the
man; younger children, girls and babies with the woman, so that the male half
of the image tends to be larger than the female, and the oedipal implications of
cross-gender relations are suppressed. Whether the participants are ‘real’ families
or models, there is always a sense of staging or self-conscious re-enactment.
Each individual performs an allocated role, and it is essential to the singularity
of the unit that each member plays a different role. Sexes and ages are clearly
differentiated by clothing, length of hair and sometimes props (the girl clutches
a doll, the boy has a ball tucked under his arm). Examples which might spoil the
map or add ambiguity – such as teenagers who may be taller than their parents
– tend to be excluded, so that the visual differences in themselves produce the
expected relations of power and subordination. Frequently, the hands of the adults
touch and restrain the children, who offer no resistance to their positioning. In
a classic version of this image, each person directs their separate smile at the
viewer, as if admiring their own reflection in a mirror or creating a picture
for a notional family album (see page 58). The smiles confirm the group as a
centre of pleasure which, it seems, is contingent not on personal character or
behaviour, but on the satisfactory composition of the family itself. The relaxed
expressions demonstrate that these people want to be photographed in this way,
and to be recorded in precisely this relation to each of the others. This is an
image of harmony in which the children’s acquiescence is pivotal. It is only when
this presentation is read against the full range of imagery that a shadow of doubt
is thrown across their willing acceptance.
The power of such an image lies in its ability to call up an abstract concept
of ‘family’, even though social and historical research, as well as commonsense
observation, has shown such an ideal to be rare in everyday living. Its simplified
 S U P E R B R AT S I N T H E C H A R M E D C I R C L E O F H O M E 53

and satisfactory presentation is a shorthand convenience, trailing a cluster of

ideas which determine what we say before we begin to say it. This kind of family
arranged in this way continues to dominate attempts to think of alternatives.
The image invites viewers to become complicit in its definitions and to bring
their own personal meanings to it. We may not be able to name the members of
the group, but can instantly label them as Father, Mother, Son and Daughter.
Making such a recognition is more than giving consent to a set of social
arrangements; it means taking an active part in renewing a particular, limited,
concept of ‘family’. The image becomes not just a picture of an ideal family, but
the very meaning of ‘family’ itself. Its power persists despite its familiar con-
struction as an image, despite the visibility of performance, and despite the fact
that we know perfectly well that the individuals in the pictures could easily be a
‘jigsaw’ family or an unrelated group of models. Yet how could any viewer deny
the appeal of those confident smiles? They defy us to spoil their enjoyment.
They challenge us to share their happiness and to echo their visible security
within our own, most probably less than perfect, group.
The configuration has withstood time. It stands as a quick reference for
politicians of both parties and for all who argue for a ‘return’ to family values.
But in the face of multiple critiques, presentations have become more fluid in
their arrangement and less assertive. In recent years it occasionally falls to the
man to hold the baby; older generations may be introduced and there may be a
varying number of children. Nevertheless, at the heart of this image remains a
child-shaped space. A child creates a ‘family’, and it falls to the pictured children
to bring about the warmth and mutual pleasures the imagery seeks to evoke. We
can trace several influences on this resonant image, each of which creates a space
for children to occupy within the family grouping. In each of them the image of
a child is offered as a secure value, and in each of them a nostalgic trace of
remembered childhood is filtered through the image. We will consider family
snaps, the evocation of tradition, and the concept of home.

Family snaps

The classic family image has a specific and emotive source. It refers directly to
those valued collections of photographs – including holiday snapshots, studio
portraits, wedding pictures and records of baby’s first year – which sustain a
bond even between relatives who are not on speaking terms. Family pictures are
part of the ritual of family life, and contribute to a sense of continuity and
personal identity. They are collected and preserved to revive warm memories
54 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

about a past that is part reality, part fantasy. They are, above all, desired pictures,
which someone has chosen to make and to preserve, and in which the subjects
present themselves as they want to be seen.
Family pictures gain their power because they are stitched into the fabric of
personal history. Leafing through a collection of snapshots, whether it is this
year’s full gloss and saturated colour or the fading black-and-white of earlier
decades, we can recall pleasures we have lived, people we have loved and, most
poignantly of all, our earlier selves. Family pictures are intensely private, which
means that other people’s pictures seem thin and insignificant. Who is this
woman standing by the Eiffel Tower in 1950s dress? She could be one of many
hundreds of mothers, wives, girlfriends who posed in just this way. Who are
these children whose features you can hardly discern, building sandcastles in a
tiny black-and-white picture with crinkled edges? Who cares? The children of the
woman on holiday in France and the adults who were once those children on
the beach – they care. These pictures depend for their meaning on recognition
from those who know, or know of, their subjects. And they are used in complex
ways. Enjoying them or merely sorting them through may be a social activity or
an intensely private one. It may involve reconstructing memory or arriving at
new understandings. It can cement or question relationships, and it can play an
important role in confirming or re-thinking personal identity. Over its hundred-
odd-year history, Kodak has encouraged millions of home photographers to
domesticate their imaginations and use their frozen memories to reaffirm a family
setting. Cameras have become increasingly cheap, easy to use and a regular part
of holiday baggage. High-speed film or digital disc gives reliable results in rich
and gratifying colour. The technology of domestic photography – a medium
lens, automatic focus – itself disposes users to produce pictures that will suit the
intimate family group. In this context, childhood is always personal.
When a public image, such as an advertisement, uses the snapshot style, it
borrows the warmth that belongs to familiar faces. It invites its viewers to act
as if they were looking at their own family pictures, to undertake the same
imaginative work and to invest these anonymous public figures with something of
the same emotional charge. In a reciprocal move, personal pictures are enhanced
by public imagery, since advertisements, particularly those for photographic
products, offer a repertoire of possible images for family use, and situations
which may be staged in order to be photographed, in what Jo Spence described
as ‘precious moments’. Jennifer Ransome Carter, advertising photographer for
Kodak between 1970 and 1984, says she ‘tried to get pictures that were as close
as possible to those that people would have liked to take for themselves’. She
described them as the ‘supersnap in Kodaland’.
 S U P E R B R AT S I N T H E C H A R M E D C I R C L E O F H O M E 55

Despite the interplay between them, private pictures remain radically different
from public imagery. As usual, the difference depends on use and context, rather
than style and content. Private pictures notoriously recall complex emotions,
and the individuals in a family photograph may have memories which are
utterly at odds with each other. Many writers have recalled the trauma behind
apparently cheerful pictures of themselves as children. In private imagery a picture
is never quite what it seems. Its depths can only be explored with knowledge
brought to the picture from unrecorded events beyond the frame. Commercial
pictures, on the other hand, make instant sense. After all, if the supersnap is not
exactly what it seems, its makers have wasted their time and money. Such
pictures are their surface. There is nothing more to them; nothing beyond the
frame but the paraphernalia of a professional shoot. We should understand
them by looking for their wider rather than their deeper meanings. They make
best sense when they are explored horizontally within the broad network of
contemporary media. Private imagery remains expressive imagery, only fully
revealing itself to those who are part of its own private circle. Public imagery
greedily appropriates those expressive values, but the richness of its promises
can never be fulfilled.

Inheritance, biology and the invention of tradition

Celebrity photography transforms family imagery for a wider audience. Pictures

of the children of the famous are a staple of the tabloid press and consumer
magazines, recycling private lives for public consumption. The motherhood and
sexuality of Princess Diana obsessed the public for more than a decade, and the
royal soap opera continues to absorb the nation as new generations grow up in
the public eye. These most privileged of children and their mothers, fathers,
grandmothers, aunts and uncles are both very special and reassuringly ordinary.
The fascination is not new. Although Queen Victoria at first thought that a
photograph of her children playing at dressing up taken by Roger Fenton in 1854
was too private to be published, photographs of the Royals and their families
were soon widely circulated in Victorian Britain. Eric Hobsbawm has described
the ways in which a variety of nineteenth-century institutions created an instant
history for themselves by reviving or inventing traditions which would give
them a sense of ancient legitimacy. The monarchy was amongst them. But
Victoria and Albert’s ‘traditions’ were not only ceremonial. They established a
royal family, which effectively reflected the new middle-class domestic ideal and
helped transform celebrations such as Christmas into domestic affairs.
56 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

A sense of continuity and stability is created by families whose apparent

cohesion over the generations is ensured by their wealth and status. It continues
to underpin one contemporary concept of ‘family’ and to imply a special
responsibility for the children who are its inheritors. The aristocratic family,
with its ancestral portraits, family trees and ownership of stately homes, still
appears in popular discourse as a culturally valued protector of history and
tradition. A colourful medieval vision of tapestry and heraldic design trails
behind it a petty snobbery that can be handily commodified. For a few pounds
anyone can trace back their surname or equip themselves with a coat of arms or
a parchment scroll as proof of antiquity. A renewed interest in family history,
helped by links and exchanges over the Internet, has fuelled this backward
glance and linked it to a sense of inheritance and continuity previously thought
to be the province of the upper class alone. Intriguing sepia photographs,
crumbling at the edges, may signify generational dignity. In this image which
looks to the past, the child becomes the focus of a particular vision of the future;
not as representing the human race as a whole, but representing the family as a
limited and competitive unit.
Since the 1980s home-ownership boom, the idea of inheritance has dev-
eloped a different face. Increasing numbers of ordinary people in Britain have
inherited wealth from their parents – if only in the form of a 1930s semi or a
mortgaged ex-council house. A new range of images place children as potential
inheritors, and the central figure is, once more, that of the father, as it is he who
is expected to pass on his name and his wealth. Advertisements for insurance
and investment plans show fathers enjoying the company of attractive and
healthy children and urge them to protect the future of ‘their’ family.
The theme of material inheritance overlaps with that of biological inheritance.
An awareness of tradition and social continuity over the generations is par-
alleled by an acute anxiety over biological origins. In both cases the ‘natural’
father appears all-important. The 1975 Children Act gave adopted children the
right to seek their ‘real’ identity, and since the late 1980s a regular theme in the
popular discourse around childhood has involved a search for biological roots.
The discovery that a ‘real’ father was an anonymous sperm donor has been seen as
deeply traumatic. Artificial insemination by donor (AID) was described in the
Sunday Times as ‘sowing the seeds of despair’. Within these debates, childhood
is deeply embedded in family structures and has come to stand for forms of
continuity which reach beyond personal mortality.
 S U P E R B R AT S I N T H E C H A R M E D C I R C L E O F H O M E 57

Home: precious moments behind the laurel hedge

The concept of childhood as a time of innocence developed during the nine-

teenth century in parallel with the notion of domesticity and the creation of the
‘home’ as a centre of privacy, order, morality and security. Childhood came to be
seen as a stage of life with special needs and values, and the space within which
those values could best be secured seemed to be the domestic environment –
ultimately one exclusive to a two generation, structured nuclear family, as reflected
in the key image. ‘Home’ appeared as a refuge from the world of commerce and
work, and childhood, with its special qualities of warmth and spontaneity,
enhanced the sense of well-being found within its walls. The image of ‘home’
was epitomised by the family gathered around the hearth.
By the mid-nineteenth century the ‘respectable’ middle classes were moving
away from the chaos and corruption of the urban centres and developing their
private lives protected by high laurel hedges in the outlying parts of the cities.
As childhood was increasingly required to be an age of innocence, the suburb
became a place where girls, especially, could be protected. The separation between
economic activity and domesticity was a supremely modern development, yet
the imagery that accompanied it harked back to a nostalgic, pre-modern, pre-
industrial past. Nostalgia is intimately connected with the idea of home and
with one’s own lost past. Bryan Turner describes it as a ‘sense of historical
decline and loss, involving a departure from some golden age of “homefulness”’.
The desire to recreate a ‘golden age’ is reflected in the architectural design of
many English suburbs as a fantasised medieval idyll became an aspiration for
philanthropists, city planners and municipal authorities in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. The Cadbury family at Bournville near Birmingham
and the Lever family at Port Sunlight near Liverpool built model villages for
their workers, designed to be more healthy and child-friendly than the Dickensian
slums and overcrowded back streets which provided the living conditions for
most of the nineteenth-century working class (and, incidentally, to ensure a
more satisfied and docile work-force). Their timbered cottages, rustic bridges
and picturesque village greens were a three-dimensional, fully inhabitable
complement to the popular drawings of children dancing and playing in a rural
setting drawn by Kate Greenaway in the same period. This was the age of a new
cult of childhood, of Peter Pan and Christopher Robin, reassuring, nostalgic, and
relishing kitsch.
I want to argue that this nostalgic formation was not merely backward-
looking, but a dynamic force, since it deployed a set of concepts that had some
purchase on social necessity. It was clear that the rural image could express
58 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

Courtesy of Daily Mail.

aspiration as well as conservatism, social aspiration as well as relaxation. The
sensibilities it brought with it were an important strand in changing attitudes
which eventually achieved a vast improvement in the experience of most working-
class children. By the 1930s, the new suburbs for the rising lower-middle classes
incorporated similar ideals. (Publicity for the Boots estate at Hayes in Kent,
where I was brought up, described itself as housing of which ‘thousands had
only dreamed’.) This child-friendly image was the antithesis of the 1960s estates
and tower blocks built in a forward-looking modernist style. They were intended
to reflect functionality and practicality, but they came to be seen as the harbourers
of delinquency, violence and uncared-for children; places from which there was no
escape and no upward mobility. The twenty-first-century imagery of childhood
has done its best to shake itself free from the chocolate-box legacy, but the
yearning for the countryside as a natural place for children remains in frequent
visual references to simpler, more rural times and in arguments that children
need fresh air and green spaces. The pre-industrial image still defines the dream
home. An advertisement for Hovis bread in 1984, bathed in a nostalgic sepia
tone showed a family at tea and claimed ‘it’s the little things that make it home’.
 S U P E R B R AT S I N T H E C H A R M E D C I R C L E O F H O M E 59

Creating a sense of a home-centred family, one set of advertisements uses a

constructed documentary style as if to capture family groups absorbed in their
daily lives. Making a snapshot is a collective activity with collaborative interaction
between the person taking the picture and those who are in it; making a docu-
mentary picture usually means photographing others without their knowledge.
A snapshot is intended to remind its viewers of events and people they know; a
documentary usually offers information about those who are unknown. The
snapshot depends on our memory; the documentary claims to be complete in
itself. It seeks out the unguarded moment, peers into forbidden places and does
not hesitate to uncover truths the participants may prefer to conceal. Docu-
mentary photography prefers harsh realism. But when advertising presentations
imitate the documentary mode, far from revealing scandal and chaos behind the
family image, they show us – perfection. Anne McLintock has pointed out that
nineteenth-century advertising developed in parallel with the idea of private
domesticity, and was already bringing the ‘intimate signs of domesticity (children
bathing, men shaving, women laced into corsets, maids delivering nightcaps)
into the public realm’. By the late twentieth century this was being done by
advertisers to glimpse happiness, laughter and relaxation, with the coherence of
the family secured by the joyful presence of the children. Presentations show
affluence and abundance either in well-furnished homes or in some family
playground – a beach, a country lane or a holiday trip. The car is a recurring
feature, a sort of mobile home which transports the family between its two
locations. The wholeness of the group is confirmed by the presence of all the
members – often a dog too – and gilded by a ubiquitous family smile. No
one withholds their commitment nor the intensity of their enjoyment. An
advertisement for Pakistan International Airlines shows a (white) family
picnicking on an archetypal village green beside a cricket match. ‘You know the
feeling,’ it reminded its viewers. ‘It’s a warm smile. A relaxed atmosphere. A lot
of caring. You can be yourself.’ The codes of documentary naturalism mean that
people have their backs to the camera, are frozen in the middle of activity or
appear awkward or ungainly, giving a particular sense of authenticity. On display
is that moment of perfect satisfaction we feared we could never attain.
A harmonious image of domestic life takes many seductive forms. It tends to
involve children well below adolescence, and to express the ‘simplicity, personal
authenticity and emotional spontaneity’ on which nostalgia feeds. As we will see,
much of the other available imagery of the family works to undermine such
blissful harmony. Yet the disturbances which threaten from within – the fear of
violence, of inappropriate sexuality, of children who are uncontrollable, sullen or
destructive, or who simply do not fit the picture of what children ‘should’ be like
60 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

– all these possibilities leave traces which contribute in a paradoxical way to the
pleasure of presentations designed, above all, to please. Their very distance from
lived experience enhances their comfort and reassurance.

Breaking the image: men and money

However, looked at another way, the perfection of the family image holds the
seeds of its own destruction. The first step in the construction of the key image
of a ‘family’ is when the father invades the imagery of babyhood, so that the
inward-turned oval of mother and baby becomes a sharper triangle, with the
man at its peak. In one powerful contemporary theme, the man attempts to
imitate the perfection of the nursing couple. (Photographs of Prime Minister
Tony Blair with his fourth child Leo were described as ‘sultry’, his vulnerability
visible, while his wife, barrister Cherie Booth, greeted the camera with make-up
in place and a practised smile; television presenters Davina McCall and Matthew
Robertson posed for their baby picture with Matthew bare-chested, cradling the
baby, while Davina is fully clothed. Psychologist Andrew G. Marshall, writing in
the Daily Mail, described this picture as ‘extraordinary’.) But the roles can never
be completely reversed, despite the softening of the masculine persona. All the
other photographs analysed by Marshall in the Daily Mail spread showed the
man as an admiring and protective third party – and even Davina leans her head
on Matthew’s shoulder, so that her head is lower than his, and the outlined shape
within the frame conforms to the new, three-point harmony.
When the family achieves the key image discussed at the beginning of this
chapter, it has developed beyond this baby-centred triangle, to include four
positions – two parents and two young children. But this larger group still retains
a triangular shape with the man at its apex. In the classic presentation, his
encircling arms mark its boundaries and separate it from the outside world. The
direction of the touch is from him, towards them. He is the only one who remains
unenclosed, so that his body marks the transition between an exterior, public
world and the interior, private one associated with the concept of ‘home’. He
asserts his power to define a space and to limit the ways in which others may be
present in it. He draws from its members their individual expressions of pleasure
and affirmation. His touch confirms the physicality of their pleasure but prevents
the uncontrollable chaos of the erotic from emerging. He literally holds the group
in place. As well as being pictures of a family, the classic image pictures a man.
They reflect his fantasy. (‘Now all you need is wife and kids’, an advertisement in
a lifestyle supplement tells a man looking longingly at a good-sized Volvo.) Yet,
 S U P E R B R AT S I N T H E C H A R M E D C I R C L E O F H O M E 61

paradoxically, this defining position allows the man to absent himself from the
group and become invisible. He can be outside the picture and yet retain control
when it is he who, as seems so natural, ‘takes’ the snap. A family picture may be a
proud image of his possessions, his people. Within the frame he encloses the
family with his arms, but when he is outside it, he claims the right to create the
frame itself and to enclose the family members with his directing eye.
There is another, more practical, reason for his reduction in visibility. His
absence may be necessary to achieve the all-important presence of the consumer
goods he has provided. An advertisement for de Beers from the 1970s could
hardly put it more clearly. A family trio are sitting on a lawn. The father is
reclining, his back to the viewer, his visible status diminished. The text declares,
‘He’d been in Bombay on her birthday. In Istanbul on his daughter’s first day at
school. And in Tokyo on their wedding anniversary. When he got back from his
last trip he gave her a diamond eternity ring. “I know I’m a rotten letter writer,”
he said, “but I’m always thinking about you”.’ Routine departures for a daily job
can be compensated for with routine goods, but an extreme absence in Tokyo or
Bombay requires something more dramatic. In more recent years, such a history
of absence is at odds with the image of the new family man. But within the
narratives of perfection, the father’s position remains one that cannot be delegated
(to another person), but must be replaced, either symbolically (a diamond ring
might just do) or effectively. Insurance advertisements frequently remind a man
that his most satisfactory replacement is money. In the symbolic system evoked
by commercial imagery, the power of the father and the power of money are
frequently interchangeable.
Thus, a closer look at the imagery makes it clear that even the apparently
perfect family group is not so perfect after all. It creates a lack by its very
existence. ‘Families need…’ is a recurring phrase in the language of advertising.
To keep the smiles in place, families need money and they need goods – houses
and mortgages, holidays, furniture, whiteware and kitchen utensils, cars, clothes
and toys for the children. To achieve these necessities, we have seen how the
image will need to be broken by the absence of an adult – most often the father.
But the whole family image may be undermined when it is not sustained by
the necessary funds. This is strikingly demonstrated by two presentations from
the late 1970s – a leaflet advertising Barclays’ insurance and one issued by
the Department of Health and Social Security to publicise Family Income
Supplement. In the Barclays’ presentation a photograph in saturated colour
reveals the detail of the fashionable clothes worn by all four family members.
Behind them is a comfortable home with creepers over the porch. They pose
beside an expensive car into which they are about to load a picnic basket and
62 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

golfing clubs. The point is made to excess. They are well supplied with everything
– home, car, food, clothes and leisure equipment. By contrast the family who
need to draw Family Income Supplement is virtually simplified out of existence.
The family members pictured on the leaflet are nothing but empty shapes. Not
only are there no smiles, there are no faces. The four family positions of the
diagrammatic key image are present, but they are represented by mere geometric
shapes. The figures have triangular bodies, like a child’s drawing, and circles for
heads. They have no features, no possessions and no individuality.
The difference in the two presentations reflects the difference in the funds
available to produce a costly advertising image and a welfare leaflet. Even so, this
bizarre contrast points to the potential instability in the image of the apparently
perfect family group. A stark distinction between consumer plenitude and welfare
austerity has, if anything, increased over the years as available imagery finds
new ways of celebrating family pleasure based almost exclusively on domestic
consumerism. Advertising imagery has no space for families which fail, and little
space for those which do not conform. The pleasure of consumption within
the family and the home is always tempered by the fear of losing face – like those

Insurance Services, mid-1970s. ys

lement, November 1978. Leaflet for Barcla
Leaflet for DHSS Family Income Supp
 S U P E R B R AT S I N T H E C H A R M E D C I R C L E O F H O M E 63

who live on Family Income Supplement and its contemporary equivalents.

The absence of an image of civic well-being, outside the operations of the
market, means that poorer families have become more difficult to imagine in
a positive light.

New realism: problem families and family problems

The richness and diversity of family structures in contemporary Britain is well

documented, and many photographers have set out to record that diversity.
Richard and Sally Greenhill pictured every mundane detail of their own family
life from the birth of their children in the early 1970s; Brenda Prince photo-
graphed lesbian mothers and their children in the 1980s; Donovan Wylie
documented a community of travellers in the 1990s – to mention only a few
whose work have featured children’s family lives. Such work is occasionally
featured in the broadsheet press, whose project includes reflecting the diversity
of society to itself; it appears in photographic books and catalogues and is
increasingly available online. Even so, the key image continues to hover in the
background as an ever-present undertow to documentary realism. It remains
available for those who have sought to affirm ‘traditional’ family values in
the face of a complex reality. While historical and sociological investigations
demonstrate the multitude of different ways in which adults and children have
long coped with the contingencies of life, news stories, in thrall to the dominant
image, are all too eager to describe diversity as breakdown and the variety of
possible family groupings as perversely inappropriate. (‘Lesbians stole my baby
girl’ is the sort of headline relished by the Sun).
However, there is a recent self-consciousness in image-making which expresses
a deep concern about family life – not only ‘abnormal’ families but also the
most conventional. Photographs in the new realist mode illustrate articles on
the troubled relation between parents and children, uncertainty about parental
discipline and control, and efforts to protect ‘childhood’ against the pressures of
modern life. A burgeoning genre of domestic documentary sets out to expose
the cracks in the perfect surface and to pull into public view emotions that have
been kept firmly behind the metaphorical laurel hedge which separates family
life from the rest of the world. By seeking out the awkward glance, the scowl
on the face of the truculent child, the uncontrollable tantrum, this genre of
documentary photography reminds viewers of the difficult underside of family
relationships – without pushing the debate over the edge and into the realm of
abuse and family collapse. In contrast to those advertisements which use a
64 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

constructed documentary style, the intention here is to peel away the smooth-
ness of the ideal image. It is part of a wider discourse on family problems – an
uneasy undertow in all family pictures – which includes a fear of troublesome
children and of parents who can’t cope, and deal with negotiations over the
balance of power within families. In this set of images, children’s energy may
become uncontrollability which breaks rather than confirms family cohesion.
The sober moralism of classic documentary observation is continuously
challenged within a visual regime powerfully influenced by advertising and fashion
styles. A more self-conscious documentary mode has taken these influences on
board and has sought to create a heightened, post-modern neo-realism, usually
in colour, in which patronising morality is thrown aside and ‘dysfunctional’
families play a more active role in creating their own image. Such pictures do
indeed seek out disorderly homes, messy clothing and crying children, but they
may potentially deal with stresses and conflicts in a more indulgent way. Jillian
Edelstein’s photographs of single parents for Yvonne Richards’s article ‘Holding
the baby’ use collaboration and performance as the participants confront the
camera with a refusal to be pigeon-holed or pitied.

PA R T 2 : T H E C O N S U M I N G C H I L D

Euphoric values

Within the family context, children are largely defined by negative values. They
do not do productive work; they have no responsibility and they are dependent
on adults. The imagery of children together with their parents largely works
to reinforce these prohibitions. In the ideal family image, children retain their
childishness. Their tendency to excess, their instability and their vulnerability
reassuringly justify the protective shell of the nuclear family. However, negative
definitions are counterbalanced by the positive pleasures of childhood play.
Play is the opposite of work; it turns irresponsibility into pleasure; and it is
legitimised by childish dependence. Play is an expression of euphoric values – of
freedom, authenticity, purposelessness, creativity, and above all of enjoyment and
fun. These, too, are qualities that are seen as essential to children’s childhood.
During the twentieth century, as children’s play became increasingly domesticated,
the image of playful activity became a resonant public image.
The values of play are at the heart of family life and of contemporary
constructions of childishness, yet they bring their own subversive influence.
Playfulness and expressiveness all too easily lead to uncontrollable children,
 S U P E R B R AT S I N T H E C H A R M E D C I R C L E O F H O M E 65

Catalogue, 2002.

while hedonistic values may well disrupt socially cohesive family structures.
Play is licensed within the family but is constantly pushing at the edges of the
tolerable and threatening to shatter the harmony. ‘The arrival of a child can turn
your once beautiful house into a playground’ was the heading of an article in the
Guardian accompanied by a very blurry picture of a child leaping on a bouncy
castle. Uncontained play can all too easily topple into chaos, and ruin more than
your once beautiful house.
In recent years children’s actual mobility has been increasingly limited for fear
of dangers outside the home, yet bodily freedom and movement has become
essential to the playful image. Separated from their family context, pictured
children romp through the advertisements, catalogues and fashion features of
the new century, often loosely arranged against neutral backgrounds. No fake
documentary realism here, just an intensity of movement condensed into small,
energetic bodies. As expenditure on children has increased, so has the frenzy of the
image. Play is presented as an autonomous value, as the ultimate justification for
the sustenance of the family itself. Playing with the children is now an important
part of what adults – aunts, uncles, grandparents and friends as well as parents
66 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

– do with their leisure time. It remains an apparent guarantor of authenticity,

and of values which adults envy and greedily want to reclaim for themselves.
But playful values are posing another challenge to family self-sufficiency,
for these mobile childish bodies have become a sign of political and economic
change. Children are now at the cutting edge of market expansion, heralding
a social regime which pays less respect to traditional structures. At the end of
the nineteenth century, children were excluded from economic activity when
they were forbidden to engage in paid employment. By the end of the twentieth,
they have decisively re-entered the economy in their role as consumers, and
those precious qualities which characterise protected childhood have been re-
appropriated for economic use. The antithesis between childhood and economy
has been thrown into confusion; play has been transformed into a form of
consumption. In the promotional image, children appear to have leapt beyond
familial constraints. Surrounded by prices and product information, the context
of this playful child appears to be provided by commerce alone. The parents
or other adults who are expected to pay for the goods are invisible, taken
for granted, replaced by financial symbols. In this commercial image, where
euphoric values have a practical significance, it is easy to overlook the financial
exchange which makes such exuberant playfulness possible.

Becoming a market segment

‘Children’s pocket money is much in demand,’ the advertisers’ journal Campaign

told those of its readers who were interested in the bubble gum and cheap con-
fectionery market. Items which stretch beyond the pocket money level must
appeal to both children and to the adults who pay out on their behalf. This
means that goods must convey something of the way children see themselves
and something of the way parents see them. There remains a striking difference
between the fangs, blood, skulls and lavatorial humour of items designed for
children to buy, and the educational toys and tasteful clothing targeted at their
parents. As Stephen Kline wrote,

The merchants and marketers of children’s goods have always paid more diligent
attention than educationists to children’s active imaginations and incidental cultural
interests. These researchers don’t bother to observe comatose children in the
classroom being battered with literacy; they study them at play, at home watching
television or in groups in the streets and shops. They have talked to kids about why
they like playing Nintendo or trading sports cards…Marketing’s ethnography of
childhood has validated children’s emotional and fantasy experience, which the
educational researchers have by and large avoided and derided.
 S U P E R B R AT S I N T H E C H A R M E D C I R C L E O F H O M E 67

In 1989 the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents estimated that each of
Britain’s ten million children under 14 receives on average 20 new toys each year.
The Mail on Sunday displayed under-fives surrounded by their possessions –
toys totalling between £1000 and £2000 in value when new. In 1999 it was
estimated that the average child received presents totalling £250 at Christmas.
Equipment for children – to call many of these sophisticated objects ‘toys’
seems, in itself, rather archaic – is more complex and more varied than ever
before. Famous toy shops, such as Hamleys in London, and big chains such as
Toys R Us, are stacked with everything from traditional dolls to electronic
equipment and the latest fad to sweep the playgrounds. In the run-up to
Christmas 1994, such was the competition for Power Rangers dolls that there
were all-night queues outside Hamleys. The shop rationed its sales to one per
customer and fathers came to blows as supplies ran out. In 1997 Teletubbies
topped the sales, and in 2001 the UK Toy and Game Council named Nintendo’s
Game Boy Advance, closely followed by Lego’s Harry Potter. Children pressurise
their parents to buy the essential toy of the year, and advertisers exploit that
‘pester power’. ‘Kids…are marvellous manipulators of parental pockets’, wrote a
reporter for the television trade magazine Broadcast, ‘a fact that is becoming
increasingly clear to the television industry’.
The increasing consumer sophistication of children has been deplored as a
loss of innocence. Children are said to be, in the title of a television programme,
‘getting older younger’. Indeed, consumerism has, in the view of many critics,
brought about the death of childhood itself. However, although they may be
acquiring the sophisticated adult skills of consumer choice, the commodities
targeted at them go directly for childish tastes. Children’s preferences are intensively
researched, through focus groups, interviews and observation in order to produce
precisely that product which will tempt and gratify them.
The marketers didn’t have to assume that children’s day dreams, hero worship,
absurdist humour and keen sense of group identity were meaningless distractions or
artefacts of immaturity. Rather they recognised that these attributes were the deep
roots of children’s culture, which could be employed as effective tools for communi-
cating with them. Identifying the basis of children’s daily experience provided the
means of transforming them into a market segment.

As children change their social positioning, with their new economic importance,
new child-shaped spaces have developed – including the toy shop, with its
towering piles of goods on offer, and the children’s bedroom, which is now not
simply a place to sleep but an amply provided play environment. The catalogues
of Argos and Toys R Us, advertisements and parents’ magazines illustrate children’s
rooms in which youngsters are surrounded by their possessions. In contrast
to the image of euphoric activity, this displays calm satisfaction, in which the
68 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

presence of the children is subordinated to that of the goods on display. It seems

that the limits of childish identity are no longer defined by their physical bodies,
but are dispersed into those childish objects which surround them from the
youngest age. Soft building blocks, toy trucks, a whole menagerie of anthropo-
morphised animals, activity centres, Lego, Fisher Price plastic learning toys,
curtains and duvet covers illustrated with popular characters, mobiles hanging
from the ceiling, posters on the walls – contemporary children in their homes
have access to a world peculiar to them. In its own way it reflects the outside
world, but it is more colourful, miniaturised, sanitised and fantasised. Children’s
presence and identity have become externalised into a cast of characters which
reflect childish qualities. Some have long histories, such as Pooh Bear, Noddy,
Postman Pat and Barbie (who recently celebrated her fortieth birthday); others
are more recent and may be shortlived – Tweenies, Teletubbies, Power Rangers,
He-men, Spice Girls, Bob the Builder.
Contemporary consumer capitalism prioritises economic values above all
others. Speaking directly to children, its cultural images of childhood may be in
tune with family structures or may bypass them altogether – bypassing at the
same time traditional morality and values. Underlying the image of the child
surrounded by possessions is an intense negotiation between the moral limits of
childhood, painfully established over the nineteenth century, and a much newer
set of economic constraints. Children’s inability to defer gratification is welcome
to the marketers, but it threatens their parents’ purses and often their parents’
sense of the proper limits to consumption. However, by the beginning of the
new century, well-provided pre-teens – already owners of personal stereos,
Playstations and television sets as well as their well-stocked and constantly
renewed wardrobes – are in training to be a new kind of adult. As children
negotiate their tastes with the parents who buy for them, it is the parents who
are learning to defer to children’s wishes, recognising in them an accession to
adulthood in a market-orientated world (even when the appeal to buy is disguised
as ‘educational’). The image of children’s euphoria is working to harness children’s
joys and sorrows to their new role as discriminating consumers. Is this an exploit-
ation of childhood, as some commentators argue, or is it the triumph of those
libidinous values that, until now, children have been required to express on
behalf of us all? Within these marketing presentations, if not in real life,
children’s desires are always satisfied.
 S U P E R B R AT S I N T H E C H A R M E D C I R C L E O F H O M E 69

The electronic future

In the huge imbalance of power between adults and children, new opportunities
for adult fantasy are continuously presenting themselves, and the notion of
children’s special affinity with new media is the most recent. Online, children
may be taken out of their bodies even more effectively. While sitting still, rather
than physically running and jumping, they can take part in intricate virtual
acrobatics. The advertisers’ journal Campaign wrote of a ‘Subclub site’ aimed
at 7–15-year-olds in which each child gains an avatar, a virtual personality, and
can choose their own character. Significantly, the site includes ‘shopping’ and
‘cashpoint’ as well as ‘joyzone’ and ‘my place’…‘parents can credit an online
account for their children which enables them to shop independently online
within the subclub’s walled garden of retailers’. Children’s bedrooms have
changed from secure and cosy environments to network centres from which
they communicate way beyond the protective walls of the family home through
television sets, computer games, the Internet and text messages on their mobile
phones. One eight-year-old, in a study of children’s views of what their future
bedroom might be like, drew a room filled with enormous screens and a tiny
‘virtual Mum’ up in one corner.
Nervous press reports suggest that children’s facility with these tools of
the future have already taken them to realms incomprehensible to their elders.
Anxieties range from ‘An 11-year-old computer whizzkid from Sunderland ran
a £10,000 copying scam from the bedroom of his home…’ to ‘Computer games
can be as addictive as hard drugs for the most besotted children’ and ‘An
intelligent, determined and computer literate child … could … amass a huge
collection of startlingly disgusting and realistic pornography’. US President
George W. Bush declared, ‘a child can walk in and have their heart turn dark as
a result of being on the Internet’. At the other extreme a group of (mostly
American) utopian writers celebrate the imagined freedom and independence
of the digital generation as they take off into the future. ‘They have unpre-
cedented mobility. They are shrinking the planet in ways their parents could
never imagine.’ ‘They will bring about “a generational explosion” a “social
awakening” that will overthrow traditional hierarchies of knowledge and power.’
The rather static image of children in front of a computer screen which tends
to accompany such excessive language has difficulty in matching the flights of
fantasy. However, an image of a child bathed in an other-worldly glow and
gazing beyond adult horizons has long represented a future that is partly
unknown. At the moment when some writers see the move to consumerism
as one more sign of the death of ‘childhood’, a new form of ‘childhood’ is
70 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

re-born, in which the glow comes from a computer screen. This ‘childhood’ is
transformed by digital technology and is leading the adult world into a future
based in cyberspace.

NOTES ON CHAPTER 2

p.51 charmed circle of home: a reference to Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall
(1976) ‘The charmed circle of home’, in J. Mitchell and A. Oakley (eds) The
Rights and Wrongs of Women, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
‘jigsaw families’: a survey by Virgin One, June 2002, reported by the free London
newspaper Metro. David Fickling, ‘Family life, but not as we know it’, 29 May
2002.
p.52 ‘cereal-packet family’: Stephen Kline (1994) Out of the Garden, London: Verso,
pp.56–61.
social and historical research: for example Leonore Davidoff, Megan Doolittle,
Janet Fink and Katherine Holden (1999) The Family Story: Blood, Contract and
Intimacy 1830–1960, Harlow: Longman; Historian John Gillis (1997) distin-
guishes between the ‘families we live with’ and the ‘families we live by’, in other
words the reality of actual family lives and the mythologies which create a sense
of family solidarity, whatever the real experience. ‘We would like the two to be
the same, but they are not.’ A World of Their Own Making: a History of Myth and
Ritual in Family Life, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p.xv.
p.53 Family snaps: Jo Spence and Patricia Holland (eds) (1991) Family Snaps: the
Meanings of Domestic Photography, London: Virago; Patricia Holland (2nd edition
2000) ‘“Sweet it is to scan”…Personal photographs and popular photography’,
in Liz Wells (ed.) Photography: a Critical Introduction, London: Routledge.
p.54 one of many hundreds: the German artist Joachim Schmidt collects snapshots
sent to him from all over the world. His project is to display them in new con-
texts: for example as multiples of images that have an uncanny resemblance to
each other, or compared with the work of prestigious photographers.
confirming or re-thinking personal identity: see for example (from two very
different perspectives) M. Csikzentmihalyi and E. Rochberg-Halton (1992) The
Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press; Roland Barthes (1982) Camera Lucida, London: Jonathan Cape.
Kodak has encouraged millions: Nancy Martha West (2000) Kodak and the
Lens of Nostalgia, Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press; Don
Slater (1995) ‘Photography and modern vision: the spectacle of “natural magic”’,
in Chris Jenks (ed.) Visual Culture, London: Routledge.
Jennifer Ransome Carter: interviewed by Patricia Holland, 1996.
p.55 cheerful pictures of themselves as children: Annette Kuhn (1995) Family Secrets:
Acts of Memory and Imagination, London: Verso; Valerie Walkerdine, ‘Behind
the painted smile’ and Simon Watney, ‘Ordinary boys’, both in J. Spence and
P. Holland (eds) (1991) above.
the invention of tradition: a reference to Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger
(eds) (1983/1992) The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge: Canto.
Roger Fenton: Time-Life (1973) Photographing Children, New York: Time Inc.,
pp.37–38.
Christmas: Gillis (1997) above, pp.101–4.
 S U P E R B R AT S I N T H E C H A R M E D C I R C L E O F H O M E 71

p.56 ‘sowing the seeds of despair’: Lesley Garner and Ivor Davis, ‘The proxy fathers:
sowing the seeds of despair?’ Sunday Times ‘Magazine’, March 1982.
p.57 parallel with the notion of domesticity: Anna Davin (1999) ‘What is a child’, in
Anthony Fletcher and Stephen Hussey (eds) Childhood in Question: Children,
Parents and the State, Manchester: Manchester University Press; Hugh
Cunningham (1995) Children and Childhood in Western Society since 1500,
London: Longman; Catherine Hall (1992) ‘The early formation of Victorian
domestic ideology’, in White, Male and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism
and History, Cambridge: Polity.
the creation of the ‘home’: Witold Rybczynski (1986) Home, a Short History of
an Idea, London: Penguin. Rybczynski points to the influence of women in
designing child-friendly homes. Lillian Gilbreth, whose books on household
management had considerable influence in the US, named one of them Living
with our Children (1928). Rybczynski, p.190.
Bryan Turner: (1987) ‘A note on nostalgia’, Theory, Culture and Society, vol.4,
pp.150–51.
architectural design of many English suburbs: see also Ebenezer Howard’s
designs for a ‘social city’ and his ‘garden city’ layouts at Letchworth and Welwyn.
Patrick Wright (1985) On Living in an Old Country, London: Verso, especially
Chapter 1, ‘Everyday life, nostalgia and the national past’.
Bournville Village: built in 1879 by George Cadbury to house workers in the
Cadbury Bournville factory and others. From 1900 it was run by the Bournville
Village Trust. Cadburys at Bournville 1879–1979, Bournville Publications
Department, 1979. Thanks to Arthur Lockwood for the loan of materials from
his collection. The celebrated photographer Bill Brandt made a rarely seen
series of pictures in 1943, showing life in the ‘village’, owned by the Bournville
Village Trust.
Port Sunlight: built as a ‘garden village’ in 1888 by William Hesketh Lever, the first
Lord Leverhulme. ‘In line with his ideas on prosperity-sharing the building and
maintenance of the village was subsidised with a portion of the profits from Lever
Brothers Limited.’ The Origins of Port Sunlight Village, Unilever External Affairs
Department, 1992.
Kate Greenaway: Anne Higonnet (1998) Pictures of Innocence: the History and
Crisis of Ideal Childhood, London: Thames and Hudson, pp.51–55.
Peter Pan and Christopher Robin: see Peter Coveney (1967) The Image of
Childhood, Harmondsworth: Peregrine, Chapter 10; Jaqueline Rose (1984)The
Case of Peter Pan, or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction, London: Macmillan.
p.58 ‘thousands had only dreamed’: see Patricia Holland (1991) ‘The old order of
things changed’, in Spence and Holland (eds) above.
still defines the dream home: Homes and Gardens, in August 2001 included an
advertisement for old-style English furniture; a feature on the use of lace; a
feature on converting a Gloucestershire cottage and another on converting a
French farmhouse.
p.59 Anne McLintock: (1995) Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the
Colonial Conquest, London: Routledge, p.209.
‘simplicity, personal authenticity and emotional spontaneity’: Turner (1987)
above.
p.60 Tony Blair: photographs of young Leo Blair with his Prime Minster father and
barrister mother, taken by Mary McCartney, daughter of the former Beatle
Paul, gave rise to much comment on the softening of Tony Blair’s image as well
as the changing role of fathers. The Daily Mail invited ‘experts’ to analyse the
72 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

photographs; it was ‘body language expert’ Judy James who described Blair as
‘surprisingly sultry’ (23 May 2000). Victoria Coren in the Evening Standard
devoted paragraphs to ‘the Peter Pan of pop. Sorry, politics’, and declared,
‘I think we should all take two weeks off, just to look at the pictures’ (24 May
2000). The Sun’s agony aunt, Deirdre Saunders, captioned a tongue-in-cheek
photo-story (posed by look-alikes), showing Tony woken in the small hours
and dealing with the affairs of state, baby in one arm (23 May 2000). As well as
on the front pages of all the newspapers, the pictures were instantly available on
the No 10 website.
Davina McCall: in Andrew G. Marshall, ‘Coochie-Coo (So what do those photos
REALLY reveal about her, him and darling little diddums?)’, Daily Mail, 29
September 2001.
‘Now all you need is wife and kids’: Independent on Sunday, 8 November 1998.
p.63 Brenda Prince: her sequence of photographs The Politics of Lesbian Motherhood,
June 1982, is discussed by Val Williams (1986) Women Photographers: the Other
Observers, 1900 to the Present, London: Virago, pp.176–78.
domestic documentary: the Independent and the Guardian newspapers, with
their critical, educated readerships and their regular features which nag through
issues of parenting, relationships and the problems of domestic life, are a
prolific source for this kind of imagery.
abuse and family collapse: see Chapters 5 and 6.
p.64 a heightened, post-modern neo-realism: the exhibition Who’s Looking at the
Family?, curated by Val Williams at the Barbican Centre in 1994, explored many
genres of photography dealing with families and family relationships, including
the heightened drama of Nick Waplington’s ‘Living Room’ series. The work of
photographers such as Richard Billingham and Nan Goldin, circulated in a
fine-art context, have influenced the trend. Jillian Edelstein’s pictures appeared
in Sunday Times ‘Magazine’, 1995.
Euphoric values: Roland Barthes (1977) ‘The Rhetoric of the image’, in Image,
Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath, London: Fontana.
play became increasingly domesticated: Lisa Jacobsen ‘Revitalising the
American home: children’s leisure and the re-valuation of play 1920–1940’,
Journal of Social History, Winter 1996/Spring 1997, pp.573–97.
p.65 ‘turn your once beautiful house into a playground’: Guardian ‘Weekend’,
21 July 2001.
p.66 guarantor of authenticity: ‘children are the necessary countervailing force to
liberal modernity’, writes Laurie Taylor, Prospect, June 2001. See Chapter 4.
role as consumers: Barrie Gunter and Adrian Furnham (1998) Children as
Consumers: a Psychological Analysis of the Young People’s Market, London:
Routledge.
‘Children’s pocket money is much in demand’: Walls Pocket Money Monitor
began in 1975. In 1997 pocket money was shown to average £2.33, but
children’s weekly income, which includes jobs and gifts, averaged £5.14.
Independent, 7 August 1997.
The merchants and marketers: Kline (1994) above, pp.18–19.
p.67 Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents: quoted by Bryony Coleman and
Jenny Cowley, ‘What is your little treasure worth?’, Mail on Sunday, 3 December
1989; Guardian, 28 December 1998. See also Gunter and Furnham (1998)
above.
UK Toy and Game Council: quoted in Harrow Times, 15 November 2001.
marvellous manipulators of parental pockets: Broadcast, 2 December 1994.
 S U P E R B R AT S I N T H E C H A R M E D C I R C L E O F H O M E 73

deplored as a loss of innocence: for example ‘The loss of our innocence: the age
of computers has robbed children of their fascination with toys’, Independent,
August 1996.
Getting Older Younger: BBC Bristol for BBC2, 1999. The advertising agency
Saatchi and Saatchi estimated that the cut-off point for buying toys has been
falling by one year every five years.
the death of childhood: see David Buckingham (2000) After the Death of
Childhood: Growing up in the Age of Electronic Media, Cambridge: Polity,
Chapter 2.
The marketers didn’t have to assume: Kline (1994) above, p.19.
p.68 dispersed into those childish objects: Alan Prout (ed.) (1997) The Body, Childhood
and Society, London: Macmillan, pp.2, 11. Prout argues that bodies are ‘hybrid
entities’ inextricably interwoven with artefacts, machines and technologies.
Barbie: manufactured by the American toy company Mattel, and first appeared
in 1959. ‘We didn’t depict Barbie as a doll. We treated her as a real life teenage
fashion model.’ Quoted by Kline (1994) above pp.169–70.
p.69 ‘Subclub site’: Campaign, 9 February 2001.
‘virtual Mum’: Sonia Livingstone and George Gaskell (1997) ‘Children and
the television screen, modes of participation in the media environment’, in
Jo Langham Brown, Sue Ralph and Tim Lees, Tune In or Buy In, Luton: John
Libbey Media. Also lectures on this research conducted in association with the
Broadcasting Standards Council.
‘An 11-year-old computer whizzkid’: ‘Computer buff, 11, ran copying scam’,
Guardian, 27 February 1999.
‘Computer games can be as addictive’: ‘“Hard drug” fear for computer
children’, Guardian, 13 March 1995.
‘An intelligent, determined and computer literate’: ‘Doomed’, Independent,
6 September 1994. See also Patricia Holland (1996) ‘I’ve just seen a hole in the
reality barrier! Children, childishness and the media in the ruins of the twentieth
century’, in Jane Pilcher and Stephen Wagg (eds) Thatcher’s Children? Politics,
Childhood and Society in the 1980s and 1990s, Brighton: Falmer Press.
George W. Bush: Independent, 7 June 2001, on a report that parents of the school
students massacred by two of their classmates at Columbine High School
in 1999 were bringing a law suit against manufacturers and distributors of
computer games such as Tomb Raider.
‘They have unprecedented mobility’: Don Tapscott (1998) Growing Up Digital:
the Rise of the Net Generation, New York: McGraw Hill, quoted by Buckingham
(2000) above, p.47. See Buckingham, Chapter 3, for a discussion of the ‘elec-
tronic utopians’.
Package, mid-1980s. Advertisement, courtesy of Elliott School, 2002.
 3
Ignorant pupils and
harmonious nature

In the mind of the child we may perhaps find the key to progress, and, who knows,
the beginning of a new civilization.
Maria Montessori

Children are not born good; they have to be disciplined, otherwise they are a threat
to the rest of society.
Rhodes Boyson

The key to progress

(Two postcards from my collection: one reproduces a 1930s lithograph by Soviet

artist Aleksandr Deineka. It shows a boy and girl wearing red pioneer scarves,
against a background of modernist tower blocks. They are hand in hand,
unsmiling, with determined expressions. ‘We demand universal compulsory
education’, says the caption. The second is from a sequence of black-and-white
photographs by Janine Weidel, documenting British school life in the 1970s.
Two bored-looking boys sit aimlessly behind a desk, one picking his fingernails,
the other gazing into space. A similar picture was used on a poster made by
the National Union of School Students, ironically captioned ‘The best years of
our lives?’)
Pictures of children being educated tend to be constructed to argue a case
(in the two examples above either for compulsory education or against irrelevant
schooling) or to quell anxieties. In one of those paradoxes which characterise
the imagery of childhood, the desired images of schooling indicate children’s

75
76 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

incapacities rather than their capabilities. Two key images resonate through the
popular media. One is an image of close concentration, with the child’s head
bent down over a task, usually at a school desk. The other shows a child with
hand raised, apparently in eager competition for the teacher’s attention. The first
is an image of solitary learning, while the ‘hands-up’ image suggests that such
self-absorption is not altogether desirable. This image pulls the child’s attention
away from his work and towards an adult, a teacher, the representative of the
institution, who will scrutinise, criticise and assess. The raised hand places the
schoolboy in competition with his classmates (this well-adjusted student striving
to succeed is most often male). The teacher is not visible in the image, but the
eyes of the eager child gaze towards that potent space in front of the frame
where it is assumed a teacher stands, but is, in fact, currently occupied by the
viewer. When testing and grading are all-important, it is not learning but the
display of learning that counts.
We have seen how the imagery of childhood regularly demonstrates children’s
lack of adult knowledge. Childish innocence of the world creates the poignancy
which pictures exploit. Viewing adults understand all too well the transience of
the childish state and the bitterness of real-life experience. We long to preserve
a nostalgic image of blissful unknowingness partly to fend off the disillusion
that is to come. But the ignorance associated with the image of the schoolchild
is of a different sort. Apart from pictures of very young children in nursery or
infants classes, viewers are not invited to be sentimentally moved by pictures of
a child at school. Instead, the schoolchild’s ignorance is shown as a problem
to be solved; it is the very rationale for the education system. The face of the
child with upraised arm, so eager to please, reflects the anxieties of the whole
society. He may well represent a ‘key to progress’ or even ‘the beginning of a
new civilization’.
Since the inception of universal state schooling in Britain from the 1870s,
the changing image of the schoolchild has reflected shifting political and social
ideologies embedded in the school system. Theories of schooling are always
related to possible social futures, so whether education is seen as a civic struggle
for democracy or as the reproduction and entrenchment of traditional, hier-
archical values, this particular image of childhood has carried a strong social
resonance. The view which sees childhood as a value in itself does not always fit
easily with imagery which contemplates the weighty implications of educational
ideologies.
 I G N O R A N T P U P I L S A N D H A R M O N I O U S N AT U R E 77

Transition to school

The institutions of family and school put forward competing definitions of child-
hood, and the conflict can be traced in the imagery. The family is an informal
organisation based on sentiment and a network of commitments and ties; the
school is a formal structure, subject to legislation and public policy; yet both
construct a childhood with no independent validity and little independent
existence. In the transition from home to school it is the quality of childish
dependence that changes. When a child is shown as a pupil, there is a calming
of the image, as the disciplines of the institution create a sort of latency period
between the euphoria of early childhood and the chaos of youth. The young
child’s body becomes less mobile. It is encased in special clothing and encumbered
with special equipment.
The imagery makes much of the qualities children lack – knowledge, under-
standing and the competencies of adult life. The job of the professionals of
education is to make good these childish lacks, but, in the paradoxical construction
of childhood, they must also make sure that children’s ignorance and incom-
petence are preserved and made visible, since the absence of adult skills continues
to characterise ‘childhood’, and to justify the very existence of the institution.
Children must not be deprived of their childhood too soon (‘The end of child-
hood? Parents’ hopes and fears for the schools revolution’ was a headline in the
Guardian ‘Education’). Educational professionals must carry out the double task
of dividing childhood from adulthood and of forming a bridge between the two
states, but the imagery shows more effort going into enforcing the separation
than into enabling the transition from one to the other.
Separation from the adult world involves creating a physical space which
is unique to children, within which the meanings of childhood and childish-
ness may be negotiated anew. School buildings are expressive indications of
changing views of childhood, from the gothic piles of the first state schools of
the 1880s and 1890s to the airily laid out primary schools of the 1930s and the
huge, aspirational comprehensives of the 1960s. Each creates its own version of
a child-shaped space, where childish impulsiveness can fight it out with school-
based discipline.
The image of the schoolchild is modulated according to whether its intended
audience is parents or teachers. As children move from the emotional space of
the home to the formal space of the school, parents’ rights over their children
are dramatically curtailed and family relationships must be readjusted in
accordance with legal educational requirements. Every September sees ‘Back to
school’ features in shop windows, advertisements and consumer magazines. The
78 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

axis of the classic family image is swung around, so that the exchange of smiles
is no longer between family members within the frame, but between the child
who is leaving and the parent-viewer who is left behind. On the cover of Mother,
September 1983, in a touching close-up, a little boy who seems much too young
to be encased in his heavy grey uniform, could well be on the edge of tears. A
presentation from Parents shows a boy and a girl festooned with the shoes,
crayons, satchels and other paraphernalia needed for ‘my first day at school’. In
2002 the supermarket Tesco offered £4 off schoolwear on presentation of a Daily
Mail coupon. The promotion showed a group of school-clad model children,
their bodies mobile and energetic, their smiles intended to reassure ‘their’ mothers
and all viewers of the image who put themselves in the position of ‘mother’ by
the very act of looking.
The theme of happiness has been part of the discourse of the post-war
primary school, and happiness is evoked to sustain the links between children
and their parents even as they depart through the school gates. It is the parents’
desire which is reflected in these children’s faces. ‘If he (or she) is happy, then
you’re laughing,’ Parents told its readers. The faces in the image reassure, but the
regime of the school has already laid claim to the children’s bodies. The playful
gestures contrast with the dark skirts, stiff blazers, school hats and heavy loads
they carry. Yet it is the parents who must provide the equipment and clothing
which symbolise this contest of definitions. They must purchase those satchels,
pencils, notebooks, sensible shoes, clean shirts, caps and sweatshirts in the school
colours. The well-equipped schoolchild appears as a shiny surface, washed,
polished and brushed, a credit to those who service him or her. To produce a
child in this image is the job of the servicing mother, and in doing so she
services the school itself. The smiles in the picture maintain her relationship
with her children and ensure her support for the school regime.
Since children go to school not to follow their own desires, but to live out
the desires of the whole community, the tentative looks on the faces of these
five-year-olds in their new school clothes express a major social concern. The
weight is on their shoulders. It is up to them to grasp the importance of school
for society and, at the same time, to reconstruct it as the only pathway to their
personal future.
 I G N O R A N T P U P I L S A N D H A R M O N I O U S N AT U R E 79

Dangerous coagulation

To realise its promise, the school must enclose this child – and all children – within
its boundaries, and the child must be subject to its control. Unlike a family,
made up of members of different ages and sexes who may be widely dispersed,
schools contain large numbers of the same type of person gathered in a limited
and clearly defined space. Pictures which seek to represent ‘school’ often set
out to reflect this multiplicity. Their frames are filled with many children,
gregariously bunched together, engaged in similar activities, leading to similar
ends. Differences such as those of gender or ethnicity are subordinated to
categorisation by age. The children in these school images tend to be unnamed
exemplars, each one representing its own generation. On entering school, a child
becomes one of a type. One favourite newspaper image to illustrate children in
school is a bunch of kids cheerfully waving at the camera in the playground or
classroom, in a democratic, undifferentiated mixing.
Such a gathering together of children carries symbolic dangers of its own.
School becomes a place where order and disorder constantly confront each
other. There is the danger inherent in crowding itself, in promiscuous contact
with numerous others (‘Is this what they mean by “crammer’’?’ was the caption
to one newspaper photograph of an overcrowded classroom). Assembled
together, children may develop autonomous activities which exclude adults.
They may egg each other on or form into gangs. Their uproar and mobility are
aggravated by their numbers, so that it is difficult to keep track of a single
individual at every moment in time. In the imagery of school this tendency
is kept at bay by a visual effort to present children as a purposeful group, and
to convert the incipient disorder of the crowd into what Michel Foucault
classically described as a ‘disciplinary society’. For Foucault, ‘The principle of
“enclosure” is neither constant, nor indispensable, nor sufficient in disciplinary
machinery. This machinery works space in a much more flexible and detailed
way.’ He outlines some of the principles of ‘disciplinary space’: ‘Each individual
has his own place and each place its individual. Avoid distributions in groups;
break up collective dispositions; analyse confused, massive or transient pluralities.
Disciplinary space tends to be divided into as many sections as there are
bodies or elements to be distributed.’ And any teacher would endorse an effort
to ‘eliminate the effects of imprecise distributions, the uncontrolled disappear-
ance of individuals, their diffuse circulation, their unstable and dangerous
coagulation’.
To achieve an orderly regime, childish spontaneity, which is so highly valued
in the family imagery, must take on negative connotations. The restlessness of
80 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

childhood, its random and purposeless movement, indicates precisely those

qualities that school is designed to modify. Spontaneity may be pictured as
naughtiness, inattention or downright disobedience. Above all, on entering school,
children find their right to undirected play limited to a designated space, the
playground, and time, playtime. The playground image itself may be seen as a
threat, infested by bullies and children running wild. Play itself is linked to
uncontrollability and the fear that children may move beyond the reach of the
school’s disciplinary regime.

In harmony with the nature of the child

The concept of play is threaded throughout the many definitions of childhood,

particularly in the prosperous West. Play is the antithesis of work and of
seriousness. It is characterised by expressive values. It is an end in itself. That
means there are special problems when children bring playful values to the serious
business of education. The imagery of school, and particularly of the primary
school, must balance ‘play’ against the related concepts of ‘learning’ and ‘work’.
‘Learning’ is the only work permitted to children, since adult, productive work
is forbidden to them, and learning becomes suspect if it looks too much like
play. On the other hand, play may loose its value if it has too instrumental a
purpose. The challenge is to define activities which seem like play as images of
learning. The subversive possibility that play may invade the disciplinary space
of the school has given rise to acute public anxiety over the last quarter of the
twentieth century. On the other hand, the introduction of ‘Early Learning Goals’
for three- to six-year-olds in 1999 seemed to bring a negation of the essence of
childhood at an unacceptably young age.
The desired image of stiff, deskbound, serious-faced pupils which launched
the educational initiatives of the late nineteenth century was challenged by
a group of child-centred theorists and progressive educationists in the early
twentieth. They preferred an image of active bodies and smiling faces, and for
them childish play was an inspiration. H. Cauldwell Cook wrote about his ‘Play
School’; Maria Montessori developed learning equipment which looked very
much like toys; Susan Isaacs argued that children should be free to express their
playfulness both as expressive exuberance and as intense, pleasurable absorption
in an activity. The relation between play and learning became the centre of a
dispute which has lasted for more than a century and has both personal and
social aspects. In its personal form, a pessimistic definition of childhood in which
play is at best wildness, and at worst violent and dangerous, is opposed by an
 I G N O R A N T P U P I L S A N D H A R M O N I O U S N AT U R E 81

optimistic one in which play expresses a childish freshness. A perceived need to

control children and to tame the threat from wildness is opposed by a desire to
build on children’s playful self-expression. In its social form it is argued on the
one hand that society needs well trained and disciplined members who know
how to keep play time and work time separate, and on the other that playful
values produce well-balanced citizens and a happier community.
In the years following World War II, the campaign to allow playful values
into schools was in the ascendant. The Plowden Report, Children in their Primary
Schools, confirmed what was to become the orthodoxy in classrooms for younger
children: ‘This distinction between work and play is false, possibly throughout
life, certainly in the primary school…Play is the central activity in all nursery
schools and many infant schools.’
The report was illustrated with photographs of child-friendly principles,
gleaned from the archives of local country councils (and one from toy manu-
facturer James Galt). A picture of a boy of about eight caught in the midst of an
energetic leap was juxtaposed with one showing two boys facing each other in a
playground – perhaps playing a chasing game, or perhaps about to launch into
a fight – and a group of girls rehearsing a dance. From inside the classroom,
photographs showed groups of children, heads down, intent on their activity.
They are playing with building bricks, using scientific equipment, making models,
painting, working with tools. The pictures echoed those taken at progressive
schools, such as Susan Isaacs’s Malting House, and provided a model for thirty
years of images of primary classrooms.
This is a vision of an education which aims to be, in Plowden’s words, ‘in
harmony with the nature of the child’. In the spirit of harmony, teachers and
pupils are presented as collaborators in the enterprise of the school. For Plowden
the best teacher was an invisible one, whose values were internalised within the
children. The teacher could leave the room and the class would carry on without
noticing the absence. Teachers rarely dominate pictures of the progressive class-
room. They are either absent from the frame, or their heads rise slightly above
the heads of the children. When such pictures do show a teacher – as in
advertisements recruiting new teachers – we find them either holding the rapt
attention of a group of delighted youngsters, or behind the group, encouraging
them, initiating and sharing their activity.
But to read these images of the post-Plowden primary classroom as pictures
of children doing their own thing is to misinterpret them. Visible or not, the
teacher remains the controlling centre. The exchange of looks between teacher
and pupil is by no means reciprocal, nor does it display the mutual pleasure seen
in looks exchanged between family members. In this image, while teachers
82 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

watch children in order to control and guide them, children look at teachers
only in ways that indicate their status as pupils. They respond when the teacher
addresses them directly and pay careful attention when the whole class is being
taught. To create a suitable image of child-in-the-progressive-classroom, a
pedagogic eye is needed, creating a one-way relationship that has much in
common with the structures of documentary photography. The documentary
photographer aims to look where the look is not returned and where the subjects
of the picture are unaware of the photographic gaze, just as the eyes of the child-
centred teacher observes the classroom and its inhabitants. The practice of
observation and documentation of children’s activities has been a central tenet
of progressive pedagogy. At all times children must make themselves available to
the professional eye, and must reveal themselves without artifice, forgoing the
temptation to adopt what Maria Montessori described as a ‘mask of seemliness’,
or indeed any other mask. To preserve the innocence of the image, they must
present themselves without strategies for self-protection.
The Plowden image faces the challenge of play head on and converts it into
work through learning. Many books of 1960s and 1970s contained photographs
of this sort – a desired image of an energetic child fulfilling their childishness and
learning at the same time. The imagery seemed to square the circle, to solve the
paradox, and to illustrate that learning could be both orderly and ‘in harmony
with the nature of the child’. The Inner London Education Authority’s Contact,
distributed free to the Authority’s teacher employees, was, in the late 1970s, a
substantial magazine, printed on glossy paper. In its many pages of colour photo-
graphs, concerned teachers are presented with visual confirmation of the value of
their work. In a regular feature, Contact profiled a London school, using action-
documentary-style photography, with children ‘captured’ in the midst of their
activities. Many small frames arranged on a unifying page reflect the diversity of
classroom activities. They show cheerful bustle and clutter, each frame filled with
the active bodies of children and a rich profusion of objects spread around them
– live rabbits, building bricks, paints, plasticine, new technology.
The magazine recognised that the activity of learning was not immediately
visible, and instructed its readers on how to interpret the photographs and the
classroom itself, so that this image of intricate control would not be confused
with forms of childhood play which are completely self-directed. Viewers should
not be misled by the apparently unstructured bustle, but should note ‘the degree
of involvement of the individual child and the work habits acquired’, and
especially ‘the efforts of the teacher to inculcate good habits of orderliness and
the necessary persistence to complete a task successfully and learn the correct
attitudes of tidiness’. Unstructured play may well put the position of the adult
 I G N O R A N T P U P I L S A N D H A R M O N I O U S N AT U R E 83

under threat, since a child absorbed in play is not concerned to display the
subservience that secures adult power. But in these pictures the movements of
the children are organised according to their learning activity, and every object
has not only its place but also its label. Working near the borders of discipline,
this classroom must be read as a major achievement of discipline. It is designed
to challenge and defuse the dangers of disorder and lack of control through an
internalisation of the values of structured learning.
A pragmatic social-democratic politics has been associated with both docu-
mentary photography and the progressive classroom. They share an aim to create
an informed public to participate in a society in which guidance by educated
professionals plays an important part. The ‘social’ eye of the documentarist sets
out to provide clear, objective information; the progressive-education movement
is committed to improving facilities for the underprivileged and playing down
differences in ability and attainment. It was this dual stress on the role of public-
service professionals and a commitment to egalitarian politics that brought
progressivism increasingly under attack as the political mood changed in the
1980s. Campaigners on behalf of traditional teaching and formal assessment
questioned the social-democratic image and demanded who has the right to
observe the teachers?

Backlash or promise

From the mid-1970s, the child-centred classroom became an object of scorn

from an unsympathetic press, for whom a confusion between work and play was
symptomatic of disorder and political subversion.‘Gone are the two-by-two rows
of desks. Pupils sit haphazardly grouped at work tables – a doubtful improve-
ment when it comes to a handwriting class in one South London junior school,
where, because of the table arrangement, one half of the class were sitting with
their backs to the blackboard,’ wrote Joanna Patyna in the London Evening News,
under a Plowden-style photograph. The campaign was on to change the image,
to get the teacher back at the front of the class and the desks in orderly lines
facing the blackboard. The preferred image of a ‘traditional’ classroom associated
itself with educational standards which must be imposed on children rather
than drawn out of them. In this view, children cannot be trusted to internalise
disciplinary norms, the nature of the child is far from harmonious, and the
appropriate politics are those of competition and market choice.
According to the traditionalists, children need training, clear-cut structures
and punishment where necessary. The changing imagery of school illustrates this
84 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

conflict between internal and external constraint: in the one the body of the child
is controlled by the disciplines of the mind; in the other by the disciplines of the
regime. Each image deals in its own way with the twin moments of liberation and
control. In successive editions of a local paper, published as the contest between
the two positions was at its height, the rival images were reflected in different
photographic styles. Both presentations set out, in the manner of the local press,
to please the readers and to maintain circulation by including as many local
names and faces as possible. Both aimed to demonstrate to parents the work of
their children’s schools. They could hardly be more different.
At St David’s we do not see learning in progress. Instead, the children greet
the camera, their parents and the outside world, sitting at their desks or grouped
around their work. They display the results of their learning, holding up certifi-
cates and pointing to their paintings. They show their achievements and are
themselves achievements. They are the products of the school, presented to the
school’s customers, their parents. The photographs are formal and static, so that
the processes of learning are concealed and the work of expressing the values
of the school is done by certificates, badges and tidy uniforms. By contrast, in
the photographs of Merlin school, we find the familiar documentary image of
children absorbed in their activities. Here the process of learning is itself on
display in the disposition of the children’s bodies and the equipment they are using
– weighing machines, cookery equipment, paints and easels. These pictures are
directed less at the eye of the notional parent than at the pedagogic eye of the
teacher. In this case it is the teacher’s eye that is represented by the camera, and
composes the pictures.
In the bitter disputes of the 1980s and 1990s, the interests of ‘parents’ and
‘teachers’ were frequently presented as incompatible and irreconcilable. ‘Parents’
were seen as far less threatened by the St David’s type of school, and as we look
at the two groups of photographs it is not difficult to understand why. At St
David’s the teachers appear to have accomplished a task. They have worked on
their charges and offered them back to their parents/owners, produced, finished
and dealt with. The Merlin pictures, by contrast, make considerable demands on
the parents who view them. First, they must make an effort to interpret the
pictures, which, as we have seen, involves a specialised knowledge that chiefly
belongs to teachers. Second, and perhaps more importantly, parents are made
irrelevant by the image. The work of this school is shown not as a service to the
parents but to their children. It seems to be encouraging children’s independent
development and offering them a degree of autonomy. Those mechanisms
by which the pupils’ learning is paced and controlled – testing, grading and
measuring attainment – are not given prominence here.
Kentish Times, October 1983. Photographs: Ken Watt and Don Reed.
86 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

‘Children are not born good,’ declared Conservative MP and ex-headmaster

Sir Rhodes Boyson, ‘they have to be disciplined, otherwise they’re a threat to the
rest of society.’ As a contributor to the ‘Black Papers’ on education, published
as a response to Plowden, Rhodes Boyson was part of a long campaign which
brought about a radical change in educational policy and culminated in the
Conservative Education Reform Act of 1988 (described as the ‘biggest shock
to the school system in 50 years’). It was a change in which the desired image
of schooling once more became an image of rows of children, seated at desks,
paying close attention to a teacher. The 1997 Labour government intensified
the drive towards disciplined schooling, structured teaching, regular testing,
inspections, and the measurement of schools against nationally established criteria
of success. But although the ideological battle had been won at the level of
policy, the imagery continued to reflect conflicting views in the definition of
childhood. What changed was the social-class alignment of these images.
In the period immediately after the Second World War, the perspective of
the upwardly mobile segment of the working and lower-middle classes had
dominated popular discourse on education. After all, these were groups for
whom social improvement was attainable only through schooling. State schools
were offering children a precious value that had not been available to their
parents. Education promised a better life. But by the end of the century, the class
location of the dominant narratives had changed. Now they were dominated by
a successful middle class who sensed that their values and privileges were under
attack, and feared that a state education would pull their children down. The
concept of possible futures has changed, no longer aspirational and democratic,
but individualistic and competitive.

The invention of tradition

To come into contact with the formal academic curriculum, English working class
children have to pass through another ‘symbolic universe’ of uniforms, honours
boards, prize days…etc…Any democratic conception of education has always
had to be advanced in the context of educational traditions and practices that were
produced by – and themselves serve to reproduce – the undemocratic political and
educational thinking of the nineteenth century.

In each of its contexts the imagery of childhood is torn between a rather fright-
ening orientation towards the future and a more comfortable backwards glance.
This tension displays itself most strongly in the imagery of school, which harks
back to the past with a confidence quite unlike the sentimental nostalgia of other
forms of childhood imagery. In a powerful social construct fraught with paradox,
 I G N O R A N T P U P I L S A N D H A R M O N I O U S N AT U R E 87

one version of the history of education draws on traditional forms and image-
laden rituals to create a spectacular display of visualised antiquity. This set of
images refers further back in history than any other image associated with
childhood, to a medievalism revived in the mid-nineteenth century, yet it still
gives value to many newly commodified educational establishments. A resonant
image for the concept of excellence in British education is the expensive and
prestigious public school and its state-funded imitator, the grammar school,
which both seek to distinguish themselves, not least by ritual and visual display,
from everyday run-of-the-mill secondary schools (notoriously referred to by
a spokesman for the British government as ‘bog standard comprehensives’).
As state-funded secondary education was hesitantly established at the
beginning of the twentieth century, Robert Morant – the civil servant in charge
of implementing the 1902 Education Act – wrote that ‘uniforms, badges and latin
mottoes’ were the essential characteristics of a true secondary school, and many
aspiring establishments set about providing themselves with these markers of
antiquity. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the ancient universities
and the elite public schools continue to cast their magic shade. The visible signs
of the ‘best’ education still include the teacher’s gown, the monastic cloister and
the gothic arch, all frequently hinted at in visual presentations of schooling.
Within this image children are subordinated to the symbols they carry on their
bodies (school tie, heraldic badge, school motto) and the positioning of their
bodies within a ritualised space (lined up for assembly, standing when the teacher
comes into the room). This is a performance of tradition, a visual marker of
privilege, a theatre of ritual. It is certainly intended to make an impression on its
participants, but in the contemporary, post-modern world, tradition also plays
an ornamental and decorative role for an audience constructed as tourists.
Despite the excess of the performance (its tourist aspect), the visual reminders
of an elite education enable a continuous elision between privilege and ability.
The signs of wealth have come to stand for cleverness, those of exclusivity for
excellence. Whenever ordinary, hard-working schools use such devices as badges,
gilded lettering, panelled halls, archaic uniform, to represent themselves to their
pupils, they are, willy-nilly, recycling the meanings of hierarchy and exclusion.
They are also referring to an ecclesiastical past where learning is associated with
godliness, and scholarliness is cut off from the melee of the everyday world.
Refined places of learning can be presented as being above grubby politics, since
their imagery refers to the dignified ranking of pre-industrial times with its
hierarchically stratified society, outside the unholy scramble of capitalist exchange
and grab. This lofty image has provided a conceptual framework for the whole
of the British debate on education, which, according to Carr and Hartnett, is
88 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

conducted in ‘a language which embodies educational assumptions and voc-

abularies which speak to pre-democratic traditions and prevent fundamental
concerns about the democratic role of education being adequately expressed’.
A school uniform in particular can invest its present wearers, with no effort
on their part, with a prestige brought by past wearers. The older and more
confident the school, the odder its costume and its symbols may be. (My postcard
collection includes a crocodile of Kings College Cambridge choristers in gowns
and top hats filing past the famous chapel.) In its claim to be an unchanging
inheritance from the past, school uniform must be the antithesis of fashion, with
little attention to convenience or comfort. Parents are informed that to produce
their child as a uniform image is a sign of social achievement. (‘Spot the kid from
Bash Street,’ challenged an Abbey Life advertisement above four neatly blazered
youngsters, while an ad for Woolworths asked, ‘Are you as smart as your kids?’)
Uniform is a convenient marker of schooling in other ways. It is a visible
sign of the multiplicity characteristic of school imagery, and it adds the important
ingredient of conformity. It gathers children together in an orderly fashion, gets
them literally into line, encourages a uniformity of stance and bodily control as
well as dress. It speaks of a uniformity of quality which will transcend individual
quirks and oddities. (The photographic image can be corrected, even when the
pupil resists. A GCSE student had her pink dreadlocks electronically trans-
formed to an acceptable brown by the school photographer.) This is a reassuring
image for adults, for it tells them where children belong and who is responsible
for them. It has become an easily available shorthand to indicate school itself.
This image of conformity and exclusion is an unavoidable part of the daily lumber
of pedagogical meanings, visually imported even when unwanted. Through
uniform, the ‘traditional’ version of schooling has become an exemplar of all
education. Childhood is confined and defined.
Although this mythic image calls up the distant past, the politics of the 1980s
pushed it firmly into the present. When changes to the law allowed schools to opt
out of local-authority control, the resonant strength of the grammar-school
image contributed to its presentation as a more reliable alternative. The Observer
‘Review’ used a photograph showing uniformed teenagers in a shady cloister
beside the headline, ‘The best for one’s child?’. The Daily Mail featured a Skegness
school that was opting out. Its begowned headmaster and suitably uniformed
sixth-formers declared themselves proud of their newly adopted latin motto:
‘Murus Aeneus Conscientia Sana’ (‘A clean conscience is like a wall of bronze’).
Antiquity can be easily appropriated by a market model of education, for, unlike
the less visible qualities of the social-democratic public-service model, ‘traditions’
can be constructed whenever needed and can be put up for sale. ‘Now we are a
 I G N O R A N T P U P I L S A N D H A R M O N I O U S N AT U R E 89

business,’ declared the Skegness headmaster. The spectacle of education itself

entered the marketplace, the more exotic signifiers of learning gained economic
value, and the backward-looking iconography of traditional schooling was
appropriated for a future-orientated world of competition.
The powerful claim of public schools and grammar schools to offer the
‘best’ education, accompanied by easy access to the ‘best’ universities and elite
professions, has continued to mean that comprehensive schools which aim to
offer equal opportunities to all have not been represented as an alternative vision
but as a poor second best. No image has emerged to characterise the democratic
aspirations of these secondary schools equivalent to the image of the Plowden
primary classroom. Instead, in the narratives of the popular press, children have
been described as abandoned in a comprehensive jungle. The image of youngsters
in undifferentiated groups (dangerous coagulation) has been mobilised as a
potential danger – and has characterised structureless and disorganised schooling.
The blame has been laid, once more, at the door of the teachers. When ‘tradition’
was opposed by teachers they were condemned as ‘trendy’, while efforts to create
a more equal regime were jeered at as ‘political correctness’. ‘We can’t take a
chance on teachers like this…’ declared the Daily Mail in 1984 above a drawing
of teacher with an afro hairstyle, a ‘coal not dole’ badge, a bomber jacket and
trainers. More than a decade later, the Independent was still (partly tongue-in-
cheek) characterising teachers as ‘trendy’ (young, female, in sweatshirt, jeans and
trainers) or ‘traditionalist’ (middle-aged, male, in mortarboard and gown). But
the Mail’s mood was more bitter. By 2001 its theme remained the same, even if
fashions had changed. Now it claimed to reveal how teachers’‘stupefying political
correctness wreaked havoc with children’s lives’.

Shock reports and schools of shame

The image of school appears in the national press in two strikingly different
contexts. In the ‘quality’ press, such as the Guardian education pages and the
Times Education Supplement, the address is largely to professionals. These
publications expect an audience conversant with educational policy and often
directly involved as teachers, governors, academics or active parents. The imagery
is realist and observational, sometimes illustrating an argument, sometimes
exploring a practice. By contrast, the popular press addresses its readers as
laypeople, highly suspicious of the obfuscations of professionalism. These readers
are seen as parents with a straightforward, commonsense approach, who may
not be well educated themselves but are worldly-wise and want the best for their
90 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

children. They are assumed to have no stake in perpetuating education as a

protected area, for it is an area from which they themselves have frequently
been excluded. They are thought to see schools as places of restricted access,
protected by arrogant and unaccountable teachers. Such readers, then, will not
be surprised when they open their daily papers and are taken behind the scenes
into the forbidden territory of school to find dreadful behaviour and scandalous
goings-on.
In the daily sequencing of the national press, narratives develop over the
weeks and years which gain their own momentum. These long-running dramas
create a framework into which the individual news items are fitted. They provide
a set of expectations, including familiar plot-lines and a cast of characters who
move between the news, features and gossip pages. There are heroes and villains,
victims and aggressors – archetypal roles waiting to be filled by whatever real
individual is the subject of the next topical scandal. Readers follow develop-
ments as if following a soap opera, eager for the next instalment.
In the last decades of the twentieth century, a popular drama of this sort built
up around education. The heroes were ‘parents’, cast as the losers in the struggle
for education, who were campaigning for their ‘freedom’ – in other words for the
right to choose their children’s schools. The villains were the ‘teachers’, determined
to thwart the parents and blinded to the children’s interests by their devotion to
ideology. Teachers, in this scenario, disguise political opinions as professional
expertise and use fancy language to deceive and confuse. Against this background
readers have been entertained with discipline scandals, sexual scandals, and
scandals centring on improper teacher behaviour and uncontrollable pupils. They
have been given shock reports (Daily Mirror) and schools of shame (Evening
News). Stories have explored those margins of a school’s activity which are largely
unspeakable in the professional discourse. When inner-city ‘sink’ schools, with
their almost insuperable problems of underfunding and disadvantaged pupils, hit
the headlines, the popular press, led by the Sun and the Daily Mail, demanded
more discipline and an assertion of ‘standards’ that they claimed could only be
imposed by ‘traditional’ teaching methods.
Education made the front pages when conflict erupted into action, as with
the extended dispute over progressive teaching methods at William Tyndale
School in Islington in the mid-1970s – which led to teachers mounting a highly
publicised picket of the school, and to a public inquiry – or the teachers’ strikes
of the mid-1980s. The relatively few pictures of children which accompanied
these unfolding narratives reflect the secondary place that children have taken
in the drama, even though the polemic has been centrally concerned with the
nature of childhood. Children could legitimately play a part only as pawns in
 I G N O R A N T P U P I L S A N D H A R M O N I O U S N AT U R E 91

the game or as passive by-products of the system. When they do appear, the
‘happiness’ seen as characteristic of the primary school has changed to a sullen
resistance, and rebelliousness has become a narrative theme. Sometimes children
appear alongside angry parents; sometimes they are shown as pathetic figures,
deprived of their schooling by militant or incompetent teachers. When allowed
to speak up for themselves, they demonstrate their own need to be controlled.
‘Please sir, don’t be trendy,’ ran a headline in the Daily Mirror. The humourless
call was for a return to the delightfully ironic three Rs. ‘The need to get back to
the basics in education – that means the three Rs – is recognised by everyone.
Everyone, that is, except the teachers in their ivory classrooms,’ wrote the Sun,
missing (apparently like everyone else) the joke embedded in the very idea
of three Rs. (Since they are derived from spelling mistakes they tell us that
educational incompetence is inevitable.)
When the Education Reform Act of 1988 introduced a national curriculum
and regular assessments for all children at seven, eleven, fourteen and sixteen,
the Conservative government could claim that the move was in response to
public opinion, and particularly the opinions of ‘parents’, as expressed in the
popular press. The debate continued to rage over the form of the national
curriculum, as traditionalists feared that the progressives would hijack it for
their own ends. A row over the teaching of reading led Education Secretary
Kenneth Baker to describe ‘modern’ methods as ‘cranky’. Traditionalists argued
that children should gain access to the subversive power of the word through
graded reading schemes and formal systems rather than through undisciplined
access to ‘real books’. Knowledge itself must be carefully controlled and designed
in such a way that children may be graded, tested and marked for life. In what
came to be the accepted wisdom, a new, visible disciplinary space was reasserted,
with the teacher firmly back at the front of the class.
By the beginning of the 1990s, ‘the dream of a more egalitarian education
had turned into a nightmare’, and the traditional image had been triumphantly
reasserted. Deprived of political support as well as money and equipment, state
education was accepted as second-class, abandoned by all who could afford to do
so. By the end of the decade, a ‘new’ Labour government had adopted the rhetoric
of competition, inspections, league tables and structured schooling backed up by
private-enterprise initiatives. Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown
announced his desire to ‘bring business into the classroom’. ‘Failing schools’ were
to be ‘turned around’, in the manner of businesses, by ‘superheads’. One 1998
paper showed ‘superhead’ William Atkinson pictured as a massive figure against
a playground empty of children. Schools could even be taken away from ‘teachers’
and given to ‘nominees’. The debate had moved from educational methods to the
92 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

efficiency of schools measured by outcomes and competitive results. Many pages

in the broadsheet press are now given over to publishing complete league tables of
GCSE and A-level results – often ranked under photographs of suitably uniformed
pupils. ‘How well is your child’s school doing?’ they ask.
This is not the desired image of schooling. When children appear in con-
temporary newspaper reports we all too often see surly faces in the playground
or, in an important new strand of imagery, children who have been excluded
from school – at home watching television or hanging around on the streets. (In
one striking case a mother was jailed for allowing her daughters to truant.) For
those who remain in class, testing and assessment remain all-important. Michelle
Cole wrote to the Guardian ‘Education’, ‘I, along with many other children, get
nervous and scared. Why us children? We should relax and be children for as
long as we can – we’ll have enough problems when we’re grown up!’

NOTES ON CHAPTER 3

p.75 ‘In the mind of the child ’: Maria Montessori (1936) The Secret of Childhood:
a Book for all Parents and Teachers, trans. Barbara Barclay Carter, London:
Longman, p.3.
‘Children are not born good’: Rhodes Boyson, quoted by Bel Mooney, Nova,
1972.
Janine Weidel: Rob Walker and Janine Weidel (1985) ‘Using photographs in a
discipline of words’, in R. Burgess (ed.) Field Methods in the Study of Education,
London: Falmer Press.
p.76 struggle for democracy: John Dewey (1916/1966) Democracy and Education,
London: Macmillan; David Rubinstein and Colin Stoneman (eds) (1970)
Education for Democracy, Harmondsworth: Penguin; Wilfred Carr and Anthony
Hartnett (1996) Education and the Struggle for Democracy: the Politics of
Educational Ideas, Buckingham: Open University Press.
p.77 The end of childhood?: Guardian ‘Education’, 29 February 2000.
p.78 ‘my first day at school’: Parents, 1975: Photograph: Graham Henderson.
p.79 Dangerous coagulation: reference to Michel Foucault (1977) Discipline and
Punish, London: Allen Lane, p.143.
‘Is this what they mean by “crammer”?’: Diana Hinds, Independent, 9 November
1995. Photograph: Geraint Lewis.
‘Each individual has his own place’: Foucault (1977) above, p.143.
p.80 In harmony with the nature of the child: ‘No advances in policy, no acquisitions
of new equipment have their desired effect unless they are in harmony with the
nature of the child’, The Plowden Committee (1966) Children and their Primary
Schools, London: HMSO, para. 9.
‘Early Learning Goals’: ‘Branded school failures at four’, Daily Express, 4 September
1998; ‘Lessons too early “scare off infants”’, Independent, 12 May 1999.
progressive educationists: Willem van der Eyken and Barry Turner (1975)
Adventures in Education, Harmondsworth: Pelican; R.J.W. Selleck (1972) English
 I G N O R A N T P U P I L S A N D H A R M O N I O U S N AT U R E 93

Primary Education and the Progressives 1914–1939, London: Routledge &

Kegan Paul.
H. Cauldwell Cook: Selleck (1972) above, p.67.
Maria Montessori: Maria Montessori (1936) The Secret of Childhood, London:
Longman, p.189.
Susan Isaacs: photographs of children at her school from a film directed by
Mary Field for British Instructional Films in 1927 included pictures of chil-
dren making pottery, working lathes and dissecting Isaacs’s cat, which had
just died. Van der Eyken and Turner (1975) above, p.55. See also p.101.
p.81 ‘This distinction between work and play is false’: Plowden (1966) above, para.
523.
the teacher remains the controlling centre: Valerie Walkerdine has described
this progressive pedagogy as an ‘impossible fantasy’. She argues (1990) that,
‘bourgeois culture is taken as “nature”’. ‘Progressive pedagogy and political
struggle’, in Schoolgirl Fictions, London: Verso. See also Valerie Walkerdine (1984)
‘Developmental psychology and the child centred pedagogy: the insertion
of Piaget into early education’, in J. Henriques, W. Holloway, C. Urwin, C. Venn
and V. Walkerdine, Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation,
Subjectivity, London: Methuen.
p.82 a mask of seemliness: Montessori (1936) above, p.189.
Many books of 1960s and 1970s: those I have picked up for 10p or 20p in
second-hand bookshops include: John Blackie (1967) Inside the Primary School,
London: HMSO, in which the newly retired Chief Inspector of Primary
Education gives an account of Plowden principles; Nora Goddard (1964)
Reading in the Modern Infants’ School, London: University of London Press, in
which a retired headmistress lays out the principles of child-centred learning
on which she had run her school; Cynthia Mitchell (1973) Time for School: a
Practical Guide for Parents of Young Children, Harmondsworth: Penguin, one of
an innovative series on progressive and alternative education under the imprint
of Penguin Education.
‘the degree of involvement’: ILEA Contact, Primary Supplement, Issue 21, 1974.
p.83 major achievement of discipline: see Walkerdine (1984) above.
The ‘social’ eye of the documentarist: see Stuart Hall (1972) ‘The social eye of
Picture Post’, Working Papers in Cultural Studies 2, Birmingham: University of
Birmingham, an extract reprinted in Jo Spence and Terry Dennett (eds)
(1979) Photography/Politics: One, London: Photography Workshop.
Gone are the two-by-two rows of desks: Joanna Patyna, ‘What are they learning
now?’, London Evening News, 9 May 1978. Photographs: Jimmy James.
p.86 ‘Black Papers’: C.B. Cox and A.E. Dyson (eds) (1968) Fight for Education: a Black
Paper, and (1969) Black Paper Two, London: Critical Quarterly Society.
‘biggest shock to the school system in 50 years’: Judith Judd, ‘The lost art of
learning’, Independent, 6 March 1999, a contribution by the paper’s education
editor to a series called ‘Dumb Britannia’ on the allegation of the ‘dumbing
down’ of British culture.
Education promised a better life : for an expansion of this perspective, see
Richard Johnson et al. (1982) Unpopular Education, London: Hutchinson.
The invention of tradition: Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds) (1983/1992)
The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge: Canto.
‘To come into contact with the formal academic curriculum’: Wilfred Carr and
Anthony Hartnett (1996) Education and the Struggle for Democracy: the Politics
of Educational Ideas, Buckingham: Open University Press, pp.111, 120.
94 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

p.87 ‘bog standard comprehensives’: Daily Express, 14 February 2001.

Robert Morant: quoted in Carr and Hartnett (1996) above, p.94.
the gothic arch: Robert Bell and Nigel Grant (1974) A Mythology of British
Education, St Albans: Panther. These authors point to the links between Gothic
imagery and the rise of Victorian anglicanism and Newman’s Idea of a University.
p.88 which embodies educational assumptions: Carr and Hartnett (1996) above, p.12.
Abbey Life: insurance advertisement, 1980; Woolworths’ school clothes, 1986.
A GCSE student: Metro, 22 February 2002.
‘The best for one’s child?’: Observer ‘Review’, 22 February 1981.
Murus Aeneus: Ross Kinaird, Daily Mail, 23 February 1989.
p.89 ‘We can’t take a chance’: Daily Mail, 18 December 1984.
characterising teachers as ‘trendy’: Independent, 16 January 1996.
stupefying political correctness: ‘Chilling indictment of British education’,
Daily Mail, 31 March 2001.
Shock reports: a reference to the Daily Mirror’s occasional ‘shock’ issues includ-
ing a ‘Shock report on education’, 22 May 1972, when the school leaving age was
raised to 16, and ‘Shock issue’, a ‘Mirror campaign for the future of your chil-
dren’, on the lack of facilities and funds, 25 February 1990.
schools of shame: a reference to an Evening News headline on the dispute
over ‘progressive’ teaching methods at William Tyndale School, Islington,
15 October 1975.
p.90 These long-running dramas: see Patricia Holland (ed.) (1977) Lunatic Ideas: on
Education and the Press, London: Corner House Bookshop.
William Tyndale School: Terry Ellis et al. (1976) William Tyndale, the Teachers’
Story, London: Writers and Readers.
p.91 ‘Please sir, don’t be trendy’: Daily Mirror, 26 April 1976.
‘The need to get back to the basics’: Sun, 29 July 1975.
Education Reform Act of 1988: see Carr and Hartnett (1996) above, p.166.
the dream of a more egalitarian education: Colin McCabe, Independent,
9 December 1990.
bring business into the classroom: see Richard Ingrams, Observer, 24 June 2001.
‘superhead’William Atkinson: Vivek Chaudhary,‘Super Sir’, Guardian, 23 February
1998. Photograph: Graham Turner. A character apparently based on Mr Atkinson
was played by Lenny Henry in the television series about a charismatic head-
master. Hope and Glory, BBC1, June 1999, Script Lucy Gannon, Dir. Peter Lydon.
p.92 a mother was jailed: ‘Jail for truants’ mother’, Daily Mirror, 14 May 2002.
Michelle Cole: letter in Guardian ‘Education’ on SATs (standardised assessment
tests), 13 April 1999.
 4
The fantasy of liberation
and the demand for rights

PA R T 1 : T H E I M A G E O F P L AY

The little ones leaped, and shouted and laugh’d

The little ones leaped, and shouted and laugh’d

And all the hills echoed…

The quotation from William Blake accompanied the section on children’s play
in the massive photographic exhibition The Family of Man, staged in New York
in 1954. Pictures showed many types of play – some co-operative, some
aggressive – but the key image which has echoed down the decades was that of
children leaping, shouting and laughing, casting off constraints – and often
clothing – expressing nothing but pure exuberance and joie de vivre. Near-naked
children run over sand dunes in Bechuanaland – one is caught in mid-air, both
knees up, an arm raised in a gesture of pure exultation; children throw long
shadows as they race across the cobbles in a Swedish street; a naked child is
about to splash into an expanse of water. In images heavily laden with adult
fantasy, these children from many cultures seem to be leaping free from the
containing institutions of home, school and nation. Only a short decade after so
much public imagery had documented the devastations of war, the exhibition
aspired to a form of global reconciliation. Children exemplified a reassuring
vision, since children could be shown as outside the wars, rivalries and cultural
hatreds of adult society. As the image resonates across the decades, children
continue to leap free from problems of all sorts. ‘Let the children play’ was the

95
96 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

headline in the Save the Children magazine World’s Children (1997) above a
photo-story by Julio Etchart seeking children at play around the world despite
the most difficult of circumstances. The message is that play is children’s
birthright across cultural divisions, and evidence of the universal nature of
childhood itself. The Family of Man had set a pattern for a celebration of the
common rhythms of life. It aimed to be ‘a camera testament, a drama of the
grand canyon of humanity, an epic woven of fun, mystery and holiness’. ‘There
is only one child in the world,’ it claimed, ‘and the child’s name is All Children’.
This powerful assertion of universality was cynically rejected by Roland Barthes
who, in a celebrated essay, attacked the exhibition’s sentimental denial of historical
contexts, ‘placing Nature above History’.
As we trace the image, we find that the concept of childish play has been
repeatedly re-negotiated over the twentieth century, pulled between ‘nature’ and
‘history’, between adult fantasy and children’s activity, between instrumentality
and a refusal to be appropriated for any end but its own. Its independence is
celebrated, but at the self-same moment it is appropriated for learning or for
therapy. We have already observed how the image of play is contested as it moves
between the consumer paradise of the home and the learning environment of
the school. For two psychotherapists writing in the late 1940s, it ‘is an activity
for its own sake, without a utilitarian significance, it is non-purposive and free,

Advertisement, late 1990s.

 T H E F A N TA S Y O F L I B E R AT I O N A N D T H E D E M A N D F O R R I G H T S 97

hence, perhaps, the peculiar delight which pertains to it’, and yet their book is a
discussion of play as ‘child treatment’.
The liberatory aspects of play have come to characterise childhood as opposed
to adulthood, but at the same time they throw all boundaries into question,
including that between adult and child. With its promise of joyful and even ecstatic
experience, play is increasingly seen as a value which adults seek to reclaim.
Images of childhood play are shadowed by adult envy and adult fear: envy since
play stands for non-utilitarian pleasures that adults must leave behind, and fear
because moving beyond social constraints may provoke nameless dangers. Thus
it is hardly surprising that when pictures of leaping, laughing children stand as
a key image they tend to be separated from surroundings which would root them
too closely into a specific social milieu. Their pure pleasure is not interrupted by
too much grounded information and they have no qualms in representing nature
rather than history.

Closely observed children and the irresponsible eye

Children at play seem absorbed in activities that are not pre-defined by adult
society. They have an air of mystery and inaccessibility, like some exotic cult. Iona
and Peter Opie, ethnographers of childhood, spent many years recording children’s
culture, talking to children in the playground and noting games and rhymes.
These sometimes turned out to be of great antiquity, passed from one generation
to the next, and sometimes very new, spreading across the country with remark-
able rapidity and no apparent mediation by adults. Such secrets have long
tempted the adult eye. Observation of children at play may well further the
teaching or therapeutic process, but on other occasions it has no other purpose
than to delight the adult viewer. Either way, observation reasserts adult control
over childish spaces. I shall consider here three approaches to the image of children
at play: first an argument for respectful observation; second a valuation of
childhood which sees it as a resource for the rescue of a corrupt society; finally
an irresponsible way of looking, in which adults appropriate childish values.
Observational photography has been strongly criticised for its voyeurism and
denial of the photographer’s presence. It has been seen as a form of repressive
surveillance, capturing an image without the consent or collaboration of the
participant. The observation of childhood is an extreme case of this inequality
between observer and observed, since the relations of power between adults and
children are so great. (Candid photographers are advised to keep a low profile
and wait for ‘that magic moment when the movement reveals the child’.) But, as
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I have argued throughout this book, the meaning of an image may be modulated
according to its context and use. In 1972, Leila Berg put a gloss on the docu-
mentary project in an eloquent argument for adults to respect children’s privacy.
A vocal advocate for child-centred education, she invited her readers to Look at
Kids. The photographs which make up the book set out to reflect a respectful
practice in which she urged adults to observe but to hold back from interfering
or attempting to impose acceptable behaviour or formal constraints. Rather than
studying children in order to teach them, Berg argues, they should study them
in order to learn from them.
Moving a step beyond such humility is the view in which playful children
are seen as the keepers of true values, including those values of community and
rationality that adult society seems to have lost. ‘How can human beings emerge
in a society that has such rampant nihilism as does ours?’ asked Paul Adams,
writing in the same year as Look at Kids, ‘…where people grow up immersed in
anomie, aloofness, relativity, absurdity, indefiniteness and non-participation?’
In his view, if childlike values are allowed to develop freely, the world would
stand a better chance of achieving a future of peace, co-operation and harmony.
In this adult fantasy, children are owed a better society, but they themselves are
expected to create it. These high expectations have led to a search for images in
which children’s play appears constructive rather than destructive, companion-
able rather than antagonistic.
At the same time, the popular imagery of childhood has produced a resonant
image of play that is not particularly constructive or co-operative, but free-
floating and anarchic. In this resonant image, playfulness is expressed in the
movement of the body of the child through the open spaces of the countryside
or the city. The geographical location is important here, for a background of
home or school would imply constraint or pedagogic purpose which would
negate the drive of the image. Rather than fitting a child to a pre-prepared child-
shaped space, this image offers the exciting prospect that children will be able to
create their own space. Viewers are not addressed specifically as parents, teachers
or caring professionals, but are invited to look with an irresponsible eye, feeding
off the childlike values expressed. Unanchored in a daily negotiation with real
children, this image serves to release the viewing adult from practical responsibility.
It becomes susceptible to a different kind of projection of adult fantasy – an
invitation to viewers to share the playful experience and take on the irrespons-
ible qualities of childishness.
Increasingly adults have bought into the values of play. Rebecca Abrams
describes it as ‘a fundamental social good’. Contemporary imagery is more likely
to find the child in the adult than the adult in the child. A double-page spread
 T H E F A N TA S Y O F L I B E R AT I O N A N D T H E D E M A N D F O R R I G H T S 99

in The Big Issue which at first glance seems to be a collection of snapshots of

children, turns out to be a group of adults, laughing, tumbling and chasing each
other in outdoor games. An image of bicycles screeching out of control down a
hill is actually a fashion spread by ‘hot’ young photographer Elaine Constantine,
and the bikes are ridden not by children but by adult models. The current
appropriation of childish values now finds adults on cornflake packets and
euphoric values in car advertisements. Surprisingly often, children have been
pushed out of the picture to be replaced by childlike adults.

Urban ruralism

As we have seen, many of our resonant images of childhood are linked to parti-
cular periods of history, and linger in the cultural image-bank long after their
original significance has lost its contemporary charge. Their meanings may
decay, so that they remain decorative or ornamental, or they may be recuperated
and reconstructed through a new dynamic usage. The image of children at play
has moved through both of these processes. We have already considered the
decorative and seductive image which lingers from the turn of the twentieth
century, and shows a world of quiet villages and peaceful village greens where
children sing and play gentle games far from the corruptions of the town.
Historically, the last decades of the nineteenth century were a time of rural de-
population and an unprecedented expansion of urban living. But despite the
actuality of poverty and hardship in the lives of real children, it was a period
when the cult of childhood took on a new significance. The fantasy of a simpler,
more innocent period in history fitted well with the concept of childhood as
a simpler, more innocent period in human life. Cecil Sharp sought out a type
of rural folk song that he saw as ‘the product of the spontaneous and intuitive
exercise of untrained faculties’, as opposed to ‘the conscious and intentional
use of faculties which have been especially cultivated and developed’. Similarly
children’s spontaneity and untrained faculties came to symbolise an aestheticised
ruralism which celebrated the rhythms of a country lifestyle that was fast dis-
appearing – if it had ever existed. The turn of the twentieth century saw revivals
of children’s games, maypoles, ‘folk’ songs and ‘folk’ festivals in the recreation of
a largely mythological pre-industrial past. Popular imagery of all kinds has
followed and exaggerated the trend.
(In the outer London suburb where I was brought up, carved out of the fields
and parks of the landed gentry in the mid-1930s, children, mostly little girls, still
dress up for an annual May Day festival, known locally as the ‘May Queens’. The
100 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

only time I took part, it poured with rain, and instead of dancing round the
maypole on the local common we ended up in the Village Hall in wellington boots
with navy gabardine macs over our flimsy dresses. Perhaps because it reminds me
of those childhood extravaganzas, one of my favourite postcards is a photograph
from some time in the 1920s entitled ‘Free dancing for children on Tooting Bec
common under an LCC scheme’. It shows a row of little girls in fairy dresses led,
not very freely, by a rather stout lady in a long satin dress and bouffant veil. They
point their toes and elegantly stretch their arms for the camera.)
An image of pre-industrial rural life lay behind the thinking of the free-
schoolers of the early part of the twentieth century. By the 1970s the aim was to
recreate a sense of organic community and find a creative space for children
within the inner city. For example, Colin Ward’s The Child and the City captured
the last moments before major road and office redevelopments transformed the
British urban landscape. Photographs show children playing on bomb-damaged
wastelands, hiding in disused buildings and scribbling with chalk on the paving
stones. The indulgent adult’s desire not to interfere is strongly tested as children
take risks with fire, piles of rubble and abandoned machinery, moving at the edge
of danger. The self-conscious realism of this urban imagery sought to reject the
moralism and romanticism which linked children with the rural and with nature,
but in treating the town as a space for discovery it created its own form of urban
ruralism. Children were not seen invading the centres of modernity and power.
Instead they were shown seeking out quaint customs and craftspeople at work.
The hiding-places, nooks and crannies of the inner city were for all the world like
the lanes and copses of the countryside, peopled by elderly characters with a tale
to tell. This imagery set its face against the hardness and reflective surfaces of the
new city in a nostalgia for the manipulability of the old.
By the end of the twentieth century the idea that the back streets of the
city offered spaces which children could explore seemed outrageous. The open
spaces of city and countryside had become the subject of new fears – of
ill-intentioned strangers, increasing traffic and the dangerous pressures of
modernity. The consensus was that children should be supervised beyond as
well as within the home. Readers of the concerned press now find articles on
how to protect their children in that difficult period of the school holidays.
‘Girls and boys come out to play…but where?’ headlined the Observer, adding
anxiously ‘six weeks to go before they’re back to school’. The photographs which
accompany such articles tend to be carefully framed to contain playful children
within a safe environment. ‘Children to have safe “play-zones”,’ headlined the
Independent above a photograph of two girls soaring high on chain-link swings.
The swing is a useful photographic device. A form of equipment specially
 T H E F A N TA S Y O F L I B E R AT I O N A N D T H E D E M A N D F O R R I G H T S 101

constructed for children’s play, its delicate chain can hold them fast, suggesting
both safety and energetic movement. Supervised local play areas, readers were
told, will allay parents’ fears.

Savagery and horror

Psychoanalyst Melanie Klein has described play as the central activity of child-
hood, and one with a clear purpose. ‘In their play children represent symbolically
phantasies, wishes and experiences,’ she wrote. Above another picture of a young
girl on a swing, a Council of Europe publication expanded on her view: ‘A child
of any age who resorts to play is in a sense entering a private domain – usually
secret, magic or sacred – a maintenance area in which every item is taken apart
and put together in a genuine process of creation’.
For Klein the observation of children at play was an essential part of her
pioneering child therapy. Susan Isaacs, an analyst herself and a friend of Klein,
established the Malting House School in 1924, which she saw as a laboratory
for the study of child development. She argued that if education should follow
the nature of the child, it was important to explore that nature in all its aspects.
Photographs of the children at the Malting House show them coping with
functioning equipment – often much bigger than they are – and absorbed in
their tasks. But pictures like these leave little space for the projection of adult
fantasy. Rather than feeding a nostalgia for a lost past, these children give the
impression of calmness and competence in the present world of adults.
But the psychoanalytically trained educationists of the early part of the
twentieth century were also aware of the dangerous aspects of play. (‘Here the
children’s crudities, the disorder of their emotions, their savagery even, are allowed
to show,’ wrote a contemporary of Susan Isaacs.) For the radical headmaster
A.S. Neill, playfulness was definitely not to be harnessed to the educational
process. In 1926 he founded Summerhill, ‘that dreadful school’ where children
were left to make their own choices, including the decision on whether to attend
lessons or simply to play. ‘Most of the school work that adolescents do is simply
a waste of time, of energy, of patience. It robs youth of its right to play
and play and play,’ wrote Neill. The attacks on the ‘wildness’ of Summerhill
children continued throughout the life of the school. Despite the increasing
formalisation of the education system, by the early 2000s Summerhill, now
run by Neill’s daughter, Zoe, continued to hang on by the skin of its teeth (on
20 March 2000 it appealed in the High Court against OFSTED the schools
inspectorate).
102 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

In recent years the imagery of play that is not contained within home or
school has been concerned both with dangers to children and dangers from them.
Euphoric play that takes no account of the consequences can easily topple into
equally careless forms of uncontrolled violence. The contemporary image which
matches Colin Ward’s celebration of playful children in the back streets is one
of mayhem and destruction (see Chapter 5). When in 1992 the toddler James
Bulger was abducted from a Liverpool shopping mall by two ten-year-olds,
then murdered in horrific circumstances, one of the images that dominated the
press was the terrifying face of a demonic doll. The boys were said to have been
influenced by a film called Child’s Play, whose plot heightened the irresponsible
destructiveness of play by featuring toys that run out of control. Although
it became clear that the boys had not, in fact, seen the video, an image that
horrifies rather than attracts has become indispensable to the imagery of play.

PA R T 2 : L I B E R AT I O N A N D R I G H T S

Childhood is not a good idea

The mundane facts of children’s everyday experience have meant that playful
liberatory aspirations sit uneasily with the practical demands for children’s
rights. The one promotes a vision of childhood outside all cultural constraints;
the other insists on a negotiation with culture, politics and everyday life. Yet,
as with The Family of Man exhibition, the aspiration remains for a universal
childhood which will be available for all children whatever their parents’ culture,
and will draw on their global similarities and potential freedom from entrenched
hatreds. ‘For better or worse, the world can be revolutionised in one generation
according to how we deal with the children,’ wrote Eglantyne Jebb in the after-
math of the First World War. Jebb had founded the Save the Children Fund in
1919, with the specific aim of transcending national enmities and aiding the
innocent victims of war, in particular the children of enemy countries – Germany
and Austria.
She went on to draft the first Declaration of the Rights of the Child in 1924
– but a formal international commitment to children’s rights took the best part
of a century to achieve. In 1959 the United Nations issued a Declaration, in
the form of 10 succinct principles, whose worthy preamble affirmed, ‘Mankind
owes the child the best it has to give’. Twenty years later the International Year of
the Child created a global opportunity to heighten awareness and to publicise
the condition of children worldwide. But a further 10 years passed before the
 T H E F A N TA S Y O F L I B E R AT I O N A N D T H E D E M A N D F O R R I G H T S 103

General Assembly of the UN adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
It entered into British law in 1991.
Other campaigners for children’s rights have been contemptuous of slow
negotiations and modest claims. ‘The first duty of a revolutionary is to build
a society geared to children,’ declared Children’s Rights magazine, launched in
1971 by a group of adults and children who saw children’s liberation as an
obvious companion to the women’s liberation and the radical student move-
ments of the time. For them, children should not be satisfied with taking their
place as junior partners in an adult society, they should set out to transform
that society. In its short and controversial existence, Children’s Rights attempted
to hold together a heady call for social and sexual revolution with a re-
evaluation of the nature of childhood itself. The project nearly ended in
disaster when the magazine produced a ‘Bust Book’ which advised children
to fight the police and resist arrest. It was rescued by its eminent board of
advisers, including A.S. Neill and Leila Berg, who sacked the editor and
relaunched it under a new title, Kids. They made it clear that the fatal mistake
had been for adult editors to attempt to speak from the position of children. ‘If
the Bust Book article had been written by a group of kids,’ wrote Leila Berg,
‘… it would not have been taken as a “practical guide” but as a demand to have
attention paid’.
The dangers inherent in an inappropriate confusion between adult and
child shadowed the movement. But many writers of the time continued to argue
that boundaries must be readjusted despite the risks. Only then could society be
both more free and more rational. Whereas nineteenth-century reformers such
as Mary Carpenter had struggled to have children recognised as children, the
progressives of the twentieth century pointed to those qualities children shared
with adults. Writers such as John Holt insisted that children are not different
from adults – or at least not in the ways that are commonly assumed. They are
not less conscious of their rights, nor less sensitive to disrespectful treatment.
Nor are they less able to assess a situation and make coherent decisions on their
actions. The balance between childhood defined as different from adulthood
and the ways in which children are similar to adults was up for negotiation.
If adults desired the playfulness of childhood, children should be granted the
privileges of adulthood. This was not a plea to protect an endangered childhood
but to escape from childhood altogether. ‘I decided that childhood was not a
good idea,’ wrote John Holt in the preface to his book of that name.
In this spirit, a new ‘free-school’ movement emerged in the 1970s, insisting
that an appropriate space for learning should refuse traditional demarcations.‘All
over the world school has an anti-educational effect on children,’ wrote Keith
104 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

Paton in a densely typed pamphlet which featured an angry Dennis the Menace
on its cover. He argued that schools shut off avenues of exploration rather than
opening them up. They should not be the peaceful oases envisaged by Plowden
but should be open to the surrounding world. The streets should be seen not
as a place of danger and corruption but as one offering potential learning
opportunities. Children should be free to wander where they will, invading adult
territory, entering places of work, exploring and asking questions. ‘There are
plenty of learning situations outside, and there could be more if workers inside
assisted in a mass jail break and turned their energies into making society more
educative for everyone, not just kids.’ Learning should take precedence over
economic activity, and the values of childhood should permeate society.
For some the answer was ‘alternative’ schools, in which children would be
participants as well as pupils. The White Lion Street Free School in London, one
of the more long-lasting and articulate of these, aimed to break down many
different kinds of boundaries – between holiday and term, between pupils and
teachers, between teachers and other adults who worked in the school, between
teachers and parents, and between school and the world beyond. A commitment
to children’s rights in education meant that childhood was to be a positive value
even in the school context. Children should be allowed to evolve their own forms
of expression and not be channelled into those already laid down by the adult
world. Other education experiments included free schools on the Summerhill
model, innovations such as learning exchanges, adventure playgrounds, often built
by children themselves, ‘schoolkids’’ unions, radical teachers’ groups, informal
truancy centres providing facilities for school refusers who would otherwise be
hanging around on the streets, and campaigns which aimed, in the words of a
contemporary guru, Ivan Illich, to ‘deschool society’ and reject the strictures of
institutions altogether. Children’s centres were set up in crumbling urban spaces,
often in squatted warehouses or other empty buildings, in which children could
express the playful values that had gained such a symbolic weight, and where the
heavy hand of adult guidance was restrained.
There was a prolific output of informal posters, pamphlets and magazines
produced by children themselves, with names like Braindamage, Fang, Miscarriage
(produced in Hackney) and Blazer. They were shortlived, but they shared a sense
of urgency and drama, and evolved a dynamic imagery of their own. (A ragged
pile of these magazines forms a special part of my collection, acquired through
a bookshop where I worked at the end of the 1970s. Sometimes photocopied,
sometimes stencilled, full of vigour and venom, I value this pile of magazines
as a remarkable antidote to the all-too-smooth professionalism of mainstream
imagery.)
 T H E F A N TA S Y O F L I B E R AT I O N A N D T H E D E M A N D F O R R I G H T S 105

From ‘school kids’‘ magazines early 1970s.

The calm and orderly photographs which represented the progressive class-
room (Chapter 3) were not pictures in which radical teachers and school students
could recognise themselves. There was a yawning gap between the social-
democratic documentary image and the helpless, chaotic experience of school
expressed by the rebellious pupils of the mid-1970s. Their imagery showed
the school system as mechanical and inflexible, directed towards a future that
was equally limited. ‘Schools imprison your mind and control your body…they
don’t encourage us to develop our potential but rather tame our natural
inclinations, causing total apathy in most and rebellion in very few,’ wrote the
editors of Braindamage. For them it was a system in which individuals were
reduced to mere items, crumbs from a mincing machine (the cover of Libertarian
Education), or trapped within the bars of a timetable (in Y-Front). The imagery
of prison was balanced by an energetic imagery of escape, both mental and
physical. Vanguard used a photograph of children symbolically leaping from a
classroom window.
The magazines did not totally reject school, but their demand was for ‘schools
not prisons’. They return again and again to a sense of deep injustice and impotent
outrage when adult action fails to match adult rhetoric. Despite their anarchic
streak, they are convinced that their approach is grounded in reason and justice.
Although they see themselves as reasonable, they know that in the eyes of the
school authorities this is an empty claim. Children’s demands need not be taken
seriously by those whose power does not derive from consent. In that sense
teachers’ power is bound to be arbitrary and irrational. Demands which were on
the surface trivial, such as regulated hair length and the wearing of uniform,
gained enormous significance as the centre of symbolic battles. The magazines
contain letters and anecdotes which describe routine humiliations when ‘reason-
able’ requests come to nothing. ‘Have you ever been ticked off for bringing a
106 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

paper carrier bag to school for your books because it is inappropriate or not
strong enough?’ wrote Skinners’ School third-year pupils. ‘Sometimes when you’re
at a table you’re not allowed to speak, but why can grown-ups speak?’ asked
Karen, aged 10, both in Children’s Rights 2.
The magazines are full of sexual innuendo and risqué jokes. Whatever their
quality, their existence was a challenge, an assertion of pupils’ right to address
each other publicly and to speak aloud those things which are normally giggled
over or muttered. Informal school culture was made public.

Irrationality and attitude

As children, the 1970s campaigners found that irrationality was expected of

them. They were trapped by the ways in which they were defined. One tactic
was to embrace irrationality as an appropriate expression of their situation. In
the ‘kidslib’ magazines, irrational fury and rational solutions were presented
together in a chaotic visual style. There was a need for an imagery that would
represent children to each other and, at the same time, deny to adults the
fullness of that representation. These children did not intend to gratify adults
either with their visible innocence or with Montessori’s ‘mask of seemliness’.
Instead they set out to antagonise and shock. ‘The impossible generation bites
deeper,’ declared Miscarriage. With bad spelling, scribbled drawings and disorderly
pages, adults’ view of children was thrown back at them. The magazines drew
on the language of the student movement, the proletarian image of the clenched
fist, the dream imagery of hippiedom, and above all the anarchic imagery of
children’s comics.
Comics are traditionally complicit with children’s interests. Their prices are
low so that they can be bought with pocket money, and on the whole they are
free from educational overtones. They tend to be frowned upon by adults
and forbidden in class. Their inventiveness and irreverence remain icons of
children’s refusal to be shaped into an image acceptable to adults. Over the
generations Dennis the Menace and the Bash Street Kids have come closer to
expressing children’s experience of childhood and school than many a more
respectable medium. Dennis started his disruptive career in Scotland in 1951
and has kept his appeal into the twenty-first century, successfully competing
with newer inventions. ‘A menace never changes,’ he declared in 1991, in a strip
in which he refused to abandon his striped jersey to become updated with
tracksuit and personal stereo. The characters in Beano and Dandy remain close
to the spirit of the tramps and messenger boys in the very first comics of the
 T H E F A N TA S Y O F L I B E R AT I O N A N D T H E D E M A N D F O R R I G H T S 107

1890s, inhabiting a world that is unequivocally working-class and urban. Their

one aim remains to outsmart adults and teachers. (For many years, publishers
D.C. Thomson jealously protected their characters and refused all requests to
reproduce them. But commerce conquers all. The Dennis the Menace Fan Club
was launched in 1976 and brand merchandising began. An invitation to ‘go
menacing and win a Dennis the Menace make-over for your bedroom’ turns out
to be a 2001 Safeway’s promotion for a new flavour called ‘Baked Beano’. Clearly
a menace can be tamed when promotional culture calls the shots.)
Comic-book kids traditionally take perverse pleasure in an image of child-
hood which rejects any form of attractiveness. The Bash Street Gang are weedy,
ugly or oddball. They are reverse exhibitionists, mostly boys, but Beryl the
Peril and Minnie the Minx are in a similar mould. By drawing attention to
an unacceptable surface, they reject adult sympathy and attempts at under-
standing. Their appearance is designed to repel. Their chosen image erects an

Book cover, 1979

. Magazine, 1990
s.
108 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

antagonising shield of ugliness which may keep selfhood secret within it. It
is an image which has been taken up by some children – particularly the
shaven-headed hard ones who become visible elsewhere in the imagery of
poverty and exclusion. It has also been appropriated by such pre-school
favourites as the Tweenies, with their punky hairstyles and clumpy shoes, and
by contemporary birthday cards, which often favour young toughies in the
comic-book mode.
In the books and magazines of the children’s liberation movement, the gaze
of the adult is met head on with a challenging glare. A simmering aggression
covers an underlying expectation of betrayal: the contempt in the eyes of the
Rasta child on the cover of Changing Childhood; the calculating gaze of the boy
on the cover of Children’s Rights magazine. These are looks that refuse deference;
which recognise but defy the demand for acquiescence. These children are shown
as people who, in the words of Paul Adams, have the right to live in a meaningful
world and to have a moral sense, but instead are offered ‘opportunism,
expediency, absurdity and non-participation’. The look from these pages is not an
innocent one. It claims the right to express anger and refuses any sense of guilt.
Leila Berg’s injunction to look at kids in a generous and empathetic way becomes
uneasy when children claim the right to glare back.
The assertive glare at the camera has become established as ‘attitude’ – a
multicultural, post-colonial defiance. A semi-official Brixton magazine featured
on its cover an oriental boy in a Mao cap and dark glasses. Readers were invited
to purchase ‘Attitude from Brixton to Hong Kong’. This vision of liberation
poses a dilemma of power and control which is the more acute for adults who
support its claims. For this image is anti-humanist. It does its best to reject the
comforting assumption of a shared humanity, since that assumption can all too
easily be sentimentalised or exploited. The image of Chucky, the murderous doll
from the Child’s Play films, is in the same tradition.

Participation and politics

Despite the theorising of the liberation movements, to the popular press children’s
politics simply means unruly demonstrations incited by subversive teachers.
Only corporal punishment would be appropriate discipline for such riotous
behaviour (‘I will cane these lollipop rebels,’ read one headline). But the mundane
image of the democratic committee meeting had also played an important part
in the challenge to unequal relations between adults and children. Decision-
making at A.S. Neill’s Summerhill was by school meeting, where, in theory at
 T H E F A N TA S Y O F L I B E R AT I O N A N D T H E D E M A N D F O R R I G H T S 109

least, no one’s voice would count for more than anyone else’s, regardless of
age or position. The practice was taken up by free schools such as the White
Lion. Photographs show a heterogeneous group, adults and children of all ages,
in intense discussion.
The 1979 UN Year of the Child brought the opportunity to expand definitions
of children’s rights beyond protection to include children’s participation in the
public sphere, claiming a legitimate presence in political space. It was formally
recognised that children have the right to express opinions and have those
opinions taken into account; to exercise freedom of thought, conscience and
religion; to meet with others and form associations, and to have access to and
share information. The Advisory Centre for Education (ACE) published a draft
Charter of Children’s Rights, which was grudgingly welcomed by the ‘schoolkids’’
magazine Miscarriage, which described ACE as a ‘mild, liberal group of people’.
The Charter concluded, ‘Children’s rights are no different in nature, nor do they
demand any different interpretation than is applied to the rights of adults’.
Writers, such as Bob Franklin, supported children’s right to vote. ‘Arguments
in favour of child suffrage have too frequently been ridiculed rather than
met…[but] that position is a clear violation of the principle that no individual
or group should be subject to laws which they have not participated in making.’
Pictures which accompany such arguments are sober, without the spectacular
qualities associated with childhood in other contexts. Photographs like that of a
children’s election meeting which accompanied Bob Franklin’s Guardian article
are far less gratifying to adult fantasies, depriving the viewer both of the heady
opportunity to identify with a liberatory childishness or of an equally gratifying
opportunity for violent denunciation.
By the 1980s, although arguments for children’s liberation had come to seem
hopelessly excessive and outmoded, the campaign for children’s rights had made
definite changes to public perceptions of childhood. The alternative-education
projects and small-circulation magazines had closed down, no longer viable in
the changing political climate. Nevertheless, children’s voices had gained some
legitimacy. Long-standing organisations in the field of child protection and child
welfare sought to produce images of childhood that would reflect the shift from
an adult-oriented welfare approach to a child-oriented participatory one. In 1989
Saatchi and Saatchi produced a series of role-reversal posters for the NSPCC.
To persuade parents to pay greater attention to their children, they placed
undersized adults on the laps of oversized children. The point was made without
taking the risk of appealing outside the family structure.
Children’s participation has become more widely accepted, and there are
now more spaces where they are freed from the responsibility of being childish
110 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

for the benefit of adults. Newspaper presentations and news broadcasts are
more likely to seek out children’s opinions. To encourage them, Save the Children
issued a leaflet advising journalists on interviewing children respectfully (‘tell
[the photographer] to avoid clichéd camera angles…’). In 2000 Stirling Council
published Children as Partners: A Guide to Consulting with the Very Young.
Echoing Leila Berg, nursery staff are reminded that consultation is not enough.
‘Once we have learned to listen to children, we must be prepared to change our
own thinking as a result of what they have told us.’
In the ‘Rosendale Odyssey’, pupils between five and eight at Rosendale Infants
School, South London, collaborated on a multimedia presentation of their lives,
bringing together the 22 different languages spoken at the school. Visitors to the
website were invited to click on a classroom and meet children whose pictures
of themselves were inventively presented using photoshop technology; ‘Me and
my brother eating breakfast’ has a snapshot crayoned over with specs drawn in,
one eye mauve and the other yellow. Some children provided family histories
with photographs of parents and grandparents, others showed pictures of the
things they like: ‘This is my bedroom. These are my toys. I have 100 Barbies.’
Children who visited the site were invited to e-mail the participants and develop
a dialogue.
The Independent newspaper featured portraits of schoolchildren from 12 to
18, whose opinions on morality were headed ‘public sleaze is blamed for moral
decay’. The comments echoed the schoolkids’ magazines of the 1970s, but
reflected the changing climate: ‘[My parents] have never said “no” to anything
really and if they did I’d probably go and do it because they would be stopping
me’. This shift in attitude means that adult fantasy may be defused by a different
type of realism – not the traditional documentary realism in which an unseen
observer peeps in on activities which would otherwise go unobserved, but a
participatory realism, making space for a social group which has previously
had no access to public modes of expression. Inevitably, children’s meanings
are expressed using linguistic tools honed over the centuries by adults, but it
is becoming clear that children are able to articulate a perspective which is
distinctive and particular to them as they gain greater access to the public arena.
 T H E F A N TA S Y O F L I B E R AT I O N A N D T H E D E M A N D F O R R I G H T S 111

Childhood is a good idea – perhaps

When the UN finally accepted the Convention of the Rights of the Child in 1989,
posters showed not the glowering directness of the 1970s liberation movement,
but a cheerful multiplicity. UNICEF imagery includes a poster in which cultural
markers such as skin colour or a scrap of clothing identify groups of children
gathered together within the shape of a globe, and a greetings card with multi-
cultural children clambering on a globe as if a climbing frame. Drawings by
children illustrate the children’s version of the Convention as the dilemmas of
conflicting cultures are smoothed over by the promise of childhood.
The multicultural image was taken up most strikingly by Oliviero Toscani
in his advertising for the clothing company Benetton, which changed its name,
under his influence, to ‘United Colours of Benetton’. Prominent in crowded
town centres, railway stations and on the sides of buses, posters showed children
of many races, selected for the contrast, photographed in high-quality saturated
colour. This engaging image added a level of excess to UNICEF multiculturalism,
in the context of challenging Benetton images which turned racial stereotypes
back on themselves: a black child as a devil, with a white child as an angel; a black
woman breastfeeding a white baby.
In the spirit of The Family of Man, both these commercial and rights-based
presentations of multicultural harmony look to a presentation of difference
without conflict. But this is precisely where the image of childhood once more
runs up against its limits. Childhood is sought as that space beyond conflict,
before those rigid differences have taken hold, as a point where ‘humanity’
aspires to an impossible escape from ‘society’ and the bland but optimistic
universal image smoothes over adult problems. (One advertisement claimed
‘there’s one place where there’s no racism’, with a picture of babies from many
races.) But children’s lives are embedded in the structures and imperatives of
culture, gender and language. When the British press showed photographs of
terrified young girls from the Catholic community in north Belfast forced to
walk to school between crowds of screaming Protestants, both the parents who
insisted on walking through opposition territory and those who fought to defend
that territory were demonstrating in defence of what they saw as the historic
rights of the children of their particular community. An effective demand for
children’s rights must deal with the prejudices and historical lumber of hatreds
and exclusivity that accompany such divisions.
112 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

NOTES ON CHAPTER 4

p.95 The little ones leaped: William Blake, ‘The Nurse’s Song’ from Songs of Innocence
and Experience, printed and illustrated by Blake in 1789 and 1794. ‘The Nurse’s
song’ is illustrated by a circle of dancing children under a lurid red sky. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1970, p.24.
sand dunes in Bechuanaland: photograph: Nat Farbman.
race across the cobbles: photograph: Pal-Nils Nilsson.
splash into an expanse of water: photograph: Edward Steichen, curator of the
exhibition.
p.96 ‘a camera testament’: Carl Sandberg (1954) The Family of Man, New York:
Museum of Modern Art, introduction, p.4.
‘placing Nature above History’: Roland Barthes (1957/1993) ‘The great family of
man’, in Mythologies, London: Vintage, p.100. Interestingly, when the exhibition
was shown in Paris it had the word ‘great’ added to its title.
repeatedly re-negotiated over the twentieth century: a few examples can illustrate
how the concept of (childish) play has been re-appropriated at different points
in the century: alternative education projects of the 1920s, such as Caldwell Cook
(The Play Way, 1920) and A.S. Neill (see below); the development of ‘play
therapy’ by the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein and its expansion in the aftermath
of World War II (see ‘The psycho-analytic play technique: its history and
significance’, in Juliet Mitchell [ed.] [1986] The Selected Melanie Klein,
Harmondsworth: Peregrine, and D.W. Winnicott [1980] Playing and Reality,
Harmondsworth: Penguin); the idea of play as itself learning, expressed by
the Plowden Report on Primary Education of 1967 (see Chapter 3); the aim
of youth culture and the ‘underground’ to embrace ‘childish’ values’ in, for
example, Richard Neville (1970) Playpower, St Albans: Paladin; the ‘children’s
liberation’ movement of the 1970s, which made much of playfulness as a right
of all children; and finally the contemporary appropriation of playful values
for adults, both as part of a ‘new work ethic’ and as the basis of a consumer
economy (Rebecca Abrams,‘Let’s all go to and play’, New Statesman, 13 November
2000).
two psychotherapists: Lydia Jackson and Kathleen M. Todd (1946) Child Treatment
and the Therapy of Play, London: Methuen, p.8.
p.97 a value which adults seek to reclaim: Richard Neville (above), p.224, quotes
Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: ‘childhood is man’s indestructible goal’.
See also Frank Furedi (2001) Paranoid Parenting, Harmondsworth: Penguin, on
‘the colonisation of the world of children by adults’.
Closely observed children: Michael Armstrong (1980) Closely Observed Children,
the Diary of a Primary Classroom, London: Writers and Readers.
Iona and Peter Opie: (1959/2001) The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, New
York: New York Review of Books.
a form of repressive surveillance: John Tagg (1988) The Burden of Representation,
London: Macmillan.
the movement reveals the child: Time-Life (1973) Photographing Children, New
York: Time Inc., pp.92–93.
p.98 Leila Berg: (1972) Look at Kids, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
‘How can human beings emerge’: Paul Adams (1971) ‘The Infant, the Family
and Society’, in Paul Adams et al., Children’s Rights, London: Elek, p.79.
Rebecca Abrams: (1997) The Playful Self, London: Fourth Estate, and in New
Statesman, 13 November 2000.
 T H E F A N TA S Y O F L I B E R AT I O N A N D T H E D E M A N D F O R R I G H T S 113

p.99 Big Issue: Shelley Fannell, ‘Playtime’, Big Issue, 3–9 July 2000. Photographs:
Amyand Tanveer.
Elaine Constantine: ‘Girls on Bikes’, The Face, 1997: ‘It’s one of my favourite
images. I wanted to create an image that expressed the excitement that comes
with adolescence and the independence it brings. Adolescence is all about
seeing yourself as an individual … I loved Polly Banks’ DIY styling – it’s all
about these girls experimenting. The bikes served to give an extra sense of
things being out of control or reckless.’ Quoted in ‘Life’, Observer ‘Magazine’,
30 June 2002.
a time of rural de-population: Alun Howkins (1986) ‘The discovery of rural
England’, in Robert Colls and Philip Dodd (eds) Englishness: Politics and Culture
1880–1920, London: Croom Helm.
the actuality of poverty: Anna Davin (1996) Growing Up Poor: Home, School and
Street in London 1870–1914, London: Rivers Oram Press; Hugh Cunningham
(1991) Children of the Poor, Oxford: Blackwell.
cult of childhood: Peter Coveney (1967) The Image of Childhood, Harmondsworth:
Peregrine, Chapter 10; Jaqueline Rose (1984) The Case of Peter Pan, or the
Impossibility of Children’s Fiction, London: Macmillan.
Cecil Sharp: writing in 1907, quoted by Dave Harker,‘May Cecil Sharp be praised?’,
History Workshop Journal, 14, Autumn 1982.
an annual May Day festival: Patricia Holland (1991) ‘The old order of things
changed’, in J. Spence and P. Holland (eds) Family Snaps: the Meanings of
Domestic Photography, London: Virago.
p.100 Free dancing for children: from the Hulton Deutsch collection. For a discussion
of fresh-air schemes for children see Valerie Walkerdine (1984) ‘Developmental
psychology and the child centred pedagogy: the insertion of Piaget into early
education’, in J. Henriques, W. Holloway, C. Urwin, C. Venn and V. Walkerdine,
Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation, Subjectivity, London:
Methuen. On Margaret Macmillan, pioneer of nursery schools and advocate of
‘Night Camps’ and Open Air Nurseries, see Carolyn Steedman (1990) Childhood,
Culture and Class in Britain: Margaret Macmillan, 1860–1931, London: Virago.
Colin Ward: (1977) The Child and the City, London: Architectural Press.
Girls and boys come out to play: Observer, 28 July 1996.
‘Children to have safe “play-zones”’: Independent, 3 August 1999, Photograph:
John Voos.
p.101 ‘In their play children represent’: in Mitchell (1986) above, p.64.
A child of any age who resorts to play: Marie-Jose Leres-Richer (1979) ‘The
Child at Play’, Forum, Council of Europe, February.
Susan Isaacs: Willem van der Eyken and Barry Turner (1969) Adventures in
Education, Harmondsworth: Allen Lane.
‘the children’s crudities’: van der Eyken and Turner (1975) above, p.43.
‘Most of the school work’: A.S. Neill (1968) Summerhill, Harmondsworth:
Pelican, p.38. See also pp.67–70, on play. That Dreadful School was the title of
one of Neill’s earliest books, published in 1936. On 21 February 2000, Le Monde
reported that its French translator had lived off the proceeds of Summerhill for
the previous 10 years.
p.102 a film called Child’s Play: Patricia Holland (1997) ‘Living for libido or Child’s
Play 4: the imagery of childhood and the call for censorship’, in Martin Barker and
Julian Petley (eds) Ill Effects, the Media/Violence Debate, London: Routledge;
Bob Franklin and Julian Petley (1996) ‘Killing the age of innocence: newspaper
reporting of the death of James Bulger’, in Jane Pilcher and Stephen Wagg
114 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

(eds) Thatcher’s Children: Politics, Childhood and Society in the 1980s and 1990s,
London: Falmer.
Childhood is not a good idea: John Holt (1975) Escape from Childhood: the
Needs and Rights of Children, Harmondsworth: Penguin. ‘I have come to feel
that the fact of being a “child”, of being wholly subservient and dependent,
of being seen by older people as a mixture of expensive nuisance, slave and
super-pet, does most young people more harm than good’, p.15.
negotiation with culture: P. Alston (ed.) (1994) The Best Interests of the Child:
Reconciling Culture and Human Rights, UNICEF-ICDC, Oxford: Clarendon
Press; Jo Boyden (1997) ‘Childhood and the policy makers; a comparative
perspective on the globalisation of childhood’, in Allison James and Alan Prout
(eds) Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the
Sociological Study of Childhood, London: Falmer, p.196.
Eglantyne Jebb: quoted by Yvonne Roberts in ‘The Rights of the Child’, Observer,
30 September 1990. See also Helen Jones (2000) Women in British Public Life
1914–50: Gender, Power and Social Policy, Harlow: Pearson Education, pp.79–82.
p.103 Other campaigners for children’s rights: see Stephen Wagg (1996) ‘Politics,
childhood and the new education market’, in Pilcher and Wagg (eds) above.
‘If the Bust Book article had been written’: Leila Berg (1972) Kids, no 1; see also
Colin Wringe (1981) Children’s Rights, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Mary Carpenter: see Geoffrey Pearson (1983) Hooligan: a History of Respectable
Fears, London: Macmillan, pp.179–82.
‘All over the world’: Keith Paton, The Great Brain Robbery, privately published and
circulated by the author in the early 1970s.
p.104 adventure playgrounds: Jack Lambert, an inspired creator of adventure play-
grounds, photographed children constructing weird and wonderful structures.
His account is in Jack Lambert and Jenny Pearson (1974) Adventure Playgrounds,
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Ivan Illich: (1971) Deschooling Society, London: Calder & Boyars; Paulo Freire
(1972) The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Harmondsworth: Penguin; Everett Reimer
(1971) School is Dead, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
p.105 Libertarian Education: no 11, April 1973.
Y-Front: no 3, 1972.
p.106 ‘A menace never changes’: Beano, March 1991.
Beano and Dandy: were both launched by D.C. Thomson in Dundee in 1937.
first comics of the 1890s: George Perry and Alan Aldridge (1967) The Penguin
Book of Comics, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
p.107 ‘go menacing’: Weekend, Brighton, 20 May 2001.
p.108 Changing Childhood: Martin Hoyles (ed.) (1979) London: Writers and Readers.
Children’s Rights: no 1, 1972.
‘Attitude from Brixton to Hong Kong’: Brixton Village, vol. 2, no 2, April 1994.
‘lollipop rebels’: headline in Evening Standard, 17 May 1972, quoting Charles
Kuper, Head of Emmanuel School, London, on the occasion of a schoolchild-
ren’s demonstration in Trafalgar Square.
p.109 a heterogeneous group: pictures of Summerhill taken by a 16-year-old pupil,
Joshua Popenoe, illustrated his book (1970) Inside Summerhill, New York:
Hart Publishing; The White Lion Street Free School Bulletin published minutes
of its meetings, as well as photographs. On Wednesday 12 November 1980,
decisions ranged from ‘no more football in the basement’ to ‘the cook is
responsible for calling lunch’ and ‘James agreed to show round a visitor from
Melbourne, Australia’.
 T H E F A N TA S Y O F L I B E R AT I O N A N D T H E D E M A N D F O R R I G H T S 115

Miscarriage: no 2, Winter 1971.

‘Arguments in favour of child suffrage’: Robert Franklin in Guardian, 9 July 1986;
Bob Franklin (ed.) (2002) The New Handbook of Children’s Rights: Comparative
Policy and Practice, London: Routledge.
p.110 ‘tell [the photographer]’: Sarah McCrum and Lotte Hughes (1998) Interviewing
Children, a Guide for Journalists and Others, London: Save the Children, p.26.
Children as Partners: A Guide to Consulting with the Very Young (2000) Stirling
Council. Photographs: John McPake.
‘Rosendale Odyssey’: this interactive presentation made by pupils between five
and eight at Rosendale School ran at the Photographers’ Gallery in London in
March and April 1997.
portraits of school children: Independent, 16 January 1996.
p.111 Benetton: but see Les Back and Vibeke Quaade, ‘Dream utopias, nightmare
realities: imaging race and culture within the world of Benetton advertising’,
Third Text, 22 1993.
girls from the Catholic community: Protestants demonstrated violently against
Catholic parents taking their children to the Holy Cross Primary school, as the
route was through streets from which they feared Protestants would be driven
out. A typical headline was ‘Riots as children run the gauntlet of hate’, Daily
Express, 5 September 2001. Photographs showed terrified schoolgirls protected by
parents and surrounded by a barrier of police officers with protective helmets,
visors and riot shields. Observer, 9 September 2001, extracted three faces of
fearful youngsters from photographs by William Cherry, Kim Haughton and
Justin Kernoghan.
An effective demand for children’s rights: Jo Boyden writes, ‘the human rights
discourse tends to detract from careful ethnography, as often as not calling
forth simplistic explanations and solutions, many of which are inappropriate or
ineffectual’. Boyden (1997) above, p.220.
 5
No future: the threat
of childhood and the
impossibility of youth

PA R T 1 : B A D B O Y S

Public space

In 1993 a low-key, blurry image was reproduced across the British media, captured
from a frame of a security camera. It came to stand for a radical reorganisation
of the relations of looking and being looked at which occurred in the final decade
of the twentieth century; part of a drama of safety and danger, surveillance and
protection, in which the concept of childhood played a central role – a drama
enacted physically on the streets and reflectively in the media. The picture shows
a busy precinct peopled with hazy figures. In the foreground, back to the camera,
a tiny child is apparently holding the hand of another child, their relative sizes
made clear in comparison with a shopper who is passing by. This is the abduction
of two-year-old James Bulger, pictured as it happened. The picture records the
beginning of a sequence of events which ended with the toddler’s horrific
murder by a pair of ten-year-old boys. It was one of a series of frames released
by Liverpool police and enhanced by a local photographic agency at their request,
so that the figures would stand out more clearly. As it was used and re-used
across the national press, it was worked on further, sometimes cropped, sometimes
coloured; sometimes the low resolution was further enhanced; sometimes the
figures were highlighted by a frame within the frame. The original frame has the
date and a code number superimposed across its base, and the illuminated name
of a shop, Mothercare, is clearly visible across the top, acting like a heading to
the picture. And yet this image represents everything that caring mothers dread

116
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Courtesy of Mercury Agency, Liverpool.

the most. The events and the deluge of publicity and debate which surrounded
them became pivotal in the iconography of childhood, pushing contemporary
attitudes to children in a darker, more pessimistic direction.
The original frame was automatically recorded by a camera set up to protect
the interests of retail businesses in a public shopping mall. Millions of such frames
are produced daily by security cameras across a nation which is increasingly
apprehensive of crime and disorder – including disorderly children. In con-
temporary towns and cities there is a marked difference between types of public
space and the ways in which children may be present in them. A suburban
street refers to the powerful concept of ‘home’ (see Chapter 2), and children
supposedly play there safely under the watchful eyes of their parents. (A website
is devoted to ‘Home Zones’, streets which are traffic-free and child-friendly. The
home page shows children between about four and eight years old filling an
urban street with their scooters and tricycles under a brilliant sun with just
a hint of mock-tudor in the gabled houses.) By contrast, the desolate spaces of
inner-city estates – sometimes surrounded by ageing houses, sometimes by the
repetitive balconies of 1960s tower blocks – are seen as unprotected and fraught
with dangers. A third type of busy urban space, the shopping mall, is apparently
open and welcoming to all, with its covered pedestrian arcades and brightly
lit windows full of goods. However, although they masquerade as public space,
118 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

shopping malls are usually gated areas, heavily protected by security staff and
cameras. The retailers and businesses which control them seek to monitor the
actions of all who come within their boundaries. This is definitely not a space
where unattended children are welcome, for it is a space given over to a single
activity, shopping, and children rarely have the economic status of independent
shoppers. If they are simply hanging around they are probably up to no good –
or they may themselves be at risk.
The image of James Bulger being led away by an older boy with murderous
intent came to stand for both of these late-twentieth-century fears. It represented
all those trusting young children who are in deadly danger when unattended in
public places, and all those vicious and dangerous youngsters who pose a threat
to society itself. The image was all the more powerful as it froze a moment
before young James was attacked, a moment when the crime could have been
prevented. The electronic eye of the security camera, cold and neutral, became
a chilling indication of the world of the 1990s – an uncaring world, where
surveillance is total, but disengaged. The automatic recording has none of the
claims to artistry or journalistic judgement of a human photographer. Hence,
although the abduction was observed, it was not seen. No one made sense of
the image, and the recording did nothing to prevent the crime. Unlike Cartier-
Bresson’s ‘decisive moment’ – the moment when all the elements of a scene,
driven by chance, come together to make the visually perfect picture which a
skilled photographer can capture and transform – the moment captured by this
frame has nothing to distinguish it from the moment before or the moment
after. The quality which gives it its unbearable poignancy is precisely its own
unknowingness. It is only with hindsight that the viewer knows what is to come.
The almost unimaginable scenes of the murder itself, which were sometimes
hinted at and sometimes partially described in the press reports, provide a dark
undertow to the understanding of this low-key image. The ironic truth is that
the apparatus of surveillance was as concerned to protect Mothercare as it was
the child it unblinkingly recorded. The camera was scrutinising the scene with
a commercial eye, for, in this semi-public space where children should not be
without an attendant adult, a caring maternal eye was hardly appropriate.

Evil

‘He was so evil they called him Damien,’ headlined the Daily Star next to a
school photograph of Robert Thompson, reporting the trial of the two accused
ten-year-olds. The school photograph is the second type of low-key, empty image
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which came to characterise public outrage and deep perplexity around the event.
Was there anything to be deduced from this simple image? After all, millions of
children have school photographs posed exactly like this one. How could such a
young, and – if the photograph is anything to go by – apparently ordinary child
carry out such an atrocity? Like the electronic image, the school photograph is
one which Marshall McLuhan described as a ‘cool’ image, giving up little to the
viewer, waiting to be invested with meaning. But placed alongside the ‘hot’
image of the scowling Chucky from the horror video the boys were thought to
have seen (see Chapter 4), the popular press had few doubts about the meaning
of this picture. It was an indication of pure evil. And if such a bland expression
could show that Thompson was evil, why not other children, whose expressions
are equally disingenuous and inscrutable? ‘We used to believe in the innate evil
of childhood and we used to accept that it was the moral responsibility of all
adults to keep it in check…By dismantling the concept of evil we’ve effectively
disarmed ourselves…,’ argued columnist Janet Daley, and a mass of voices echoed
her. Indulgence and child-centredness had gone too far, they claimed. The potential
for evil springs from the very nature of childhood itself. Do not be taken in by
youth and the appearance of innocence (the Daily Mail headed a 16-page special
‘The Evil and the Innocent’). The concept of evil transcends and breaks free
from social explanations. It can be called up as a final explanation, an end point,
challenging rationality, a fact impossible to go beyond. The murder of James
Bulger gave a new lease of life to this ancient view of childhood. ‘The simple
truth is that…we are staring pure evil in the face. Wickedness has existed since
the dawn of man,’ declared the Star’s leader. When Robert Thompson and Jon
Venables were described as irremediably evil, the mere statement was enough to
express the horror felt, justifying hysterical condemnation and excluding any
attempt to explore the history or the context of the event. Evil behaviour was
separated out. To seek social explanations or consider context was seen as excusing
the deed or undervaluing the abhorrence to which it gave rise. Attempts to
discuss a continuum of violent behaviour or a culture of violence were firmly
rejected. The concept of evil was mobilised to legitimise hatred and vengeance.
When manifested in living children, ‘evil’ must be dealt with at the level of
daily banality, and children’s violent potential is largely repressed in a realist
image of childhood. But ‘evil’ has a lively existence in fiction, fantasy and fairy
stories. Lord of the Flies, a powerful book and a disturbingly convincing film,
documented the systematic loss of ‘civilised’ values amongst a group of prep-
school boys stranded on an island. Its naturalist mode suggested that civilisation
is only a thin veneer over the natural savagery of childhood. But the sense of a
supernatural force driving the demonic excesses of childish behaviour is let rip
120 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

in the horror genre, particularly in films such as The Exorcist and the Damien
series, in which the devil is born as a child. It was this fantastic imagery of
horror that was harnessed to the case of the boys who killed James Bulger. It can
be seen in the reference to Damien, but above all in the hysterical condemnation
of Child’s Play 3, a rather mild horror video in which a demonic doll is invested
with supernatural powers of destruction. The popular press felt free to indulge
to the full these mythical fears. In the broadsheets the horror tended to be
deflected into the depressive drama of the surveillance camera and the simple
school photograph.
Robert Thompson and Jon Venables (whose identities were only made public
because the trial judge decided to lift the restrictions on naming juveniles) spent
the next eight years in secure units for young offenders. When the parole board
declared that they were rehabilitated and should be released rather than move on
to adult prisons, a renewed outcry echoed through the popular press, accompanied
by threats of vengeance. The boys were to be given new identities, and their
appearance was not to be made public. The only new photographs of them to
be released were also from 1993, and showed their frightened faces in police
mug-shots. Their youth and childishness were emphasised by the measuring
chart behind them, showing both to be hardly more than four feet tall. But
within days of the announcement of their impending release, a picture which
purported to show one of them was published on the Internet, apparently with
the intent to provoke revenge. Once more the image was a frame snatched from
a surveillance camera, captured during day-release from the unit. Once more
the electronic medium provided an image invested with neither spectacular nor
artistic qualities, which depended for its power on its seedy mundanity and
its availability for illicit circulation and use. The insistent power of this low-
resolution visual style had come to express a post-modern anomie which brings
it close to the excesses of horror. In comparison, realist documentary seems over-
studied and its humanist concerns inadequate.

Bad children and the savage streets

‘The street is a playground for bored youngsters,’ headlined the Guardian, dis-
approvingly, next to a night-time colour photograph of a couple of adolescents,
hands in pockets, outlined by the glare of a street light. Here, the values of play
have been turned upside down and a vision of a violent world of childhood opens
up. This new resonant image is dominated by young boys – but increasingly it
includes girls – who have escaped the constraining institutions of home and
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school, and burst unwanted into the lawless public spaces of contemporary towns
and cities. Their presence is seen as illegitimate and threatening, and a series
of public narratives have highlighted the violence and the dangers. In 1996,
headmaster Philip Lawrence was stabbed to death by a gang of youths as he tried
to protect a pupil outside his school gates; in 2000, ten-year-old Damilola Taylor
was found bleeding to death on a South London estate; in 1994 six-year-old
Rikki Neave was found dead near his home in Peterborough. Reports continue
of children driven to suicide through bullying; of children who terrorise local
estates, stealing cars, breaking windows, starting fires and terrifying elderly
inhabitants; of gangs, whose rivalry is based on territory or race; of a growing
drugs and gun culture and of suburban youth whose violence is casual and
random. The mythological construction of childhood is interwoven with a cruel
reality as newspaper narratives tell of children who are both damaged and
damaging; of children who are aggressive, impertinent and out of control. As
always, the childhood of these children is firmly constructed in opposition to
adulthood, but now the spontaneity and irrationality of childhood, instead of
being playful, has a savage and dangerous quality – giving adults the automatic
right to call for punishment rather than understanding (Prime Minister John Major
offered the opinion that society ‘should condemn a little more and understand a
little less’). An energy which in other contexts could be constructed as childish play
is here displaced and re-directed. Such reports are struggling with a dilemma
over the concept of childhood itself, trying to keep the qualities of innocence
and violence firmly separated so that they do not contaminate each other.
Although it is often described as a new phenomenon, a sense of danger from
children – particularly children from underprivileged social groups – has a long
history in public discourse. In 1980 the Sun identified a ‘vicious generation’
which rejected any form of control. ‘Terror is a modern fact of life. Increasingly
Britain is a nation that walks in fear of its young,’ it declared under the headline
‘Aggro Britain’. In 1977 the Daily Mirror described a ‘Savage Generation’, and
pictured young Geoff and Freddie, with a blank stare at the camera, posing in
front of a brick wall indicating the inner-city wasteland. ‘These young savages
emerge as iron-hard, unfeeling boys and girls without any sense of moral values
or sexual values, without any ambition or desire to be worthwhile citizens or to
be part of a decent society,’ wrote the Mirror’s star columnist Marje Proops.
Geoffrey Pearson has traced back to the seventeenth century recurring outcries
deploring the wildness of youth ‘today’, when they move beyond the control of
their families. A 1910 report speaks of ‘the gamins of our large towns [who] live
a bandit life, away from their homes, free of all control’. Such complaints were
invariably accompanied by regrets for a less turbulent adolescence ‘twenty years
122 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

ago’. It is thought that ‘the manners of children are deteriorating, that the child
of today is coarser, more vulgar, less refined than his parents were,’ as the
Stipendiary Magistrate for Brighton wrote in a 1898 report, the year the word
‘hooligan’ came into common usage. Pearson records how disturbances character-
ised bank holidays in particular, when free time led to a celebration that could
all too easily turn into a riot. And he notes the repeated dismay at the extreme
youth of these uncontrollable youngsters. ‘It is melancholy to find that some
parents are not ashamed to confess that children of 7 or 8-years-old are entirely
beyond their control,’ declared the 1898 report. The sentiment was echoed a
century later as the imagery continued to stress the youth of the wrongdoers: ‘He
is not yet 4ft tall and still only 7 years old. But for Anthony Scott it may be too late.
His mother is convinced he will end up in prison.’ Roy Hattersley noted children
as young as 11 amongst those running wild on a Sheffield estate. In a feature
headed ‘The no hope kids: joy-riding on Britain’s worst estate,’ the Mail on Sunday
review pictured a child, a woolly hat pulled well down over his face, a cigarette
in his mouth, clutching the wheel of a car with its starting wires exposed. Other
photographs in the feature show young boys pushing a stolen car or leaping in
front of the flames, in a spectacular image of mayhem and destruction.
The image of such youngsters is most threatening when they are pointing a
weapon – which may be a toy, or may be terrifyingly real – at the camera/viewer
and apparently at the whole of adult society. A frame from an American home
video showed Andrew Golden, aged six, pointing a handgun. ‘Five years later he
used his knowledge when he and his 13-year-old cousin, Mitchell Johnson, opened
fire on schoolmates in Jonesboro Arkansas, killing four pupils and a teacher.’ The
cover of a thoughtful book on the effect of the conflict on the children of Northern
Ireland shows a young boy wearing a gas mask, clutching a home-made petrol
bomb. (The image became an iconic representation of Bloody Sunday, the
traumatic occasion in 1972 when British paratroopers fired on a civil-rights march,
killing 13 people. More than one photographer pictured the boy, and the image
was used in a mural towering over the Bogside area of Derry 30 years after the
event. ‘The brawling children of Ulster…have passed prematurely from the
innocent games of childhood to the deadly serious business of street warfare,’
wrote the Belfast Newsletter.) Publications must be careful about the identities
of children they show, especially if they are accusing them of misbehaviour
or criminal activity, so the mask or scarf is a handy device which undoubtedly
adds to the menace of the image. ‘Balaclava Boy’, the 11-year-old delinquent who
terrorised a Hartlepool estate, cavorted in a ski-mask in front of the news cameras.
His image, sticking up two fingers to the world, was taken up by the national
press and used by a local rock band, the White Negroes.
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Frame from CCTV security camera, courtesy of North News and Pictures and Guardian.

(The combination of weapon and mask reminds us of the controversial

photograph by the artist Tierney Gearon, in which two naked children point a
banana at the camera. This was one of the pictures which almost brought about
the closure of an exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery in 2001. Although the public
debate focused on the nakedness of the children and the fetishistic implications
of the mask, in my view what made them disturbing was their link to this key
image of violent children – a directly threatening gesture at the viewer, but with
identity concealed, so that understanding or empathy is denied.)
‘We have never seen anything like them before,’ wrote journalist Linda Grant,
not of delinquents but of ordinary schoolchildren. The inscrutable faces that
illustrated her article seemed almost as difficult to read as those hidden behind
a balaclava or a mask. The blank look at the camera may equally imply a threat,
a contest between viewer and viewed, challenging the adult desire to get behind
the alienating surface. The confrontational glare which was one aspect of children’s
liberation – produced as a refusal of adult condescension – has, in this newer
image, changed to something cooler and more intense.
When a 1996 survey recorded the social attitudes of 12- to 19-year-olds, the
headline results judged ‘the nation’s young to be very, very boring’. However, the
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parade of characters and stories in the press continues to demand excitement

rather than boredom, and condemnation remains more exciting than under-
standing. ‘Bad’ children are news. Discussing the dubious ethics of picturing
children who had been excluded from school, John Carvel wrote of ‘media scrums
outside schools’ because ‘school indiscipline had become a hot topic’. ‘To be a
“naughty” child today can mean national media exposure.’ When in March 2002
a court lifted the ban on naming misbehaving youngsters, the Mirror pictured
Ben, aged 17, and Robert, aged 15, on its front page above the caption ‘VILE’. As
well as losing their anonymity, these boys have exchanged the familiar blank
expression for one of amused contempt (no doubt provoked by the Mirror’s
photographer). In the Mirror’s words, ‘The lawless teenagers are laughing at us all’.
One of the first acts of the ‘new’ Labour Government of 1997 was the
attempt by Jack Straw, Home Secretary, to return youngsters who were out of
place on the streets to their proper place in the home. The policy was to be ‘zero
tolerance’, and the power of curfew over children under 10 was given to local
authorities. On three council estates in South Lanarkshire ‘from 8 o’clock every
night teams of five police officers will tour the streets, stopping unsupervised
young children and “escorting” them home if they are deemed to be a danger’.
A typical photograph showed youngsters in the long shadows of the evening,
oblivious of a billboard announcing ‘“Yes” to curfew on kids’. In practice, the
order was never used. Even so, in 2001 the powers were extended to children
under 15, and the condemnatory language employed by many journalists in the
2000s continued to echo that employed by Marje Proops in the 1970s. ‘The
sexual revolution, the permissive society and the abolition of marriage…have
created this terrifying generation of murderous, morally blank wolf-children,
fatherless, undisciplined, indulged one minute then brutalised the next,’ wrote
Peter Hitchens in the Daily Mail.

Punishment and parental control

But, as we have seen (Chapter 2), the restoration of imaginary family values is
not the answer, since the image of the bad child has also invaded the home.
Pictures of scowling children, screaming children, and children in mid-tantrum
are no longer taboo. Difficult children and the problems of parental control are
the subject of television programmes and features in parenting magazines and
the concerned press. Tom Pilston’s picture of a screaming boy in a supermarket
trolley was captioned, ‘Give in, cop out – a mother’s confession’. ‘What are we
doing to our children?’ asked the accompanying article. ‘Bringing them up to
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express themselves freely in a way we never could, or failing them by refusing to

teach them how to behave?’ The question of physical punishment and whether
smacking should be made illegal has occupied many a column inch. Family love
may itself legitimate violence.
In today’s commodified image of the middle-class family, to admit mayhem
at home may give rise to sympathy rather than condemnation. The outpouring
of commercial and advice-based literature for parents transforms the problems
that go along with parenting into an acceptable lifestyle debate. Next to the
picture of a charming three-year-old on the cover of The Parents’ Guide are various
indications of the contents of the magazine. Amongst them, ‘Tantrums. How to
keep your cool’ figures prominently. This is not exactly a caption to the picture
– but immediately the sweetness of the child is no longer sugary, and the enigma
of her expression becomes a practical issue. Within this context, no stigma is
attached to an inability to cope. The image is seen as a useful one, educational
and functional, quite different from the frightening vision of radical violence.
But everyday naughtiness can imperceptibly merge into extreme behaviour,
and fear of difficult children is a tangible undertow in the public discourse around
families. Within the family context, ‘understanding’ is permitted. In contrast to
the ‘evil’ or ‘vile’ wolf-children who roam the streets, truly bad behaviour at
home may be recategorised as a medical syndrome or a response to intolerable
experience. Magazines and newspapers tell of a variety of psycho-social problems,
peaking in teenage years, including hyperactivity syndrome, unattachment
syndrome, attention deficit syndrome. Children’s suicide rates are increasing, as
are depression, eating disorders and drug dependency. In their pioneering work
on child abuse, Henry and Ruth Kempe pointed out that some abused children
may become ‘demon children’: negative, aggressive, hyperactive, with the power
to overturn the order of family life. Such devilish children can only be fully
expressed by fictional characters – in films such as The Exorcist, The Omen or
Carrie, in which children exercise demonic and destructive powers. In this safely
fictionalised realm, the adult hatred of children and the adult fear of children’s
hatred can both be fully expressed. Marina Warner has demonstrated the ways
in which fairy tales and illustrations deal in both of these dangerous emotions.
Violence and uncontrollability are part of childhood too.
The available image of the bad child expresses an anxiety around the growing
assertiveness which is now a recognised part of childhood. The obverse of the
brazen, anti-authority attitude that commentators deplore is the uncomfortable
fact that children themselves are now insisting that they must be taken seriously.
Society has not adjusted to children’s confident knowledge, to its strengths and
its heterogeneity – many of the feared groups are from ethnic minorities. Real
126 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

worries about an uncertain future may be displaced onto an exaggerated image

of violent children. The sense of despair that such children are beyond both
explanation and redemption echoes an adult powerlessness in a world where the
vision of childhood leading to a better future is no longer convincing.

PA R T 2 : T H E I M P O S S I B I L I T Y O F YO U T H

No future: the impossibility of youth

[The delinquent] is a little stunted man already – he knows much and a great deal too
much of what is called life – he can take care of his own immediate interests. He is self
reliant, he has so long directed or misdirected his own actions and has so little trust
in those about him, that he submits to no control and asks for no protection.

So wrote the reformer Matthew Davenport Hill in 1855. In the second half of the
nineteenth century, the aim was to get the children of the poor off the streets,
where they had a precocious independence, begging, scavenging, working as
crossing-sweepers or errand boys or at other odd jobs, as well as thieving and
creating general mayhem. Proper legal protections and suitable institutions had
to be created so that these children, too, could have a childhood. Hill concluded,
‘He has consequently much to unlearn – he has to be turned again into a child’.
With the first glimmerings of twentieth-century prosperity after the Second
World War, working-class young people returned to the streets in a different
spirit, and once more the category of ‘childhood’ came under challenge. Theirs
was a different sort of precocity, but it was equally deplored by respectable society.
The ‘teddy boys’, with their sharp expensive suits, greased hairstyles and assertive
ways were the first of the post-war spectacular youth cults, bent on leisure and
consumerism. The neon and pinball machines of a seedy nightlife complemented
the street corners and crumbling inner cities of this post-war phenomenon. An
imagery of glitter and decay accompanied the attractions and moral ambiguity
of a new youthful exploration of public places.
The public imagery of childhood has tended to take itself for granted. Only
in recent years has it reflected on or commented on its own construction. Not
so with the imagery of ‘youth’. Since the emergence of the teddy boys, the
pressure to redefine adolescents as ‘youth’ rather than ‘child’ has made this
liminal state highly visible and problematic. In a system of meanings which
creates rigid categorical differences, ‘youth’ is a non-category, nothing but the
dividing line between two well-defined states – adulthood and childhood. It
hovers on the margins of both, pulled first in one direction, then the other,
so that, instead of being clearly distinguished from each other, the opposing
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categories appear uncertain and fluctuating. In ‘youth’, indications of childhood

are no longer appropriate, whereas those of adulthood are withheld. But, para-
doxically, these people who should logically be absent, since they hardly exist,
have become strikingly visible. Again and again we have been invited to scrutinise
them and consider the problem of their non-identity. Pictures of youth have
been examined and dissected, catalogued and discussed, as if the image itself
could give some clue to the nature of an elusive phenomenon. One way of
understanding this prolific imagery is to see it as a set of strategies for coping
with an impossible group and its all-too-possible freedoms. At the same time its
very impossibility has made it a point of identification for adult fantasy in its
promise of an escape from the strictures of adult rationality. It can stand for
opposition, for transgression and for inexpressible freedoms.
There is a point in their lives when young people gain the right to be on the
streets, and at that point they have emphatically drawn attention to themselves
in a variety of ways – with rowdy behaviour, youth performance and carnival-
esque values which all too easily topple into riot and disorder. Whether it is a
group of raucous young girls in strappy dresses on their way to a nightclub, or
anti-globalisation protesters holding up the traffic in fanciful costumes, ‘youth’,
it appears, has not one manifestation but many. Newspapers have periodically
provided their readers with visual inventories of young people on the streets.
Strange exotic types have been identified, their characteristics analysed, their
tastes in music and dance noted, their lifestyles distinguished each from the
others. The tone has ranged from pleasurable amazement to something just
short of moral outrage.
‘Kids, just look at them. Rings through their noses, hair like porcupines.
Men with earrings, girls in boots. Bloody kids! Who do they think they are?’
exclaimed the Daily Mirror. The pictures which accompanied this outpouring
responded to the spectacular values presented by their subjects and dwelt on the
drama and wit of the costume, offering the rich and pleasurable surface of
fashion photography. This was an exercise in decoding, a search for an under-
standing of youth through a reading of the signs – the tattooed cobweb, the
spiked hair, the boots and braces – every item claiming significance. In similar
presentations across the years, young people have been catalogued, sometimes
with the aid of diagrams and charts, sometimes with photographs which attempt
to record and pin down in a series of frozen moments the ever-changing
language of self-presentation. The hunt was on for the weirdest of the weirdies,
the craziest of the head-bangers, the challenges to social norms. In the 1980s there
was the white make-up, blank expressions, tight leather, chains and hedonism of
the ‘goths’; in the 1990s the more earthy style of the eco-warriors caught the
128 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

headlines, living in tree houses to protect ancient woodland and tunnelling

underground to sabotage developments which would damage the environment.
‘Swampy’ became an icon for a generation, pictured emerging from a muddy
tunnel, his hair in his eyes, a momentary hero. The jangling of different styles
offers a pleasure Roland Barthes described as ‘babel’. In Barthes’s cataloguing of
the pleasures of the text, ‘babel’ is a carnivalesque space where incoherence can
momentarily be indulged. We can gasp with amazement, experience a frisson of
horror, or laugh at the sheer cheek of it.
Growth out of childhood involves a challenge to adults’ unlimited right to
look and an unwillingness to accept the controlling gaze. And yet here is youth,
forcing itself into view, demanding the attention of the lens. In Dick Hebdige’s
words, these young people are ‘hiding in the light’. They engage in a visible
negotiation with the powerful adult gaze, presenting themselves ready-made, as
an image. The image may be designed to amuse, or it may deliberately set out to
alienate the viewer, meeting adult indulgence with adolescent contempt, and
searching for those signs that will shock the most. Punk took these tendencies
to the extreme with its safety pins, swastikas, bondage gear, jackets embroidered
with ‘Belsen was a gas’, facial distortion and two fingers at the camera. Bodily
messages set out to challenge all that humanitarian society claims to value in

.
News of the World, 21 November 1982
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favour of the dark side of human history. The fashion for piercing – through the
ears, the nose, the tongue, the navel, the nipples – focuses a lack of respect for
social values onto the body itself, challenging the flesh to maintain its integrity.
The drama of an impossible identity cannot be limited by mere bodily
constraints. These people close to childhood fling into the face of the viewer
everything children are supposed to be ignorant of and adults have learnt to
express in carefully licensed ways. Knowledge suppressed in childhood is visible
across the bodies of those who declare themselves not-child.
One genre of presentation has indulged a rhetorical attempt to recapture
disaffected young people, and to reduce their challenge to mere bravado, returning
them to the childhood they seem so anxious to shake off. This involves picturing
them together with their parents. In a News of the World presentation, a father
was captioned ‘Proud of a punk’, even though his spike-haired daughter wears
a T-shirt that proclaims ‘No future’. Since fathers’ futures are conventionally
expressed through their children, the daughter’s visible denial of that future
introduces a bizarre contradiction. The theme of ‘No future’ can both be cata-
clysmic and point to an eternal present.
This type of imagery is not at the expense of its subjects. There is a visible
collaboration, even if sometimes an uneasy one, between those who present
themselves as performers and the photographers who enhance the performance
in an entertaining way. But although the outrageous appearance seduces the
camera, something slips away from behind the spectacular front. The young
performers solicit adult attention, then refuse its implications. By making them-
selves visible they make it clear that they cannot be known. Here there are no
secret childhood moments for adults to peep in at. If young people cannot
control the way their image is presented, they can at least make it both
challenging and difficult to decipher. The role of the observer is itself called into
question. An early youth chronicler, T.R. Fyvel, wrote of the insecurity of the
teddy boys. But one of his informants warned him, while decked in his eye-
catching gear, ‘No one can look at the Boys and laugh and get away with it’.

From working-class resistance to spoilt brats

The claim to be defined as ‘youth’ rather than ‘child’ runs alongside the potent
narratives of children who have rejected childhood in a variety of less acceptable
ways. Headlines such as ‘Affluent lifestyle leading children into temptation:
“Drink, drugs and gaming are on the increase”’ and ‘So old yet so young, pity our
lost children’ introduce stories of premature sexual awareness, too much money
130 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

to spend, precocious knowledge, dangers from new technologies and involvement

in a sexualised pop culture which somehow summarises all these frightening
attributes. The image of clubbing – ecstatic youngsters crowded together, waving
their arms in a state of collective frenzy – rejects the dignity of the youth parade
and puts aside the mask and the cool performance in exchange for an image of
abandonment, not so different from the domestic image of children’s parties.
For many left-wing sociologists and other writers in the 1960s and 1970s, a
revalidation of working-class culture was the background for the identification
of working-class youth as a special category. They saw a broader political and
social purpose behind the apparent wildness of the youngsters. Unruly
behaviour could be understood as resistance against the oppressive limits of
both generation and class. Even when the young people themselves were unaware
of it, solidarity and purpose could be recognised. The harsh disciplines of
the working class, with its traditions of conformity and self-organisation,
sustained a set of collective myths which gave dignity and a sense of identity.
Misbehaving youths could unknowingly represent their class, even as they
rebelled against their elders and the world of respectability. But this class
configuration was dissipated as the heavy industries disappeared during the
1970s and 1980s. The trade unions weakened, male unemployment became
endemic in certain areas, and the white working class was replaced by what
was now described as an ‘underclass’, including second- and third-generation
ethnic minorities. The nineteenth-century distinction between the ‘deserving’
poor – who earn their poverty – and the ‘undeserving’ poor – who are mere
malingerers – was resurrected. A forward-looking image of struggle and class
advance was replaced by the listless image of unemployment and despair. Ways
of making sense of young people’s, particularly young boys’, unruliness changed
too. There was a much greater readiness to condemn, and less inclination to
explain or understand.
Youth cultures had arisen just at the point when increasing prosperity
meant that young people were becoming a new target for marketing strategists.
The creation of specific youth styles meant that visible class differentials could
be reduced, and minority styles – particularly that of black Caribbean youth –
could be absorbed into a media-conscious market. When Phil Cohen identified
a ‘youth spectacle’ and Dick Hebdige defined punk as a post-modern style, a sort
of glamour had been added to young people on the borders of delinquency. But
as the 1980s became the 1990s, youth spectacle and youth resistance drifted
apart. The spectacle settled into a commercialised pop culture and ‘resistance’
became more difficult to identify, while, as we have seen, the image of young
delinquents became grimmer and more frightening.
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Courtesy of Bournemouth University Student Union, 2002.

In 1988 an article in the advertisers’ journal Campaign claimed that ‘the

teenage rebel is dead’ and that ‘Thatcher’s youth’ were caring and family-
orientated. They looked forward to designer clothes, a successful career and a
flashy car. By 1990 this reassuring picture had collapsed and a different sort of
moral panic had ensued. ‘Your son is 15. He lost his virginity two years ago,
swills Carlsberg Special Brew and slouches in front of the television watching
EastEnders.’ The affluent conformists had become ‘spoilt brats’, reported the
advertising agency Gold Greenlees Trott. By 2001, hedonism swept all before it.
A ‘junior rave outfit Teen Dreem’ had a nationwide network of venues for
under-18s only, from which adults were firmly excluded.

‘Othering’: degradation or nice kids

Adult society has employed many strategies to win back the right to look, to tear
off the mask, to get into the club and to return young people to the disciplines of
the childhood they have been rejecting with such impertinence. I shall consider
three such strategies: a recourse to the imagery of the ‘primitive’ and the ‘tribal’;
a degradation of the child in the image; and the construction of an imagery of
‘nice kids’.
Young people are frequently described as ‘exotic’, and youth culture has
often been compared to that of a strange tribe with customs and rituals
incomprehensible to ‘civilised’ understanding. In the Sunday Times, Ian Jack
reported that his friends reacted to his interviews with young people ‘as though
one had returned from a long stay with the Marsh Arabs’. The approach is not
new. In his survey of the reporting of delinquency and youth crime, Geoffrey
132 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

Pearson notes a centuries-old history of such ‘othering’ language, and Hugh

Cunningham tells of nineteenth-century children described as ‘hottentots’ and
‘street arabs’. There is an unavoidable continuum between children and adults
which makes it difficult to describe young people as completely alien, but
‘exotic’ peoples can be presented as irreducibly different.
To look at the exotic is to look as a tourist, a travel photographer or an
anthropologist. It is to look as a ‘civilised’ traveller at ‘uncivilised’ indigenous
peoples, as a coloniser at the colonised. ‘Primitive’ tribes continue to be a regular
ingredient of travel entertainment, and they continue to be presented as simpler,
more emotional and less rational (even when they have cannily reconstructed
themselves for the tourist trade). This vision remains woven into the language of
racial subordination. A ‘tribal’ way of life may be spectacular and fascinating, but
it may also be considered amoral, degraded and brutal. It is no coincidence that
young people are regularly described as ‘tribal’ – with all the primitive licence that
the word has come to imply. In 1956 the Daily Mail was outspoken in describing
new forms of ‘deplorable’ popular music ‘which surely originated in the jungle. We
sometimes wonder whether this is the negro’s revenge’ (a ‘revenge’ which was
amply recuperated in later music styles – including ‘jungle’). In 1980 the Daily Star
was more cautious about racist language, but the impression was similar. ‘The
“tribes” of youngsters who dance the night away across Britain all have their own
distinctive style – in music, attitudes, dress…The beat goes on from midnight
to breakfast time, inspiring complex and energetic feats of twisting, leaping and
high kicks.’ Even as they fight their way out of childhood with sophisticated
irony, such language puts young people firmly back in their place, as their
modern commentary on urban life is translated into primitive ritual. Studied
self-presentation is rewritten as the least self-conscious of ‘natural’ behaviour.
Equating young people with the exotic ensures that they retain their child-
ishness, and it also ensures that ‘exotic’ peoples continue to be attributed the
qualities of childhood. Civilisation’s ‘other’ remains necessary to civilisation’s
sense of its itself. Just like childhood itself, the image of those who are apparently
beyond the constraints of the modern world can become an imaginary repository
for qualities which ‘civilisation’ and adulthood must repress. It is an image with
a long and ignoble history, and in twenty-first-century multicultural Britain
such attitudes have dangerous consequences.
A second strategy for dealing with the impertinence of youth has been to
produce an imagery which seeks to degrade its subjects. By the late 1970s, the
use of drugs, which had given rise to the psychedelic dream of the 1960s, had
become a sign of youth excess which could lead only to disaster. The impossible
position young people are expected to occupy could result in early death – ‘No
Advertisement, Manpower Services Commission, Youth Opportunities Programme, 1978.
134 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

future’ at its most literal. A series of youthful performers acted out this scenario
in public. ‘I want to self-destruct myself,’ Sid Vicious is quoted as saying. ‘Look
at my arms. That’s a bottle scar from when I cut myself. Look at my chest…I’ll
probably die before I’m 25. But I’ll have lived the way I wanted to.’ His death was
evoked by other young people. ‘Charlie reckons he will be dead by his 21st
birthday,’ reported the Daily Mirror in a 1980 ‘youth issue’, ‘and he’s happy to
know he’ll die a skinhead. “I want to die like Sid,” he says.’
Self-destruction and the decaying body of the drug-taker apparently con-
firmed the despair which lay behind the claim to the ecstatic pleasure of being
outside social categories, neither adult nor child. The huddled bodies and
downcast eyes of the Daily Mirror’s ‘Shock report’ of December 1985 were echoed
in the Health Education Council’s widely used advertisement showing a pale
and wasted young man, ‘Heroin screws you up’. By contrast with its jaunty 1983
feature ‘Bloody kids’, the Mirror’s report on the ‘Junk generation’ presented a
typology of despair. This time it introduced ‘the dosser, the runaway, the racist,
the hooligan, the thug, the rapist’ in imagery which sternly refused any playful
collaboration with its subjects. It sought to portray ‘the depths of hell’. The
language which accompanied the pictures used a bitter vocabulary of rejection:
‘Joey Lamb is trash. A junk kid littering a junk world.’ These young people ‘are
difficult to sympathise with and’ – once more – ‘impossible to understand’.
In previous years the Daily Mirror had produced issues which, in a mood of
humanist realism, had presented a sympathetic view of youth unemployment,
recognising that, in real life, many youngsters simply fell between the cracks of
society rather than placing themselves outside in a deliberate act of refusal. But
the image of degradation has a more powerful audience appeal than that of
mere social disadvantage. In the late 1970s, government advertisements to
promote its Youth Opportunities Programme (YOP) used pictures showing
young people in dustbins, thrown aside like so much garbage. By the end of the
1980s, that metaphoric image had been overtaken by reality. Newspapers now
carried reports of teenagers begging in railway stations, sleeping in cardboard
boxes and sheltering in shop doorways as the problem of homelessness was
added to that of unemployment. These young people were on the streets, not
asserting their right to use those spaces but because there was nowhere else for
them to go. It was an image recuperated by more fortunate youngsters, in what
Angela McRobbie described as a ‘dramatically “dirty” visual style’, the fashion
for ragged clothing and matted hair which evolved in the climate of
Thatcherism, ‘as young people staged “homelessness” or “the end of welfare”’.
Addiction and degradation does not only affect the poor. By the final years
of the twentieth century many young people had abandoned a dramatisation of
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poverty for a visual style based on designer labels and a hedonistic commitment
to leisure and pleasure. But however sleek their self-presentation, the narratives
of youth have continued to reveal the underside of the image. The chilling
possibility that youth excess leads to early death has created images that are even
more shocking, as they indulge a new, intrusive realism. They include a
photograph of 18-year-old Leah Betts, in a hospital bed with tubes in her nose,
dying of an ecstacy overdose, and the pictured body of 21-year-old Rachel
Whitear, the syringe with which she had injected herself with a fatal dose of
heroin still in her hand. Both pictures were released by the girls’ parents, in an
attempt to draw public attention to the abuse of drugs.
Possibly the most effective strategy for bringing the image of youth under
control has been a search for ‘nice kids’, even within the youth spectacle. Ripping
away the mask may bring the ‘real’ teenager under public scrutiny. ‘Are they really
as horrible as they appear?’ asked the News of the World, and, perhaps surprisingly,
gave the answer ‘No’. ‘Underneath those mad mohican hairdos, startling make-
up and way-out clothes are typical teenagers.’ When a quieter, more ‘realistic’
photographic mode forces the image of young people back into the mundane
world of trivial concerns, a much more reassuring view emerges. Particularly in
the local press, where the subjects of the pictures and the purchasers of the
paper are often the same, many photographs accept the ordinariness of young
people. Unadorned by excessive make-up or fancy dress, they accept the gaze of
the camera in a relaxed, if slightly tentative, way. Their challenge is defused, but
the image has retreated from that mythological realm in which adulthood and
childhood continue to confront each other in a never-ending drama.

Riots and stunted demons

‘Everyone was having a pleasant morning here. Mums and Dads were sitting
outside with their children enjoying the sunshine when these hooligans started
running all over the place. It frightened everybody,’ reported the Daily Express
of a ‘Day trip to terror’. On that bank holiday afternoon in 1980, ‘children’ who
were sitting peacefully with their families were terrified by people at the limits
of childhood, ‘hooligans’, ‘young troublemakers’ who had escaped parental
control and started running all over the place. Adolescent anomie, youth
entertainment and the delights of the youth parade – all these must be seen
against a background of periodic and increasingly apocalyptic reports of youth
disorder. Fears that are hinted at, dramatised or parodied by the youth parade,
become brute facts when ‘youth’, which symbolises all that is chaotic and
136 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

irrational, seems to throw off all constraint and act out its dreadful potential.
From the ‘mods and rockers’ confrontations of the 1960s to the anti-capitalist
demonstrations of the 2000s, from the inner-city riots that characterised recent
decades to the periodic resurgence of football hooliganism, these most dramatic
of public narratives have put the image of youthful riot at their centre.
Central to these dramas is the image of the crowd – young people gathered
together in an undifferentiated, unstructured group, moving in unpredictable
directions, no longer children but hooligans running all over the place, carried
along by a euphoria similar to that of the clubbing image but now characterised
as ‘violence’. Feverish reporting casts these young people as objects of intemperate
abuse and mortal fear. They are ‘undisciplined, prejudiced and arrogant hooligans,
dead set on overturning order, reason and free speech’. They are wreckers, young
thugs and a threat to our sanity. They are ‘stunted demons, emerging from the
shadows with throwing arms raised’. (Pearson records the use of the word
‘stunted’ over and over across the years. As with the shocking smallness of the
two boys who killed James Bulger, the smallness of these children adds to the
awfulness of their actions.) They are animals, beasts. ‘This dog is an extension
of my right arm,’ one police officer told the Daily Express in its account of the
1980 bank holiday riot, ‘It’s animal against animal’. The language pushes against
the limits of humanity itself, provoking without examining questions about the
division between humans and beasts and about forms of human behaviour
which go beyond the margins of the tolerable.
The language of the tribal, the primitive and the savage gained a new signifi-
cance when black youth played a prominent part in the urban riots of the 1980s.
‘St Paul’s, revolt of the lost tribe,’ was how The Observer headlined the Bristol
disturbances of 1980. The Mirror wrote of ‘Tribal Warfare’. ‘England’ was regularly
invoked as the epitome of civilisation, the antithesis of uncontrol. ‘This is not
England. It’s just madness,’ a policeman told the Daily Express after the Broadwater
Farm riot in 1985. Blackness, primitiveness and a lust for violence were ideas
which came together in an easy slide from metaphor to description. ‘Many
experts predict that life will only change for Britain’s Blacks by bloodshed,’ wrote
Jean Richie in the Sun. ‘Amazingly, some would even welcome it.’
Although later pulled back and knitted into the continuing flow of the
narrative, in the imagery of riot certain hectic moments seem to arrest time
itself and to stand for something beyond. Photographs search for this moment
of action, the dynamism of movement, the ‘throwing arm raised’, waiting for the
rioter to clutch the petrol bomb or the looter to smash the window. Devices
to enhance the newspaper presentation include outlining a figure engaged in
dramatic action, and pushing back the edges of the frame to include as many
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events as possible. In one notable example, a high-angle picture of a Brixton

street – police behind their riot shields at one end and youths ‘with throwing
arms raised’ at the other – spread across the front and back pages of the Daily
Mirror, effectively wrapping the newspaper. Fire, dust and melee play an
important role, in a landscape of broken windows and burning buildings and
vehicles. Colour printing has meant that the searing orange/red of the flames
has dominated more recent reports.
The image of riot is the most extreme of the images of escape from the
mundane world of adult rationality. Safe in their armchairs, readers may take
vicarious pleasure in the drama, in the experience of shock, and even in
condemnation. But the chaos is rapidly pulled back into the flow of the narrative
as the theme becomes the familiar one of control. The tactic is twofold: to reassert
authority within the frame, and to use the news photographs themselves as
evidence of crimes committed. ‘If you know ’em, SHOP ’EM,’ headlined The
People after the poll-tax demonstration of March 1990, above mug-shots of
rioters enlarged from news pictures. Readers are invited to become players in the
drama, as collaborators in reasserting public order and adult values.
Within the photographic frame itself, order is seen to be restored. The
imagery fragments the mobile crowd as photographers follow the police moving
in to make arrests. When escape attempts take extreme forms, the visible
repression may be violent. One of the most familiar images that accompany
narratives of trouble on the streets is that of a young person, often black,
struggling in the arms of several police officers. It is an image which detaches an
individual from the mass and demonstrates their subjection to punishment.
Youth is finally put in its place. ‘A few moments before he was confident and
aggressive. Now they drag him away screaming for Mummy.’
‘He has to be turned again into a child,’ wrote Hill in 1855, and respectable
society in the ensuing hundred and fifty years has echoed his sentiments. The
problem has been that disorderly, irrational behaviour, unacceptable to adults,
always on the verge of becoming dangerous and violent, lingers as a defining
quality of childhood itself. The idea of the innate evil of childhood may have
taken a new form, but it has not been abandoned.
138 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

NOTES ON CHAPTER 5

p.116 Public space: Allison James, Chris Jenks and Alan Prout (1998) Theorising
Childhood, Cambridge: Polity, Chapter 3, on childhood in social space. See also
Virginia Morrow (2002) ‘Children’s rights to public space: environment and
curfews’, in Bob Franklin (ed.) The New Handbook of Children’s Rights:
Comparative Policy and Practice, London: Routledge.
a low-key, blurry image: Sarah Kember (1998) Virtual Anxiety: Photography, New
Technologies and Subjectivity, Manchester: Manchester University Press, Chapter
3. The image was used by Nicholas Mirzoeff (1999) to typify the visuality of the
contemporary world at the very beginning of An Introduction to Visual Culture,
London: Routledge.
p.117 a public shopping mall: Rachel Bowlby (2000) Carried Away: the Invention of
Modern Shopping, London: Faber.
‘Home Zones’: www.homezones.org.
p.118 ‘decisive moment’: Henri Cartier-Bresson (1952) The Decisive Moment, New
York: Simon and Schuster. Apparently, the reason this frame was selected was
that this was the frame in which the toddler appeared to be holding the hand
of the older boy.
‘He was so evil’: Daily Star, 25 November 1993.
p.119 Marshall McLuhan: (1964) Understanding Media, London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, Chapter 2, ‘Media hot and cold’.
Chucky from the horror video: Patricia Holland (1997) ‘Living for libido or
Child’s Play 4: the imagery of childhood and the call for censorship’, in Martin
Barker and Julian Petley (eds) Ill Effects, the Media/Violence Debate, London:
Routledge.
‘We used to believe in the innate evil’: Janet Daley, quoted by Yvonne Roberts,
New Statesman, 3 December 1993.
‘The Evil and the Innocent’: Daily Mail, 25 November 1993. See Bob Franklin
and Julian Petley (1996) ‘Killing the age of innocence: newspaper reporting of
the death of James Bulger’, in Jane Pilcher and Stephen Wagg, Thatcher’s
Children: Politics, Childhood and Society in the 1980s and 1990s, London: Falmer.
‘The simple truth is’: leader from Daily Star 25 November 1993.
daily banality: Hannah Arendt’s influential characterisation of evil as banal was
expounded in (1964/1994) Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of
Evil, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
fantasy and fairy stories: Marina Warner (1998) No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring,
Lulling and Making Mock, London: Chatto and Windus.
Lord of the Flies: (UK, 1963) Dir. Peter Brook. Based on William Golding’s 1959
novel (New York: Capricorn). Phil Scraton comments, ‘What an incredible
irony this represents given the apparently insatiable appetite that much of the
adult, patriarchal world has for violence, brutality, war and destruction’. Phil
Scraton (ed.) (1997) ‘Childhood’ in ‘Crisis’? London: UCL Press, p.164.
p.120 the horror genre: Julian Petley (1999) ‘The Monstrous Child’, in Michelle Aaron
(ed.) The Body of Perilous Pleasures, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
The Exorcist: (US, 1973) Dir. William Friedkin.
Damien series: The Omen (US, 1976) Dir. Richard Donner; Damien: Omen II
(US, 1978) Dir. Don Taylor. ‘The antichrist who got rid of the whole cast of The
Omen, now, as a teenager, starts on his foster parents. Once was enough,’ was
the disrespectful comment in Halliwell’s Film Guide, 7th edition 1989, London:
Paladin.
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renewed outcry: ‘The faceless killers freed into a world intent on seeking
revenge…No matter where they go, someone will be waiting, says James’s
mum’, Daily Express, 23 June 2001; ‘These high-handed, out-of-touch judges are
wrong, wrong, wrong’, Sunday People, 14 January 2001.
close to the excesses of horror: which itself took over the casual, low-key visual
style with The Blair Witch Project, purporting to be an amateur movie made
with video cameras.
‘The street is a playground ’: Guardian, 9 December 2000. Photograph:
Christopher Thormond.
p.121 suburban youth: ‘Bromley: Teenage yobs hold a reign of terror over suburban
streets; Residents are too scared of youths to leave their homes’; ‘Help us name
and shame them’ included a series of frames from a CCTV camera on a no 261
Metrobus, as it was vandalised by a pair of young boys. News Shopper, 30
January and 27 February 2002. Thanks to Victoria Ruffle for showing me these
references.
John Major: February 1993, quoted in Barry Goldson (1997) ‘Children in trou-
ble: state responses to juvenile crime’, in Scraton (ed.) (1997) above, p.130.
‘vicious generation’: Sun, ‘Aggro Britain’, 26 August 1980.
blank stare at the camera: see Chapter 4.
‘These young savages’: Marje Proops, ‘The savage generation’, Daily Mirror, 19
September 1977.
Geoffrey Pearson: (1983) Hooligan: a History of Respectable Fears, London:
Macmillan. ‘the gamins of our large towns’ is quoted from a 1910 government
report on p.58; ‘the manners of children are deteriorating’ and ‘It is melancholy
to find…’ are quoted from an 1898 Howard Association report, Juvenile
Offenders, on pp.54–55; for the origins of ‘hooligan’, see p.74.
p.122 ‘He is not yet 4ft tall’: Sunday Times, 22 September 1991.
Roy Hattersley: Guardian, 9 December 2000.
The no hope kids: Mail on Sunday, ‘Night and Day’, 19 November 1995.
Photographs: Jez Coulson.
Andrew Golden, aged six: Independent, 27 March 1998.
the children of Northern Ireland: Morris Fraser (1973) Children in Conflict,
Harmondsworth: Penguin. Cover photograph: Clive Limpkin. On p.22 Fraser
quotes newspaper comments from these early years of the Northern Irish con-
flict: ‘The parents who see them going berserk must surely discern that this is
the Irish tragedy. It is profoundly tragic that the children of Ulster can no
longer be called innocents.’ Daily Mirror, 9 August 1972.
towering over the Bogside: photographed by Kelvin Boyes, Observer, 27 January
2002, on the thirtieth anniversary of Bloody Sunday, 30 January 1972. In that
context, the boy is presented as a defender of his community, against the incur-
sions of the police and the British troops, who are seen in the background of
the mural.
‘The brawling children of Ulster’: Newsletter, 19 April 1971. Quoted by Fraser
(1973) above, p.22.
‘Balaclava Boy’: Guardian, 15 May 2000; other examples include ‘Asian teenage
gangs’, Evening Standard, 13 November 1996.
p.123 Tierney Gearon: Jason Bennetto, ‘Saatchi photographs are not obscene, says
CPS’ and ‘Nudists join the show as Saatchi’s carnival reopens’, Independent,
16 March 2001.
‘We have never seen anything like them’: Linda Grant, Guardian ‘Weekend’,
6 January 1996. Highgate Wood schoolchildren photographs: Mike Smith.
140 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

a 1996 survey: young people’s social attitudes survey, sponsored by Barnardo’s

reported in Guardian, 19 March 1996. Eighty-two per cent of those surveyed
said they had been the victims of crime.
p.124 John Carvel: Guardian, ‘Defiant face of class yob’, 8 November 1996 quotes the
Press Complaints Commission Code of Practice: ‘Journalists should not nor-
mally interview or photograph children under the age of 16 on subjects involv-
ing the personal welfare of the child in the absence, or without the consent of a
parent or other adult who is responsible for the children…Children should not
be approached or photographed while at school without the permission of the
school authorities.’ If the boy had appeared before a juvenile court, ‘his
anonymity would have been protected by law’.
‘The lawless teenagers’: Mirror, 20 March 2002.
the power of curfew: an intriguing insight into the pragmatics behind such deci-
sions came from Observer columnist Nick Cohen, who suggested that Jack Straw
had declared himself in favour of curfews in an off-the-cuff response during an
interview with Cohen about crime prevention policies. Introducing them was then
a face-saving strategy. ‘Guilty as charged’, Observer, 6 January 2002. For children’s
own views on curfews and public space, see Virginia Morrow (2002) above.
‘from eight o’clock every night’: Guardian, 24 October 1997. Photograph:
Murdo Mcleod.
Peter Hitchens: quoted by Johann Hari, ‘Yah boo to a Daily Mail myth’, New
Statesman, 23 September 2002.
‘Give in, cop out’: Independent, 24 September 1997.
p.125 The question of physical punishment: Christina M. Lyon (2000) Loving Smack
or Lawful Assault? A Contradiction in Human Rights and Law, London: Institute
for Public Policy Research. See Chapter 6.
The Parents’ Guide: May/June 2001.
psycho-social problems: Michael Rutter and David Smith (1995) Psychosocial
Disorders in Young People, London: John Wiley and Sons; Peter Shrag and Diane
Divoky (1981) The Myth of the Hyperactive Child and Other Means of Control,
Harmondsworth: Penguin, on what they describe as the ‘invention’ of child
behaviour disorders in the 1970s.
Henry and Ruth Kempe: (1978) Child Abuse, London: Fontana, p.50.
The Exorcist, The Omen: see above.
Carrie: (US, 1976) Dir. Brian de Palma.
Marina Warner: (1998) above; (1994) Managing Monsters, London: Vintage.
p.126 ‘[The delinquent] is a little stunted man already’: quoted by Harry Hendrick
(1990) ‘Constructions and reconstructions of British Childhood; an interpre-
tive survey 1800 to the present’, in A. James, and A. Prout (eds) Constructing
and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Study of
Childhood, London: Falmer, p.43.
they had a precocious independence: Anna Davin (1996) Growing Up Poor:
Home, School and Street in London 1870–1914, London: Rivers Oram Press;
Hugh Cunningham (1991) Children of the Poor, Oxford: Blackwell.
p.127 promise of an escape: Stanley Cohen and Laurie Taylor (1978) Escape Attempts:
the Theory and Practice of Resistance to Everyday Life, Harmondsworth: Pelican,
a work which they describe as ‘profoundly self-indulgent’, and which came out
of the authors’ studies of crime, deviance and youth cultures.
‘Kids, just look at them’: Daily Mirror, 25 April 1983.
This was an exercise in decoding: Dick Hebdige was the first to propose a semi-
otics of youth styles in Subculture: the Meaning of Style, London: Methuen,
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1979. Since then, analysing sub-cultures has become a staple of the popular
press and academic literature.
‘goths’: for example Daily Star, ‘Weirdies!’, 29 May 1980. Photograph: Simon
Pythian.
p.128 ‘Swampy’: eco-campaigner Daniel ‘Swampy’ Hooper became famous in 1997 for
his part in campaigns against the construction of a major by-pass in Devon and
the extension to Manchester Airport by spending days in a tunnel under the
sites. ‘Anti-election special: Swampy for Prime Minister!’, Time Out, 30 April–
7 May 1997.
Roland Barthes described as ‘babel’: Roland Barthes (1976) The Pleasure of the
Text, London: Jonathan Cape, pp.3–4.
Dick Hebdige’s words: (1988) Hiding in the Light, London: Routledge.
swastikas: Hebdige quotes a punk asked why she wears a swastika. ‘Punks just
like to be hated,’ she replied. Hebdige (1979) above, pp.116–17.
‘Belsen was a gas’: song by the Sex Pistols; see Hebdige (1979) above, p.110.
p.129 ‘Proud of a punk’: News of the World, 21 November 1982.
the insecurity of the teddy boys: T.R. Fyvel (1963) The Insecure Offenders,
Harmondsworth: Pelican, p.36.
‘Affluent lifestyle leading children into temptation’: Louise Jury, Independent,
23 September 1996.
‘So old yet so young’: Express on Sunday, 24 August 1997.
p.130 many left-wing sociologists: Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson (eds) (1976)
Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Cultures in Post-war Britain, London:
Hutchinson; Geoff Mungham and Geoff Pearson (eds) (1976) Working Class
Youth Culture, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. For a historical account from
the point of view of working-class young people, see Stephen Humphries
(1981) Hooligans or Rebels? An Oral History of Working Class Childhood and
Youth 1889–1939, Oxford: Blackwell.
what was now described as an ‘underclass’: see Zygmunt Bauman (1998) Work,
Consumerism and the New Poor, Buckingham: Open University Press.
Phil Cohen: ‘Aspects of the Youth Question’, privately published pamphlets, 1970s.
punk as a post-modern style: Dick Hebdige (1988) and (1979) above.
p.131 ‘the teenage rebel is dead’: India Knight, Campaign, 13 May 1988.
‘Your son is 15’: Rufus Olins, ‘Enter the superbrats, children of the 90s’, Observer,
7 October 1990 discusses Spoilt Brats, the report by Gold Greenlees Trott.
Teen Dreem: Kirsty Robinson, ‘Reach for the stars’, Guardian ‘Guide’, 9–15 June
2001.
‘a long stay with the Marsh Arabs’: Ian Jack, Sunday Times ‘Magazine’,
November 1981.
p.132 ‘hottentots’: Cunningham (1991) above.
they have cannily reconstructed themselves: many examples include the organ-
isation of Maasai villages, with dancing displays put on for tourists, in Kenya;
the development of Aboriginal paintings, music and artefacts across Australia.
‘deplorable’ popular music: quoted by Pearson (1983) above, p.24.
‘The “tribes” of youngsters’: Daily Star, 26 May 1980; see also ‘Two tribes go to
war’, Guardian, 30 April 2001, on young May Day protesters.
‘exotic’ peoples continue to be attributed: Richard Appignesi (1979) ‘Some
thoughts on Freud’s discovery of childhood’, in Martin Hoyles (ed.) Changing
Childhood, London: Writers and Readers. Also see Chapter 6.
p.134 ‘I want to self-destruct myself ’: Sid Vicious interviews, Daily Mirror, 11 June
1977 and 19 December 1977.
142 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

‘Charlie reckons’: Daily Mirror, 8 April 1980.

Daily Mirror’s ‘Shock report’: ‘The junk generation’, Daily Mirror, 4 December
1985.
Angela McRobbie: (1995) ‘Shut up and dance: youth culture and changing
modes of femininity’, in Postmodernism and Popular Culture, p.160.
p.135 Leah Betts: Independent, 16 November 1995; Observer, 3 March 2002.
‘Are they really as horrible’: News of the World, 21 November 1982.
‘Everyone was having a pleasant morning’: John Downing and Tom Smith,
‘Day trip to terror’, Daily Express, 8 April 1980.
p.136 ‘mods and rockers’: see the classic study by Stanley Cohen (1973) Folk Devils and
Moral Panics, St Albans: Paladin. The imagery of the set-piece battles on
Brighton beach was recreated in Quadrophenia (UK, 1979), Dir. Franc
Roddam, and the paraphernalia of both mods and rockers has been regularly
recuperated, both as retro chic and as a form of homage.
the image of the crowd: Elias Canetti (1973) Crowds and Power, Harmondsworth:
Penguin.
‘arrogant hooligans’: used to describe the student demonstration at Essex
University: Evening Standard, 8 April 1974.
‘stunted demons’: used to describe street riots in Liverpool 8: Brian James, Daily
Mail, 8 July 1981.
Pearson records: see Pearson (1983) above.
‘This dog is an extension’: Daily Express, 8 April 1980.
‘St Paul’s, revolt of the lost tribe’: Observer, 6 April 1980.
‘Tribal Warfare’: Mirror, 8 April 1980.
‘This is not England’: Daily Express, 7 October 1985. Pearson (1983) above
demonstrates a long history of describing such riots as ‘un-English’.
‘Many experts predict’: Jean Richie, Sun, 11 November 1980.
p.137 effectively wrapping the newspaper: ‘The shape of things to come’, Daily Mirror,
13 April 1981.
‘If you know ’em, SHOP ’EM’: Jeff Edwards, People, 13 May 1990.
escape attempts: a reference to Cohen and Taylor (1978) above.
screaming for Mummy: ‘Rough justice’, Daily Mail, 13 August 1976.
 6
Crybabies and
damaged children

PA R T 1 : FA S C I N AT I N G M I S E R Y

Pathos, fear and the unhappy child

Without an image of an unhappy child the concept of childhood would be

incomplete. Real children suffer in many different ways and for many different
reasons, but pictures of sorrowing children reinforce the defining characteristics
of childhood – dependence and powerlessness. Pathetic pictures of children
create a desired image in which childhood is no longer a threat and adults are
firmly back in control.
Suffering children appear as archetypal victims, since childhood itself is
defined by weakness and incapacity. Children living in poverty, children who
are the victims of wars or natural disasters, children suffering from neglect or
disadvantage: all of these figure in the imagery as the most vulnerable, the most
pathetic, the most deserving of our sympathy and aid. This resonant image shows
children who appear to be on the receiving end of an oppression in which they
can only acquiesce. As they reveal their vulnerability, viewers long to protect them.
The boundaries between childhood and adulthood are reinforced as the image
gives rise to pleasurable emotions of tenderness and compassion, which satis-
factorily confirm adult power.
Pathos is an essential part of the romantic tradition that has been so
vigorously rejected by the cynicism of contemporary imagery. However, in an era
when many children did not reach adulthood, pathos – even when exaggerated
and exploitative – made a different sort of sense. Pathetic, dying children were

143
144 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

part of nineteenth-century reality as well as popular culture. Joshua Reynolds’s

portrait of Penelope Boothby, who died at the age of six, came to represent all
children’s tenuous hold on life. Her distraught father commissioned a memorial
sculpture which moved viewers to tears and was described as ‘drenched in
sentimentality’. Children who died young preserved their childhood for ever.
Fictional stories, such as those of Paul Dombey, Little Nell and William Carlyle
of East Lynne, had a powerful appeal. Indeed, East Lynne became the best selling
book of its century. Its author, Mrs Henry Wood, wrote that children should look
‘with pleasure rather than fear on that unknown journey’. A soulful expression,
with eyes uplifted to heaven, became an image that was a stock-in-trade of
postcards and popular imagery of the second half of the nineteenth century.
At issue here is the emotion which such pictures aim to arouse in the viewer,
particularly when detached from the reality of the loss of a child. The pathos of
childhood belonged to an age that valued sentiment as an aesthetic experience;
at the same time, sentiment was a valuable way of dealing with the drab reality
of child mortality.
The image of a short but holy childhood could represent a wealthy Penelope
Boothby or a child from any class. However, poor children were the object
of humanitarian reform accompanied by a frequently sexualised aesthetic thrill.
‘Beggar maids’ and street children were popular photographic subjects, with ragged
clothes and appealing expressions. Oscar Rejlander’s celebrated photograph
of ‘Poor Jo’ was reconstructed in his studio, since those were the days before
technology permitted candid photography, and resembles a tableau from a melo-
drama as much as a piece of reportage. The posture of the young boy, with body
crouched and face hidden, has established itself as an archetype of neglected
childhood. This sensibility should be seen against the teeming presence of
poverty (there seemed to be no shortage of ragged children ready to act as
photographers’ models) but from it a resonant image has evolved in which a
child who is deeply unhappy evokes an unfocused emotionality which is in
danger of linking social concern with something close to prurience. Pity can be
bound together with satisfaction at the confirmation of childish vulnerability.
Since its high point in the nineteenth century, the pathetic imagery of child-
hood has undergone various mutations, its significance shifting with the changing
contexts. As health and welfare improved and the child mortality rate reduced,
pathos began to take new forms. In one of its aspects the pathetic image of a
weeping child has lingered as an integral part of childhood; in another the image
has moved overseas and become more extreme – we find it in those pictures of
degradation and disaster which have come to characterise the undeveloped world.
Within the safe confines of the West, a familiar genre of press photography features
 C RY BA B I E S A N D DA M AG E D C H I L D R E N 145

pathetic children who have survived a serious accident or suffer from an incurable
illness. But these brave little creatures are shown as battling against the odds rather
than acquiescing in the manner of the other-worldly waifs of the nineteenth
century. As, for example, in the specialist magazine Disability Now, cheerfulness in
the face of adversity has taken the place of pathos. As more media spaces become
available for the voices of those who might otherwise be seen as the objects of pity,
pathos is vigorously rejected as condescending or demeaning.
Nevertheless, reducing children to something near pathos by inducing fear
– even if playfully – remains part of the adult–child relationship. Marina Warner
discusses a long tradition of gruesome stories, using illustrations which show
fathers dressing up to frighten their children (usually daughters), and a sixteenth-
century woodcut of ‘the child guzzler’, a popular carnival figure in the shape of
a terrifying monster who devours young babies. Cruella de Vil, the scourge of
Dalmatian puppies, is a recent incarnation of female terror. The picture of young
Macaulay Culkin on the poster for Home Alone – a frightened, screaming child,
desperate to be consoled – became a resonant image, used, for example, in an
article on childhood depression (the image itself has much in common with the
ironically popularised print of the expressionist work The Scream). ‘Fear,’ writes
Marina Warner, ‘is the defining flavour of the modern sensibility’.

Poverty answering back?

In the 1990s, home-grown poverty became the focus for a powerful set of images,
as a new realism was mobilised to represent a growing concern over the ‘new
poor’. Channel 4 chose to introduce its series Poverty Answering Back with a
cheeky wave from a small girl, but there was an echo of the key image of the
pathetic child in the logo selected by the Independent for its series ‘Breadline
Britain’. This was an outline drawing of the head and shoulders of a girl around
eight years old, holding out a plate with a very serious expression. In the manner
of a resonant image, the logo was taken from a photograph in a hostel for
homeless families. The isolation of the child from the figures who surround her
in the original picture, together with her gesture of appeal, repeated daily at the
head of a series of articles, transformed documentary realism into twentieth-
century pathos.
In the 2000s the lives of the poor are well known, well publicised, carefully
scrutinised and frequently pictured – sometimes with sympathy, sometimes with
critical interest. A number of surveys and reports, many of them sponsored
by organisations whose names proclaim their origins in nineteenth-century
146 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

philanthropy – Joseph Rowntree Trust, Barnardo’s – have confirmed a widening

gap between the poor and the rest, and have documented the multiple disad-
vantages which poverty brings to children – more health problems, less nutritious
food, greater chance of accidents in the home or in the street, worse educational
opportunities and achievements, fewer recreational facilities, greater chance of
unemployment. An Institute for Public Policy Research report in March 2000
argued that the UK was ‘emerging as a serious contender for the worst place in
Europe to be a child’. Such findings are reported in detail by the specialist press
and the concerned press – particularly the Independent and the Guardian, whose
expected readership includes members of the caring professions, social workers,
teachers, health workers and educated parents. They tend to be accompanied by
photographs in the new documentary mode.
New documentary makes a determined effort to avoid sentimentalism in its
representation of poverty. It also rejects the voyeurism of which the documentary
project has been accused – in which the privileged look at the underprivileged,
the rich look at the poor, and the haves look at the have-nots. Usually black-and-
white, often moody and rain-soaked, this contemporary genre focuses on children
almost as incidental figures in a landscape. Unlike the pathetic image, these
pictures do not place the burden of expressing disadvantage on the figure of a
child. Instead, they accuse a gloomy environment of boarded-up shops, decaying
tenement blocks, rows of unkempt houses and badly swept streets, while groups
of young children preserve their childish sprightliness despite the odds. They
may be on rollerskates, or striding along the pavement, or on a bicycle. In these
loosely composed pictures, the children frequently acknowledge or play up for
the lens. This contemporary, low-key image focuses on girls and young children,
rather than the bad boys of the previous chapter.
A rather different twenty-first-century trend has also eschewed pathos, but
this time in favour of extreme and shocking imagery. In 2000, Barnardo’s launched
an advertising campaign designed to draw attention to the effects of an impov-
erished and ill-cared-for childhood: a baby becomes a heroin addict, holding a
string in its teeth in preparation for injection; a small girl beds down in the
street; another is shown as a prostitute, soliciting by a car door; a small boy is
about to jump from a tower block. In each case the caption projects a future for
a damaged child. The use of digital techniques to create convincing pictures has
opened up new possibilities of high intensity, closely worked images whose
density of detail and the ability to create maximum shock effect pulls against the
low-key aims of new realism. When the Barnardo’s advertisements were first
published, the Committee for Advertising Practice advised the media not to
carry them. The creative director at the advertising agency responded, ‘When I
 C RY BA B I E S A N D DA M AG E D C H I L D R E N 147

Advertisement, 2000, courtesy of Barnardo’s.

used to work on the NSPCC account I’d actually see the police surgeons’ log
books, and let me assure you that the truth is so much worse than anything you
or I could imagine’.
148 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

PA R T 2 : V I C T I M I S AT I O N A N D
T H E U N D E V E L O P E D WO R L D

Save the children?

As the parameters of childhood are marked out and held firm – children are
dependent, vulnerable, in need of instruction and protection – many other groups
have been rhetorically bestowed with childish characteristics: women, people
from ethnic minorities, and the whole of the previously colonised world have
come to stand in a childish relation to the exercise of power. The globalised
economy has brought a different international configuration, yet the non-white
nations continue to be presented as if they lack potency in their very essence. It
is amongst the children of the impoverished countries that we find the insistent
imagery of childhood suffering. It stands in stark contrast to the well-fed, well-
equipped mini-consumers of the domestic image.
The one area in which the British image industry has regularly and predictably
produced pictures of black and other non-white children is in press reports of
wars, famines and natural disasters and in the appeals for aid which accompany
them. Over the last quarter of the twentieth century the wide eyes of the needy
dark-skinned child have looked reproachfully out from news pages and from
those advertisements that solicit rather than seduce. Particularly during the
1970s and 1980s, an image of a ragged child who is not ashamed to plead so
dominated the available imagery of Africa, Latin America and the Indian sub-
continent that the whole of that vast area beyond Western culture has been
offered up as a place of distress and childish subservience (‘All over the world
children are dying for want of food’…‘In the developing world, innocent children
are dying …’). The expectation embedded in the image is that the viewer is
from the industrial world, paternal, white and prosperous. Suffering in the
undeveloped world continues to secure a sense of comfort amongst viewers in
the ‘developed’ nations, by assuring them that they have the power to help – in
the same ‘natural’ way that adults help children. That power is confirmed by the
gaze of an appealing child. But the gaze must be carefully selected so that it in
no way undermines the complacent certainty of a superior position. The children
pictured in aid advertisements are not asylum-seekers challenging our borders;
they are not armed guerrillas causing international disruption; they are without
the stench of disease which might make their actual physical presence repellent;
they are, apparently, without protectors from their own invisible culture. They
are abandoned or orphaned. Their humble and submissive appeal protects the
compassion of the viewer from the prosperous world and enables us to give.
 C RY BA B I E S A N D DA M AG E D C H I L D R E N 149

Advertisement, 2002, courtesy of Child Advocacy International.

The increased accessibility of visual and verbal information in the press and on
television has made war, famine, drought and disasters of cataclysmic proportions
familiar parts of everyday consciousness. The last quarter of a century has seen
recurring famines across Northern Africa, the spiralling of the AIDS pandemic
across the African continent, and increasingly serious floods and cyclones in the
Indian subcontinent. At the same time, vicious wars have devastated the Middle
East, East Timor, Colombia, Iraq, Chechnya, the Balkans, Afghanistan, Rwanda,
Sudan and elsewhere in Africa and across the globe. In the image of the un-
developed world, the pictures which document natural disasters have formed a
continuum with those which show the results of human atrocity, and news
reporting has come to share its imagery with ever-more-urgent appeals for aid.
To walk into the annual exhibition of the World Press Photography Awards, held
in the Royal Festival Hall in London, where the most striking news photographs
of the year are enlarged to giant proportions, is to be overwhelmed by the fire,
rubble and terrified faces of almost unthinkable human distress. The filtering
and selection processes which led to decisions about which picture will make
150 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

the front page and which photographer will be named photographer of the
year all too frequently mean that photographers seek out the most vulnerable.
Desperate children with wide eyes gazing helplessly at the viewer have been at
the centre of a recurring image which has expressed the very depths of human
degradation and suffering – but may well lead to a wrenching of emotion at the
expense of understanding.
The question that runs through the imagery of distress, and which resonates
between aid advertisements and the news pages, is who should take respons-
ibility for these children? The pictures can be read as a series of reflections on
that problem. When the presentation is part of an appeal for funds, viewers are
invited to recognise themselves as both adult and Western, as individuals with
the ability to ‘change a child’s life’ for the better (in the words of an Action Aid
advertisement) without changing their own for the worse. The only possible
relationship posed for the pictured child in this resonant image is a relationship
with the putative viewer. In a characteristic appeal, the black child is seeking a
white benefactor, a surrogate parent who will be more effective than his own
absent black parent. The appeal is to the competence of Western civilisation,
seen not as a controlling father, imposing the harsh disciplines of international
finance, but as a nurturing mother, the Mother Countries. The eyes of the child
are at the centre of this image, as he looks to the prosperous world for help and
succour: ‘For God’s sake help them – 80,000 children will die in Zaire in the
next three weeks’; ‘Sponsor a child and see the difference’; ‘Be my postal parent!
Help me!’ The gaze balances hope and reproach as it constructs an impossible
relationship.
In the resonance of the image, the child’s adult relatives tend to be devalued,
and men are the least visible. It is they who signify culture, whose presence
locates a picture in its geographical context, who may themselves be fighters
or oppressors. As the strongest group they are least likely to conform to the
expected image of the victim and the most likely to be involved in attempts at
reconstruction or resistance, confusing the clarity of the story, complicating a
reaction of pity alone. One of the most powerful recurring images of disaster
shows a mother and baby together, in which the weakness of the mother serves
to intensify the plight of the child. In a 1970s advertisement, Oxfam captioned
a desperate mother and child, ‘Please sir, I beseech you, give me something for
my baby’. The mother’s breasts were drained dry so that she could not fulfil the
only role that justified her presence. (A picture of the charity’s sponsor, Winston
S. Churchill, was inset as if to represent the generous white world.) The image
recurs in many contexts. Pictures from war zones show innumerable sick and
helpless mothers, or children caring for other children – this formed the logo
 C RY BA B I E S A N D DA M AG E D C H I L D R E N 151

of the Independent’s ‘Children of War’ appeal. But in the key image, a child
appealing for help is separated from family and social context. If the children
are not carrying any cultural baggage, then the children may be saved. The
implications of the relationship between image and expected viewer go beyond
a well-intentioned donation.
Child rescue plays an important part in the iconography of childhood. Grat-
ifying pictures show children being brought from the rubble of earthquakes, being
rescued from floods, fires and the aftermath of war, or simply being found when
lost. The theme of child rescue runs through the history of childhood, particularly
in accounts of nineteenth-century philanthropy, when Thomas Barnardo first
raised money for his children’s homes by selling ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures
of children brought in from the streets. But the theme of rescue has taken a
particularly spectacular form in the development of narratives which describe
relations between the industrial and undeveloped worlds. In such imagery, the
role of the rescuer is routinely played by supportive white representatives of a
technologised civilisation – doctors, nurses, aid workers. Succouring white hands
support or feed the emaciated child.
Western civilisation may be seen to be effective through spectacular acts of
charity – which also sell newspapers. ‘Mirror to the rescue,’ headlined a picture
story in October 1984, ‘The Daily Mirror acted last night to boost the relief effort
to Ethiopia’s starving millions’; In May 1991, ‘The Mail brings comfort to the
cyclone children’ (in Bangladesh). Since their community has apparently failed
them and help appears only to come from outside, it seems logical to assume
than these children may be most effectively saved by being completely removed
from their communities. They may be adopted by Western families or given a
Western education. In extreme cases, they may be airlifted out, like Ali Ismaeel
Abbas, who lost his arms in the American bombing of Baghdad. The popular
press has on several occasions cast itself in this god-like role. And the papers
implicate their readers: ‘How you rescued the orphans of Bogota,’ asserted the
cover of the Sunday Express magazine, showing a ‘rescued’ boy cuddling a dog –
symbol of the ‘civilisation’ he has reached – and in 2003 several papers launched
an ‘Ali fund’. The prototype had been the Daily Mail’s 1975 airlift of ‘orphans’
(they were not all orphans) from Vietnam as Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese.
It was organised in four days in order to scoop the official American airlift. The
Mail’s photograph of editor David English carrying a sick baby from ‘his’ plane
was on page 3, while the photograph of US President Ford carrying a rescued
baby from the American plane was relegated to page 4.
A frequent visual device in the iconography of rescue is the intervention of
the charismatic individual from the West – from showbusiness, royalty or politics.
152 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

Pop star Bob Geldof initiated the massive Live Aid concert, globally transmitted
in July 1985. A series of what Zygmunt Bauman has described as ‘carnivals of
charity’ have followed on television and across the media – Band Aid, Sport
Aid, Comic Relief interleave images of suffering and rescue with entertainment
and celebrity. Figures as diverse as Mother Teresa and Geri Halliwell have pro-
vided photo-opportunities in refugee camps and relief centres. Princess Diana’s
campaign drew fresh attention to landmines, which continue to mutilate children
in many of the poorer parts of the world years after the wars which devastated
them had finished. Pictures of children who have lost limbs are deeply shocking,
and it is the more disturbing that it takes a special attraction, such as the
presence of a Western media icon, to help them break through the news barrier
and on to the front pages.

Shock tactics and the disgusting image

As familiarity has blunted their effectiveness, pictures of suffering have become

less restrained.‘It is an unfortunate truism of famines, that by the time the pictures
are horrific enough to move people, it’s almost too late,’ wrote journalist and
film-maker Paul Harrison. But the use of distressing imagery for publicity and
money-raising has been the cause of much soul-searching and debate within the
aid agencies and amongst the press and other critics. During the genocide and
civil war in Rwanda, journalist Richard Dowden wrote of ‘the mad scramble for
publicity as aid agencies begged journalists to visit their projects, gave them free
plane tickets, put up attractive young females to represent them on television,
and plastered huge areas of refugee camps with their logos in the hope of a
flickering split-second of publicity’. Although, he added, ‘Aid workers actually
involved in the horrors of the camps were appalled’. Dilemmas over fundraising
methods are not new. As far back as 1877, Thomas Barnardo was taken to court
by the Charity Organisation because the photographic cards he sold to publicise
his homes for destitute children were said to be faked. He did not photograph
the children when he found them on the streets, but dressed them in rags
especially for the camera after they had been rehabilitated, so that the cards
could be sold as a ‘before and after’ pair. The International Save the Children
Fund was itself launched in the midst of a controversy over an image. Just after
the First World War, its founder, Eglantyne Jebb, was prosecuted for distributing
a photograph of a starving Austrian baby. Under the draconian censorship laws
introduced during that war, raising money for children of the enemy was ruled
impermissible.
 C RY BA B I E S A N D DA M AG E D C H I L D R E N 153

Advertisement, 2002, courtesy of Save the Childre

n Fund.

Today, aid agencies have expanded from their origins as small, voluntary
groups to become major international, highly professional organisations, whose
influence in the field of overseas aid and children’s rights has rivalled that of
states. They have been closest to events in disaster-prone areas, and have led the
news media. In 1973 it was Oxfam which brought back the first pictures of the
Ethiopian famine, and in 1991 a group of agencies toured journalists in parts of
Africa that would otherwise have dropped out of media consciousness. But their
main function of providing aid and assistance means that they must engage in
a constant balancing act between passing on information which bears the full
complexity of a situation on the ground and the need to penetrate the everyday
parade of Western consumer images with presentations that will encourage the
public to give.
By the early 1980s, pleading had given way to extreme tactics. Both Oxfam
and Save the Children were using pictures of the emaciated bodies of very
young children, surely only hours from death, against a stark white background.
These advertisements appeared in shocking juxtaposition with the minutiae of
everyday urban living – in the pages of newspapers and on hoardings above city
streets. Unlike the children in the wide-eyed appealing image, such children
were far too sick to fix prospective donors with their reproachful gaze. The focus
was on the emaciated body of the child, rather than the eyes, which give at least
some common humanity. Here the relationship between the dying black child
154 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

and the viewing white adult is one of guilt by comparison. ‘While you’re eating
between meals, he’s dying between meals’, ‘You’re not the only one with weight
problems’. The viewer is forced to use the text as the only context. In the absence
of more visual information, the power of interpretation is left to the controlling
white eye outside the frame. The image was operating in a dangerous area between
sympathy, guilt and disgust. In abandoning the attractiveness of childhood,
such pictured children may well sacrifice the indulgence childhood commands.
Without the flattery offered by the appealing image, they may arouse adult sadism
without deflecting it, and confirm contempt for those parts of the world that
seem unable to help their own.
The perceived need to deliver an imagery which would be adequate to the
scale of extreme situations arose at the same time as a taste developed for shocking
imagery of many kinds. In disaster movies and war films, mutilation and suffering
was presented with an increasingly convincing realism. The technologies of
animatronics and digital imaging were pushing the fantasy blood and gore of
horror movies to greater lengths, while bloodthirsty computer games were
invading teenage bedrooms. The pleasures of entertainment horror are routinely
justified by their existence as fantasy, and by their audience’s ability to recognise
artifice when they see it. A problem arises when a similar psychic defence is
summoned up against the power of extreme images which draw attention to real
suffering. ‘I want you to see this,’ photojournalist Chris Steele-Perkins harangued
his television audience while photographing a mutilated corpse in southern Sudan,
recognising how little of his total experience would be reflected in the pictures.
By the late 1980s the sort of image which showed suffering children with
no background and no context was coming under attack from several different
constituencies, including people from the undeveloped countries, aid workers
and journalists who were close to the realities of the situation, and photo-
graphers who were not satisfied with the way their work was being used. Black
and Asian British groups argued that an imagery that stressed helplessness
and dependence fuelled racism, and affected the way not only people from the
undeveloped world but all non-white people were perceived. At a conference in
1998, disaster imagery was described as ‘aid pornography’ and Overseas Develop-
ment Minister Clare Short argued that appeals for aid could deflect attention
from political realities – particularly in countries which were overcome by civil
war, such as Sudan.
As the groundswell of critique against the inequalities of global trade, the
crippling indebtedness of the poorer countries and the policies of the inter-
national monetary institutions gathered pace, in some campaigning publications
the familiar image of the starving child was turned to a new use in a bid to
 C RY BA B I E S A N D DA M AG E D C H I L D R E N 155

produce a political explanation for poverty. Instead of a context of supportive

Western aid, these presentations placed the child amongst the symbols of Western
exploitation – a baby-milk bottle, canned food or a roll of film, this last critiquing
the role of photography in creating an over-simplified view. In 1987, War on
Want, the most politicised of the agencies, commented on the dreadful repetition
of images of starving children in an advertisement which declared ‘the EC
is running out of places to put its surplus grain’ above an apparently infinite
number of children’s faces with open mouths. Its campaign was very successful,
but the charitable status of the agency meant that it risked censure by the
Charity Commissioners if its message was seen as overtly political.
In response to criticisms, most of the agencies adopted a strategy of ‘positive
images’ and ‘accuracy’ of representation. In 1991, Save the Children’s guidelines
for photographers were based on the principle that ‘the dignity of the people
with whom Save the Children works should be preserved…portraying poverty
and dependence as the norm is not accurate…The people with whom Save the
Children works risk “exploitation by camera” if their identity or opinions are
excluded in the promotion of development issues.’ The cultural context was to be
restored to the children for whom aid was requested. Smiling faces and expressions
of resilience were to take the place of appealing eyes or starving bodies.
Nevertheless, the dilemma remained. When the public is said to be suffering
from ‘compassion fatigue’, raising funds and raising awareness can seem like
contradictory aims. Too much information can confuse the power of the image,
and an understanding of political complexities deflects emotional response.
Save the Children’s advertising agency, Ogilvy and Mather, told the Guardian,
‘Images of starving children have lost their appeal’ at the same time as J. Walter
Thompson, for Oxfam, insisted that ‘a child will bring in more than an adult,
a girl child who cries will bring in more than a boy who does not’. Save the
Children called it a ‘healthy tension’.
However, as many critics of documentary photography have pointed out, a
realist style can only record what is in front of the lens. It cannot make the sort
of analysis that War on Want’s campaign had attempted. It can observe poverty
and can suggest how those involved are coping, but it cannot even speculate
about the invisible causes of the situation it observes. By the end of the 1990s,
new analyses of globalisation and free trade made more emphatic links between
the prosperity of the West and the increasing poverty and disorder of much of
the rest of the world. Teresa Hayter wrote of the ‘grotesque hypocrisy’ of the rich
countries’ claim to ‘help the Third World escape the poverty which they and their
predecessors partly created and continue to create’. A new set of images began to
seek out a different context, a way of showing children not as the victims of
156 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

poverty-stricken communities but as the victims of global economics. In a

different kind of visibility, images of children from the poorer parts of the world
have shown sickness, child labour and brutalisation not as residues from a
‘primitive’ past but as new phenomena. Reporting had taken on a renewed sense
of anger. The Guardian’s series on the debt burden was headed ‘The new slavery’.
The clear distinction between the industrialised and the undeveloped parts
of the world is visibly crumbling as photographers and journalists document
the accelerated movement of human beings across the globe. ‘All the migrants
I photographed once lived in a stable way,’ wrote Sebastiao Salgado. As an
economist turned photographer, he is clear that he is recording a global change
for the worse. Migrants become immigrants, asylum-seekers and unwelcome
polluters of the streets. The image of a mother and child has gained a new
meaning in the outcry from the British press against ‘bogus’ asylum-seekers.
Women are said to ‘use’ their own children, or other children, to assist in
begging. One photograph of a woman with a child, stretching out her hand to
the passers by, was accompanied by a text which deplored a ‘cynical exploitation
of Britain’s asylum laws’ by people from ‘a gypsy township in Romania’.

Brutalised children

Despite the actual relationship between children in the poverty-stricken parts of

the world and the economic policies of the wealthier nations, the use of a child
in news reports and in advertisements continues to refer to a value that, like
Eglantyne Jebb’s Austrian baby, claims to be outside politics. Children are seen
expressing emotions that are universal, untouched by those other qualities – social
and cultural as well as political – that make humanity so diverse. Not yet fully
participant in divisions of language, nationality, culture or even race, the child is
presented as uncontaminated by these antagonistic formations. As a symbol of
common humanity, a child can be the bearer of suffering with no responsibility
for its causes.
This view of a childhood which refers outside its cultural group – and must
be protected, sometimes at the expense of its group – is in stark contrast to the
practice of the starving nations, where the child is the most expendable. ‘If a
parent dies the family is doomed. The father eats first and dies last; the children
eat last and die first,’ wrote Richard Dowden of the aid camps in Ethiopia. The
irony of the aid imagery, then, is that however accurate the picture, an appeal on
behalf of the children may well operate against the interests of the community
of which they are part, rather than on that community’s behalf. Although the
 C RY BA B I E S A N D DA M AG E D C H I L D R E N 157

resonant image of a child humbly requesting help appeals to the richer, more
powerful viewer, children’s actual response to conditions of deprivation may well
refuse the very qualities of childhood which give them their pathos. It is less
easy for the imagery to deal with children who have become fighters, workers or
aggressive dwellers on the streets.
The image of a child with a gun has been the subject of one of the biggest trans-
formations from myth to reality. Guns are the ultimate symbol of male potency,
celebrated in movies from the deadly but modestly sized pistols of the classic
Western through to the massive armoury carried by Schwarzenegger or Stallone
in 1980s action movies. Interactive video games take a further step, making the
viewer a participant who is directly involved in the action. The image of a gun,
placed in the centre of the frame, reacts like a real gun held in the hand of the
player. Instead of empathising with the screen hero, the game’s viewer/participant
becomes part of a virtual gun-fight. The reality of children’s actual proximity to
guns and other weapons has become frighteningly clear in the atrocities committed
by schoolchildren in the US and in pictures of child soldiers from many warring
parts of the globe – particularly Africa. Yet the image remains fraught with
ambivalence. The acquisition of power symbolised by a weapon may be a welcome
sign of competence – for example by American parents pictured teaching their
children to shoot – or it may seem like heroic resistance. I have a postcard
showing a young Eritrean girl, parading with a wooden rifle as part of the
‘children’s militia’. A child with a gun may be shown as a disciplined young

Campaigning postcard, 2000, courtesy of Save the Children Fund. Photograph: Mike Goldwater/Network.
158 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

person playing a purposeful part in an organised force, a child who is not so

much rejecting childhood as redefining childhood as part of a proud nationalism
or justified resistance against an oppressor.
But such optimistic images are belied by cruel historical reality. As the
brutalising effects of the wars that have raged across Africa have been publicised,
the tactic of recruiting children to carry out atrocities has become horribly
familiar. In countries including Sierra Leone and Uganda, numerous children have
been trained to kill. Several British newspapers followed the story of 14-year-
olds in Sierra Leone pictured with standard British-made rifles. A campaigning
postcard from Save the Children uses a photograph by Mike Goldwater showing
Ugandan children corralled into the ‘Lord’s army’. A column of blank-faced
children, in combat fatigues, rifles on shoulders, stare intently ahead. The card
is scrawled with the words ‘I object’ in crude red letters. A picture on the same
theme in the Daily Mirror won the 2000 Amnesty International awards for
photographer Mike Moore. Here, the youngster wears a dirty vest, sewn over with
packages of ammunition which look like brightly coloured toys, and a bandage
around the head which may be just for effect. A huge Kalashnikov stretches
above his head. His expression may be one of surly aggression, or he may be about
to burst into tears. The headline was ‘Child victims of war’. Life in a violent
society is far grimmer than even the most shocking of images can convey.

Street urchins, vagrants and murdered children

The image of the street urchin has an uneasy presence in the imagery of child-
hood – combining pathos with a sense of resilience and engaging impudence.
Nineteenth-century photographers were fascinated by ‘beggar maids’ and street
children; cheeky urchins have continued to play an indispensable part in travel
imagery – on postcards as well as advertisements and brochures. In poorer
countries, children working on the streets are part of the tourist economy and
a tourist sight. A Western approach to the poorer parts of the world is rarely
without aspects of a tourist gaze, which samples and then withdraws, indulging
enjoyment without engagement. The holiday snapshot is part of this sampling
and distancing process.
(And I do not pretend that it is easy to step outside this structure. My
holiday snaps include a boy of about nine outside the Sultanahmet Mosque
in Istanbul displaying his expertise with one of the spinning tops that he and
dozens of others were selling to the tourists. Of course, he earned some extra
money by posing for me.)
 C RY BA B I E S A N D DA M AG E D C H I L D R E N 159

It needs only a slight shift of perspective to see the child on the streets as an
undesirable vagrant. For many years the Western media have carried spasmodic
reports on the street children of Latin America. They have created mild inter-
national scandal, but, seen from the distance of a continent, are quickly forgotten.
But to many ‘respectable’ inhabitants of Rio and Bogota such children are like
garbage, spoiling the attractiveness of the city, pestering tourists and robbing
respectable citizens. By 1990 there were reports that street children were being
routinely murdered by semi-official death squads. Amnesty International Journal
published a picture of street children in Bogota, Colombia under a poster put
up by local businesses inviting them to their own funeral. In July 1993 around
50 street children sleeping in the porch of Rio’s Candelaria Church were attacked
by three armed men who shot randomly into the group, killing eight and
wounding more. Amnesty International created an outcry, but in Rio such killings
were said to be ‘socially acceptable’. ‘When you talk about Brazilian children you
must understand that they are not the same as European children. They really are
savages here. Most of the time they are killing each other,’ a Brazilian business-
man told Zoe Heller of the Independent on Sunday. A high-circulation Rio daily,
O Povo, took to publishing photographs of mutilated corpses as the only way
of drawing attention to what was happening. Sometimes these are the only
record of the deaths of children who have no parents, no birth certificates, no
official existence.
This most shocking of images is by no means confined to children from the
undeveloped world. ‘The victimisation of children is nowhere forbidden,’ wrote
Alice Miller. ‘What is forbidden is to write about it.’ Imagery, sometimes the
most extreme imagery, can put together meanings that words hesitate to express.
Childhood is about impotence and weakness. Acceptable victimisation is part of
the visual repertoire with which the concept of childhood crosses and influences
the concepts of race and class. Whether starving child from the undeveloped
world or helpless child from the domestic imagery of poverty, there is an easy
shift of perspective from attractive gamin to foul-mouthed vermin. The image
of the child as victim prepares the way for an open expression of adult hatred
and cruelty.
160 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

PA R T 3 : C R Y B A B I E S A N D D A M A G E D C H I L D R E N

Tears

Tears are remarkable in men (the tears of football hero Paul ‘Gazza’ Gascoigne
made front-page news), expected in women, but part of the very condition of
childhood. They are the only bodily fluid that may legitimately flow in public,
and the less an individual aspires to power, the less they need be restrained.
Normal childhood tears are under adult control. Easily provoked by a shout or
a prohibition and usually dried by a cuddle, they seem like an inevitable part
of the relationship of training and care within which adults and children are
entwined. Children will behave badly and adults will lose their temper. It is
only to be expected. But, like the vast majority of the images of childhood, the
relationship is largely imagined – and imaged – from the adult perspective.
Pictures of childhood distress are judged in the light of adult experience. Uneasy
promptings from our childhood selves tend to be repressed. Pictures in which
tearfulness is comfortingly confined to children – and, what is more, where the
tears are considered to be in the child’s own interest – can only be reassuring.
They keep both the pictured child and the internal childhood of the adult viewer
firmly in place. A familiar form of neo-kitsch, pictures of weeping children may
be reproduced purely for adult gratification on postcards or wall pictures, as
examples of art photography or as anonymous symbols of misery itself. They
may well carry a sexualised attraction.
(My postcard collection includes a pair of pictures of weeping children,
reproduced from painted originals, signed with all the panache of an old master.
In one, a pigtailed, dark-skinned girl of around six years old pouts as tears well
from her exaggeratedly large and luminous brown eyes. In the companion card,
a boy of similar age wears a gypsy scarf and broad-brimmed hat. He faces the
viewer head on, with moist eyes and tear-stained cheeks. A more sophisticated
image is the black-and-white card entitled ‘La Tristesse’. A young girl of around
five gazes upwards, eyes wide, hair in stylish disorder, while a huge and obviously
artificial tear trickles down her cheek. The back of the card carries detailed
credits: the model is Laura Baron from the Truly Scrumptious Model Agency; hair
and make-up are by Tracy Townsend. The decadence of the romantic tradition
is encapsulated in the knowing cynicism of this image – which at the same time
evokes all the expected emotional responses to an image of a crying child.
A wall picture simply known as the ‘Crying boy’ is a popular purchase from
cheap arcades and market stalls. My copy is printed on thin plastic pressed into
low relief. Once more the boy wears a red gypsy scarf. His clothes are ragged, his
 C RY BA B I E S A N D DA M AG E D C H I L D R E N 161

Postcards, France, 1970s.

hair in disarray and his voluminous tears gain prominence from the embossing
technique of the picture. In one of its publicity stunts, the Sun ran a campaign
against this picture – which, it claimed, could bring bad luck to its owners. (One
copy had remarkably survived a major house fire.) Readers were invited to get
rid of their copy by sending it in to the Sun. Thousands of readers responded
and the Sun office, it was reported, was knee-deep in ‘Crying boys’ until they
were carted off and ritually burned.)
Tears may be evidence of irrational adults, of harshly punitive relations
between adults and children, or of a discipline which has run out of control. They
may be evidence of neglect, cruelty or adult hatred. The Daily Mirror’s ‘Shock
issue’ of 1972, headlined ‘Thank God we live here?’ featured a crying child, at
first hardly different from the kitsch of the postcards – except that real tears
mean distorted facial features quite alien to the Truly Scrumptious model. The
Daily Mirror was dealing with the growth in violent crime, and the child stood
for all victims. ‘Her face crumpled by unhappiness and fear. Her tears symbolise
the agony of our present age of growing violence.’
There are all too few occasions when the viewer of a picture is invited to make
a less welcome identification and see the image from the perspective of the child
who is suffering instead of that of the adult who may either cause or relieve that
suffering. Pictures of suffering children rarely allow their subjects to express the
autonomy or resistance of Channel 4’s cheeky girl in their Poverty Answering Back
162 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

season. The reluctance to take this step becomes clearer when we consider another
range of imagery, which pushes children’s humiliation yet further. The crumpled
face on the Daily Mirror’s ‘Shock issue’ is not enough to differentiate between a
child whose tears are part of the condition of childhood and a child who has been
unjustly harmed. A second resonant image is evoked – one that has been repeated
with remarkable frequency for more than a century. Reminiscent of Oscar
Rejlander’s ‘Poor Jo’ of 1860, this image shows children’s bodies bent over with
heads bowed, crushed by the weight of misery bearing down on them. Sometimes
drawn, sometimes in a staged photograph, these children cover their faces as
if tainted by the shame of their situation. This is an image of a child who is
victimised, completely helpless and certainly not capable of answering back. This
second image is not intended to be read as the normal consequence of relations
between adults and children, but as evidence of cruel and perverted adults.
Yet these children, crouched or slumped, are not only crushed by the events
which created their situation but also by the very image which seeks to represent
their plight. Once more, there is a certain satisfaction for adults in envisaging such
rejection – like a spitting out of unpleasant and unwanted elements. Attitudes
that cannot openly be admitted have a shadowy presence in the image. Childhood
and the residues of its devastating emotions are amongst those things we would
dearly love to expel but which obstinately remain part of our very selves. We
are left with the possibility of crushing those unwelcome aspects, of beating
them down, just like the child in the picture. There is a danger that the resonant
image of the slumped child, itself a temptation to adult violence, may become
disgusting to us.

Broken bodies, tempting abuse

From babyhood, children are physically handled by their parents and carers
(handling by doctors and other professionals has a different sort of legitimacy).
Parents retain the right to caress or chastise, and to exercise a discipline modulated
by these two extremes. The adult touch restrains and controls the child in a way
that limits the movements of the child’s body and evokes the expression of
emotion on the child’s face – laughter on the one hand, tears on the other. (Smiles
and laughter make appropriate family pictures. As emotions shade off to express
greater degrees of distress, their representation in personal photographs becomes
less acceptable.) There remains no consensus about the point at which gestures of
control become excessive and the infliction of physical pain unacceptable. The
image of physical discipline has become a source of embarrassment.
 C RY BA B I E S A N D DA M AG E D C H I L D R E N 163

In the absence of an easily acceptable image, articles on the topic of corporal

punishment frequently resort to a humorous distancing device, using Victorian
engravings of furious women with screaming and kicking youngsters over their
knees. (James Kincaid has spelt out at length the prurient attraction and under-
lying eroticism of such an image.) Yet campaigners have pointed out that
children who are physically chastised suffer humiliation as well as pain, which
may sometimes be extreme. In 1998 the European Court of Human Rights ruled
against a stepfather who had repeatedly beaten his stepson with a garden cane.
An English jury had found him not guilty under the Victorian defence of ‘reason-
able chastisement’. Despite the European Court’s conclusion that the boy’s human
rights had been violated, and that ‘UK law fails to provide adequate protection
to children and should be amended’, the British government decided not to ban
corporal punishment outright. This decision was challenged by a coalition of
140 child-welfare groups, including Barnardo’s, the National Children’s Bureau
and the Royal College of Paediatricians and Child Health. They declared,
‘hitting children is a lesson in bad behaviour’. ‘If someone smacked me I’d feel
like smacking them,’ added Andrew, aged seven. The National Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Children launched a poster campaign with cartoons
which illustrated precisely this reaction; the child who had been hit goes off to
hit a smaller child. Yet the arguments of the welfare groups were received with
outrage by much of the press. If smacking were made illegal, it was argued,
parents would be deprived of rights over their children, and children would be
deprived of a firm upbringing when they are too young to understand what is
good for them.
In a much more shocking set of images, adult power over children’s bodies
has been pushed to the extreme. Until the 1970s, these had been the most secret
of pictures, available only to the medical and judicial professions, showing
children whose bodies do not merely express sorrow or despair but, like the
street children of Rio, have been mutilated and tortured. This resonant image
shows children who are the broken objects of extreme physical abuse.
‘The history of childhood is a nightmare from which we have only recently
begun to awaken,’ wrote Lloyd de Mause, one of a group of authors who argued
for a new kind of history of childhood based on libertarian and psychoanalytic
principles. Such a history would reveal centuries of violence and oppression.
These authors describe habitual infanticide, mutilation, swaddling and other
forms of restraint, enforced child labour, canings and beatings, sexual abuse and
mental cruelty. ‘Child abuse is so common that it may be a characteristic that
comes close to being “natural” to the human condition,’ wrote Bakan. Yet, he
argued, the experience is so unbearable that subterfuges must be found to make
164 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

it expressible. ‘Hard thoughts which would be too unpleasant to think’ underlie

fantasy and fairy stories. ‘There they are held fast in a frame of unbelief. Some
things are simply too terrible to think about if one believes them. Thus one does
not believe them in order to make it possible to think about them.’
It was literally necessary to look beyond the surface, and an expansion of
radiology in the 1940s drew attention to fractured bones which could not be
accounted for. A medical and forensic image turned child abuse into a social
issue, as doctors, radiologists and paediatricians identified a ‘battered baby
syndrome’. A new range of pictures came into circulation, recording bruised and
swollen bodies, bruises and abrasions on the skin and face. This is a medicalised
image which does not deal with the child as a person, but with the child’s body
as evidence of a crime and in need of repair.
The narratives of child abuse have escalated over the last few decades, and
their difficult expression has reflected the fears embedded in a recognition of such
unbearable experiences, including the fear the strong have of the weak, and the
fear that excessive use of power leads not to control but to a lack of control, not
to a mastery of childhood but to a return to a childish lack of restraint. The
damaged body of a child stands as evidence not of the child’s painful accession to
adult reason but of the unreasoning violence that adulthood cannot leave behind.
The cases which gained prominence from the early 1970s made it clear that those
who threaten children most are those closest to them. Recurring scandals centred
on girls who died from injuries inflicted by their parents or carers – particularly
fathers or stepfathers: Maria Colwell in 1973, Tyra Henry in 1984, Jasmine
Beckford in 1985, Kimberley Carlile in 1986, Victoria Climbié in 2001. In 1994
Fred and Rosemary West were arrested for torturing and murdering at least eight
girls and young women, including one of their own children. The subjectivity of
the child is irrelevant in this relentless catalogue of damage. The photographs of
these children are destined for practical use by the medical and legal professions,
and their clinical nature increases the sense of shock when they appear in the
pages of the press. Tyra Henry was shown in hospital, shortly before her death,
her body cocooned in tubes and wires; colour photographs of Victoria Climbié’s
damaged and abused face and body were published with disturbing frequency
during the enquiry into her murder during 2001 and 2002.
Such visible extremity unlocks the heavily defended space of the family to a
wide range of professionals, but for much of the press, the well-meaning agents
of the welfare state whose job it is to protect children from abusing parents have
joined the ranks of those outsiders who threaten the healing powers of the ideal
family. Social workers in particular have been condemned in tones which put
the rescuers on a par with the abusers. In these obsessive narratives, the impersonal
 C RY BA B I E S A N D DA M AG E D C H I L D R E N 165

News of the World, 12 February 1984.

is opposed to the personal and the interfering state is contrasted with the
privacy of the family. The press has continued to seek dangers from without
rather than disintegration from within. In contrast to the accounts of Miller
and de Mause, child battering has been seen as an extreme phenomenon, quite
separate from the normal relations between parents and children. When the
News of the World used pictures of children scarred and broken by their parents,
it juxtaposed a classic family image of one of the richest men in Britain, the
Duke of Westminster, with his arms around his wife and children. ‘Duke battles
to raise £12 million,’ read the caption. The newspaper evoked a family that
appeared to be better in every sense of the word, with the visual implication that
the ideal family could charm away the horrors, both in the form of charitable
donations and by the power of their contrasting image.

The dangerous world

Despite the evidence that children are far more at risk from relatives and carers,
contemporary narratives have presented a world full of predators beyond the
limits of the home. When children go missing, the whole nation follows every
step of the police investigation. The parents of the children make appeals,
newspapers offer rewards. A dreadful detective story unfolds in which no one
seems to be above suspicion. A hazy snapshot or a school photograph on the
front page of a newspaper, in all its bland ordinariness, comes to signal a terrible
166 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

fear. With hindsight, these tentative or confidently smiling faces have acquired
a compelling poignancy: James Bulger; Sarah Payne; Damilola Taylor; Stephen
Lawrence; Rikki Neave; Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman. Their faces are instantly
recognisable. Childhood always looks nervously towards an unknown future.
For these children who have become household names, the future has proved
too terrible to contemplate. Their foolish confidence appears to warn that what
happened to them may happen to any unwary child.
The worst of fears was acted out in March 1996, when Thomas Hamilton
burst into a primary school in the Scottish town of Dunblane and massacred 16
children and their teacher. This time it was a photograph of a whole class which
filled the front pages. The incident gave rise to a media debate about the
legitimacy of photographing shocked and grieving parents, and was quoted as
an example of respectful journalism. Possibly the most disturbing picture to be
used was a hazy frame from a home movie taken in a boys’ club run by
Hamilton. It shows him standing beside a vaulting horse, his hand supporting a
boy as he leaps over. There is no indication of the identity of the boy – the face
is blurred – nor of his fate. As so often with images that would once have seemed
innocuous but are reinterpreted with hindsight, the effect, once more, is to
suggest that not only this boy, but every boy, is in mortal danger.

Sexual abuse and paedophilia

By far the fattest of my bulging envelopes of press cuttings concerning child-

hood is the one labelled ‘sex abuse’. From the mid-1980s the scandals around
child-battering were pushed off the front pages by even more dramatic revelations
about the sexual abuse of children. At first these new narratives told of abuse
within the family, but the emphasis moved, in what is by now a familiar pattern,
to focus on the danger to children from the world beyond – usually in the shape
of solitary and perverted men. The paedophile became the demon for the new
century. The facts which have been exposed over the last twenty years have been
the more shocking because of the scale and the extent of the abuse revealed. On
the one hand the narratives have gained a mythological status, seeming to reveal
an evil force beyond ordinary human comprehension. On the other, the brute
reality is dreaded because its prevalence means that there has been a massive
collusion in the secret. So much abuse by so many adults against so many
children must be known to a large number of individuals – even though it had
no public expression. Many people must have been involved in abusive relation-
ships, as children and as adults. The exposure of sexual abuse, when it came,
 C RY BA B I E S A N D DA M AG E D C H I L D R E N 167

was built around fear, hysteria, denial and cries for revenge. This most secret of
topics became the most public.
The image of the abused child, as we have seen, potentially holds within
itself a complex of meanings and emotions. They include the construction of
childhood as weak, dependent and completely within the control of adults, hence
a child is always a potential victim. They also include an adult fear of children
who may develop into demon children, so powerful that the child – or at least
the image of the child – must be broken and crushed (‘break their will,’ in the
Victorian saying). And they include an image of victimhood whose sexual nature
is on the verge of becoming explicit. An image which will express such a complex
of meanings is of necessity indirect and allusive. Readers of newspaper accounts,
while dealing with the ambivalence of their own reactions, are once more invited
to draw implications from the simplest of school photographs or snapshot
portraits; or to read the possibility of abusive sexuality into any gendered image;
or to return to fairy stories and mythology. The absent image becomes a collage
of hints and implications. Newspapers use outline drawings, silhouettes or
shadows. There may be a staged photograph of a cowed child; or a harsh
rectangle blotting out a face; or pictures of the dolls that therapists use to
diagnose and treat abused children – dolls which represent adults and children,
with clothes that are easily removed, clear genitalia, rounded mouths and strange
absent looks on their cloth faces. The one image which is forbidden is one that
shows any form of sexual allure.
It is now accepted that abuse, both physical and sexual, is a long-standing
aspect of relations between adults and children. There is no avoiding the pain
recorded in oral and social histories. Harsh treatment in foster homes and
children’s homes has been all but taken for granted. But a new awareness of
children’s rights and a shift in the concept of childhood towards greater
autonomy for children has led not only to an exposure of abusive practices, but
also to a more rigorous definition of what counts as abuse. Adults who have
been abused as children and children who are being abused have been given
licence to speak, while feminist campaigns have replaced the concept of ‘victim’
with that of ‘survivor’. In the mid-1980s, sexual abuse was featured in peak-time
television viewing. Esther Rantzen’s programme Childwatch was introduced in
the Radio Times by a shocking quotation from an anonymous child: ‘I was never
frightened of walking home alone in the dark or of being raped or mugged.
I knew what was waiting for me at home was infinitely worse than that.’ The
programme spoke directly to children and advised them how to protect them-
selves, if necessary against their own families. Under the slogan ‘Speak to someone
who cares’, a presentation in the Radio Times showed a young girl calling for
168 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

help by public telephone – a practical image which appealed beyond the family
circle. The familiar prejudices against social workers and faceless state agencies
were avoided, since a charismatic television star seemed to be providing an
alternative to bureaucratic state interference. The programme launched ChildLine,
a free and confidential telephone help line for children, whose logo is a smiling
and unthreatening telephone. It was to become a major child-centred charity. In
the first 12 hours after the programme went out, between 30,000 and 50,000
calls came in and up to 10,000 attempted calls a day followed. The National
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children reported a rise of more than
90 per cent in the numbers of new cases handled.
Sexual abuse within the family is private, secret and hardly spoken of between
the participants. Those scandals which became headline news in the 1980s reached
the public media because the abuse was alleged to be systematic and large-scale,
and because concerned professionals – doctors, social workers and the police –
took dramatic action by removing the children from their homes. First in
Cleveland then the Orkney Islands, a large number of parents were accused of
abusing their children. These new – yet old – and shocking narratives combined
violence, illicit sexuality and sometimes occult practices. The question arose
as to who was responsible for undermining that confident image so perfectly
represented in the News of the World by the Duke of Westminster and his family.
In feminist publications of the early 1980s the answer was, unequivocally, ‘the
Fathers’. This was the term used by Elizabeth Ward as the collective description
for men in positions of authority – fathers, stepfathers, uncles, babysitters – who
had abused girl children. She argued that incest is not separable from other
forms of child abuse. It is simply an extension of ‘a socially sanctioned sexuality
that is coercive and unequal, committed by males against those weaker females
who are available to them’. For Florence Rush, ‘the family itself is an instrument
of sexual and other forms of child abuse. The protector and the rapist are the
same person.’ Mary McLeod and Esther Saraga argue that ‘Sex abuse happens in
normal families, not deficient ones’. For these writers, the ever-present fantasy
of incest is an extension of the power which welds the happy family together,
throwing a shadow across its claim to perfection. While the image of a family
is favourably contrasted with pictures of physically damaged children, the
possibility of abuse forces a reassessment of the institution of ‘family’ itself.
ChildLine’s little girl with the telephone was a rare attempt to establish an image
which would enable the voice of the child to be independently heard beyond
the family group. But an image of a normally abusive family cannot be part of
routine public imagery. In the Cleveland and Orkney cases the tabloid newspapers
asserted their disbelief, voiced their condemnation of heavy-handed interference,
 C RY BA B I E S A N D DA M AG E D C H I L D R E N 169

and gave their support to parents’ groups who claimed to be wrongly accused.
Nothing was heard from the children themselves.
The only narrative of child abuse which legitimises a hint of pleasurable
sexuality centres on a sexualised image of a young girl. This may be a narrative
of seduction. ‘Perhaps I stared at my father in a provocative way,’ was a sub-
heading in bold type in the News of the World magazine. A closer reading shows
that the heading had rephrased a wry comment from the interviewee. Within
the text she described the experience of her early childhood and added, ‘Perhaps
I wriggled my nappy at him in a provocative way’. The rewriting turns this
ludicrous irony into a possible situation. An image of an adolescent girl, degraded
and made available by premature sexual experience, is the only image which I
have found accompanying features on child abuse in which the young person is
regularly shown looking directly at the viewer. The impression is that, aware of
her sexuality, she may well be provoking assault. Faced with this pressure from
the image, the first incest survivors to speak out could hardly trust themselves.
‘No one knows the inner torment I feel. I’m racked with guilt in case I provoked
it. I’m a freak!’ wrote ‘Liz’ in Leveller magazine.
The image of the girl child alone remains the most striking of contrasts with
the image of the happy family group, for it is she who signals that the innocence
of childhood is always deceptive. She is the one who holds immeasurable dangers
for adult men. Her seductiveness may provoke them into betraying their dignity,
and what is more, she knows their terrible secret. The position of the man at the
apex of the family group is always under threat. He is exposed as capable of
provoking total disruption at just that point where he claims to be the upholder
of rationality and order.
Even at the high point of the sexual-abuse scandals, the popular press
continued to preserve the image of a united family. The language was of ‘parents’
rights’, and the aim was for children to be ‘set free’ and returned home so that
the image could be restored. The Star showed a classic family – two parents,
a boy and girl – at the time of the Cleveland scandal. The headline was ‘Going
home’, as a judge had ruled that the children had been wrongly removed. It was
a phrase that had gained a conscious ambivalence for those who dread what
home may bring. But effectively what that picture showed was a negative of
the classic family grouping, since, even reunited, this family were walking away
from the camera, their identity concealed. They could only be photographed
from behind.
By the mid-1990s the confusing ambivalence which attached to families and
girl victims was less prominent an issue, since the narratives of sexual abuse were
revealing the possibility of corruption in every institution which provides for
170 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

children. The more closed the institution, the greater the danger. Scandals involved
care homes, youth clubs, boarding schools, public schools, church groups, Scout
troops and others. Most of these victims were boys, and the abusers were not
relatives but professionals. In February 2000 Sir Ronald Waterhouse’s report
Lost in Care found that at least 650 people had been abused in children’s homes
in North Wales. A history of abuse was revealed in homes in Staffordshire,
Leicestershire, East Belfast, Aberdeen and other locations around the country.
As the 1990s progressed, the blame was increasingly laid on a shadowy group
of figures who, it seemed, plumbed the very depths of degradation. The ‘danger
from a stranger’ meant that every child appeared to be at risk of abduction and
abuse whenever they were alone on the streets. Hysteria peaked when the News
of the World ‘named and shamed’ men previously convicted of paedophilia now
living in the community. The publication of their mug-shots provoked riots in
areas where they were thought to be housed – often deprived estates with very
few amenities. Groups of residents – usually women together with their children
– were photographed holding banners with violent slogans: ‘Don’t house them,
hang them’. Excessive condemnation became an outlet for accumulated hatreds
and resentments.
I have, amongst my press cuttings, several articles headlined ‘Beyond belief ’.
The question of sexual abuse has consistently given rise to incredulity that
such extremities should be so common yet so little known and so invisible.
Questions arise around secrecy, denial, memory and false memory. Can children
be believed when they tell of such outrageous events? Can adults who remember
abuse accurately recall objective facts beyond the confusions of childish per-
ception? What sort of image is being suggested? In this context, there was one
image that was being hinted at which would have been central to the debate, but
which had to remain a shadowy, mental image. It could not be formulated since
it would make the unacceptable link between violence against children and
sexual pleasure.
As the issue of sexual abuse throws doubt on a reliable moral framework
within which childhood can be conceptualised, it forces a reinterpretation of
all the other images we see of children. On the same page as an article by Nick
Davies, beginning a Guardian series investigating paedophilia, was an advertise-
ment for an airline, featuring a smiling, toothy, dark-haired boy. Here was an
image of a young boy, possibly attractive to paedophiles, advertising flights to a
part of the world where the law may possibly be easily avoided, where children
are poor and where child prostitutes may be available. Such implications are no
doubt entirely absent from the construction of the advertisement, but may be
brought to an interpretation of the image by the publicity given to paedophile
 C RY BA B I E S A N D DA M AG E D C H I L D R E N 171

activities. The fact that sexual abuse can hardly be pictured means that smiles
may become interpreted as seduction; childish sensuality interpreted in terms
of adult sexuality; childish unknowingness as vulnerability; childish innocence
as denial.

NOTES ON CHAPTER 6

p.143 ‘Fascinating misery’: quoted from Jo Boyden (1990) ‘Childhood and the policy
makers: a comparative perspective on the globalisation of childhood’, in Allison
James and Alan Prout (eds) Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood:
Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Study of Childhood, London: Falmer, p.196.
p.144 Penelope Boothby: Anne Higonnet (1998) Pictures of Innocence: the History and
Crisis of Ideal Childhood, London: Thames and Hudson, p.29.
Paul Dombey, Little Nell and William Carlyle: Paul Dombey in Charles Dickens,
Dombey and Son, first published 1848; Little Nell in Charles Dickens, The Old
Curiosity Shop, first published 1841. East Lynne was first published 1861.
discussed by Peter Coveney (1967) The Image of Childhood, Harmondsworth:
Peregrine, Chapters 5 and 7.
‘Beggar maids’ and street children: Graham Ovenden and Robert Melville,
Victorian Children, London: Academy Editions. As an indication of how sensi-
tive such material has become, in March 1993 the artist and antiquarian
Graham Ovenden was arrested, and his negatives and collection of Victorian
photographs were confiscated. Peter Rose of the Daily Mail reported that the
Crown Prosecution Service believed he was the centre of a child-pornography
ring. A petition signed by eminent artists and authors helped secure the return
of his work. See David Newnham and Chris Townsend, ‘Pictures of innocence’,
Guardian ‘Weekend’, 13 January 1996.
Oscar Rejlander’s ‘Poor Jo’: Oscar Gustav Rejlander (1813–75), Swedish-born
artist and photographer who worked in England from 1853, best known for his
‘Two ways of life’, a dramatic photomontage in the style of an allegorical painting,
complete with artistic nudes and moral messages, made in 1857.
p.145 Disability Now: published monthly by Scope London.
Marina Warner: (1998) No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock,
London: Chatto and Windus, pp.5, 10.
Cruella de Vil: in One Hundred and One Dalmatians, Walt Disney cartoon (US,
1961) with many live-action sequels.
Home Alone: (US, 1990) Dir. Chris Columbus.
childhood depression: Nicci Gerrard, ‘What’s worrying our kids? Psychiatrists
suggest that one in five is suffering from depression and anxiety. Who stole our
children’s childhood?’, Observer ‘Review’, 14 February 1999, a commentary on
the Mental Health Foundation’s summary of research on children’s mental
health, Bright Futures.
The Scream: the lithograph by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1895) has been
ironically reproduced on pub signs, as a life-sized balloon and on Hallowe’en
masks, as well as on numerous cards and illustrations.
‘Fear…is the defining flavour’: Warner (1998) above, p.4.
the ‘new poor’: Zygmunt Bauman (1998) Work, Consumerism and the New Poor,
Buckingham: Open University Press.
172 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

Poverty Answering Back: Channel 4, ‘Broke’ season, 1996. A contribution to the

season were programmes by documentary photographer Nick Danziger, using
still photographs, which made a point of explaining the background and the
context for each picture.
‘Breadline Britain’: Independent, 15 October 1998. Photograph: Craig Easton.
p.146 Institute for Public Policy Research report: Independent, 17 March 2000.
They may be on rollerskates: photograph: Steve Forrest, Guardian, 16 March 1998.
striding along the pavement: photograph: David Rose, Independent, 21 November
1994.
on a bicycle: photograph: Ted Ditchburn, Independent, 3 August 2001.
Barnardo’s advertisements: John O’Keeffe, creative director at Bartle Bogle
Hegarty, quoted in Guardian, 24 January 2000.
p.148 the undeveloped world: the first version of this book, published in 1992, used the
formulation ‘Third World’, which has lost its specificity after the collapse of
the Soviet Bloc. Specialists in the field have discussed replacements – including
developed/developing, majority/minority, industrialised/non-industrialised,
North/South – all of which have their problems. As a non-expert I have settled
for my own formulation, using ‘undeveloped’, since lack of ‘development’
(whether industrial or otherwise) is a major issue in relation to poverty and
‘otherness’. At the same time I do not want to imply that these countries are
‘developing’, since many of them, patently, are not. My thanks to Heather
Montgomery of the Open University for useful information on this topic.
press reports of wars, famines: Jonathan Benthall (1993) Disasters, Relief and the
Media, London: I.B.Tauris.
‘All over the world children are dying’: from a Save the Children advertisement,
‘While you’re eating between meals, he’s dying between meals’, 1980.
‘In the developing world’: Plan International UK, 2001.
p.149 World Press Photography: Stephen Mayes (ed.) (1996) World Press Photo, this
Critical Mirror, London: Thames and Hudson.
p.150 ‘change a child’s life’: an Action Aid advertisement from the 1980s was headed
‘Change this child’s life’, over the face of a dark-skinned girl with big, appealing
eyes.
‘For God’s sake help them’: Daily Mirror, 9 November 1996.
‘Sponsor a child’: Plan International UK, 2001.
Winston S. Churchill: at the time Churchill was roving correspondent for the
Times and had reported on the war in Biafra. He provided a moving account
which formed the text for the advertisement. The whole presentation thus
communicates in more than one way, as the relationship between images, text
and intended viewer shifts between different contexts.
p.151 ‘Children of War’ appeal: December 1995.
accounts of nineteenth-century philanthropy: see Hugh Cunningham (1991)
Children of the Poor, Oxford: Blackwell, for a critique of this particular historical
narrative.
‘Mirror to the rescue’: Daily Mirror, 27 October 1984. The report, by Alastair
Campbell, describes the organisation of a flight carrying food as the personal
effort by the Mirror’s publisher and owner, Robert Maxwell.
‘The Mail brings comfort’: 13 May 1991.
given a Western education: for example an advertisement for Pestalozzi
International Children’s Village, 1979, showed young people with a distinctly
tribal look next to the heading ‘We’ll give them the best survival training money
can buy. An English education’.
 C RY BA B I E S A N D DA M AG E D C H I L D R E N 173

Ali Ismaeel Abbas: see Patricia Holland (2003) ‘Little Alice and Other Rescued
Children’ in David Miller (ed.) Tell Me Lies: Media and Propaganda in the Attack
on Iraq, London: Pluto.
‘How you rescued the orphans’: Sunday Express ‘Magazine’, 19 May 1991.
Daily Mail’s 1975 airlift: 7 April 1975. Roy Greenslade, ‘Mercy mission – Daily
Mail style’, Guardian, 6 August 2001.
p.152 ‘carnivals of charity’: Zygmunt Bauman (1998) Work, Consumerism and the New
Poor, Buckingham: Open University Press, p.78.
Geri Halliwell: the Spice Girl pop singer was appointed ‘good will ambassador’
by UNICEF. On charity and celebrity see Andrew Smith, ‘All in a good cause?’,
Observer ‘Magazine’, 27 January 2002.
‘It is an unfortunate truism’: Paul Harrison and Robin Palmer (1986) News Out
of Africa, London: Hilary Shipman, p.97.
‘the mad scramble for publicity’: Richard Dowden, Independent, 21 December
1994.
Thomas Barnardo was taken to court: Valerie Lloyd and G. Wagner (1974) The
Camera and Dr Barnardo, Hertford.
Eglantyne Jebb was prosecuted: Helen Jones (2000) Women in British Public Life
1914–50: Gender, Power and Social Policy, Harlow: Pearson Education, p.108.
p.153 rivalled that of states: Boyden (1990) above.
the emaciated body of the child: a rare example of a domestic appeal using a
similar technique was part of the ‘Wishing Well Appeal’ from Great Ormond
Street Hospital for Sick Children (Collett Dickenson Pearce, 1987). The advertise-
ment showed a desperately sick premature baby in an incubator. The picture
was a snapshot taken by the baby’s mother two years previously, as the hospital
was unwilling for the agency to photograph a child currently in an incubator.
‘It had to be heart-wrenching,’ said art director Neil Godfrey. The advertisement
won the 1988 individual black-and-white Campaign Press Award (Campaign,
25 March 1988).
p.154 ‘While you’re eating’ and ‘You’re not the only one’: advertisements for Save the
Children, 1980.
‘I want you to see this’: Chris Steele-Perkins, Video Diary: ‘Dying for Publicity’,
on his photojournalism in Somalia and Sudan, BBC2, 25 September 1993.
was coming under attack: including my own article ‘“Save the Children” or
how the newspapers present pictures of children from the Third World’, in
Multiracial Education, Vol. 9, No 2, Spring 1981, which contains material I have
drawn on for this chapter.
‘aid pornography’: Bridget Harrison, ‘Is this aid pornography?’, Times, 29 May
1998; Anthony Bevins, ‘Does this picture make you flinch? Clare Short says
graphic images like this stop people caring’, Independent, 29 May 1998.
p.155 baby-milk bottle: War on Want (1979) The Baby Killer Scandal, ‘A War on Want
investigation into the promotion and sale of powdered baby milks in the Third
World’.
or a roll of film: cover of New Internationalist, January 1987.
‘the dignity of the people’: Save the Children, Focus on Images, 1991.
‘Images of starving children have lost their appeal’: see Stanley Cohen (2001)
States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering, Cambridge: Polity,
Chapter 7.
‘grotesque hypocrisy’: Teresa Hayter,‘Aid: The West’s False Handout’, New Socialist,
24 February 1985.
p.156 ‘The new slavery’: Guardian, February 1999.
174 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

‘All the migrants I photographed’: Sebastiao Salgado (2001) Children: Refugees

and Migrants, London: Aperture.
‘cynical exploitation’: Keith Dovkants, ‘Town that lives off London’s beggars:
Standard exposes racket of spongers from Romania’, Evening Standard, 14 March
2000.
‘If a parent dies’: Richard Dowden, ‘Dying by Darwinian logic’, Independent,
17 July 1991.
p.157 fighters, workers or aggressive dwellers on the streets: in her study of child
prostitutes in Thailand, Heather Montgomery (2001) writes that these children
‘exist in an ambiguous category which challenges notions of childhood and
threatens Western constructions of children’ (p.133). They ‘do not need inno-
cence. They need knowledge of their rights, appreciation of all their options,
and ways of protecting themselves’ (p.136). Modern Babylon? Prostituting
Children in Thailand, Oxford: Berghahn Books.
American parents: Independent, 27 March 1998.
Eritrean girl: children’s militia in Segeneti, Eritrea. Photograph: Mike Wells.
p.158 pictured with standard British-made rifles: the photograph, by David Crump,
was used by British newspapers, including Daily Mail, 30 May 2000, and Evening
Standard, 30 May 2000. Amnesty International’s In the Firing Line (1998)
estimated that at least 300,000 under-18s were actively engaged in over 30
armed conflicts, most of them in rebel armies. In a poignant comment on
contemporary globalisation, a heavily armed boy in Liberia was pictured wearing
a Benetton T-shirt. Guardian, 19 May 2001. Photograph: Guenay Hlutuncok.
Amnesty International awards: Amnesty International Journal, July–August 2000.
combining pathos: Hugh Cunningham has explored this theme in relation to
images of children in the nineteenth century. Cunningham (1991) above.
tourist gaze: John Urry (1990) The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary
Societies, London: Sage.
p.159 a poster put up by local businesses: Amnesty International Journal, AIBS,
January–February 1994.
‘When you talk about Brazilian children’: Zoe Heller, Independent on Sunday,
5 May 1991, accompanied by a photograph of sleeping children, literally piled
on top of each other, by Ben Gibson/Impact Photos. Historian James Walvin
(1982) wrote of the nineteenth century, ‘it was hard for the middle class to
regard the children of the poor as children’: A Child’s World: a Social History of
English Childhood 1800–1914, Harmondswoth: Pelican, p.15.
‘The victimisation of children’: Alice Miller (1985) Thou Shalt Not Be Aware,
London: Pluto, p.192.
p.160 neo-kitsch: see Michelle Henning (2000) ‘The subject as object: photography
and the human body’, in Liz Wells (ed.) Photography: a Critical Introduction,
London: Routledge, p.237. In the 1870s, Oscar Rejlander’s photograph of a
crying infant sold over a quarter of a million copies. Beaumont Newhall (1982)
The History of Photography, New York: MOMA, p.74.
‘La Tristesse’: 1990, Athena International.
p.161 the Sun ran a campaign: Peter Chippindale and Chris Horrie (1992) Stick it Up
Your Punter: the Rise and Fall of The Sun, London: Mandarin, p.157–61.
‘Thank God we live here?’: Daily Mirror, 19 September 1972. A ‘Shock issue’
headed ‘Every ten minutes an act of criminal violence happens in this country’.
Poverty Answering Back: Channel 4 (1996) above.
p.162 a spitting out of unpleasant and unwanted: see Julia Kristeva (1982) Powers of
Horror: an Essay on Abjection, New York: Columbia University Press, for a
 C RY BA B I E S A N D DA M AG E D C H I L D R E N 175

discussion of the notion of an ‘abject’ (neither subject nor object), a part of

oneself that one wants to be rid off, but cannot.
p.163 James Kincaid: (1992) Childloving: the Erotic Child and Victorian Culture, London:
Routledge.
the European Court of Human Rights: Christina M. Lyon (2000) Loving Smack
or Lawful Assault?: a Contradiction in Human Rights and Law, London: Institute
for Public Policy Research, p.1.
‘a lesson in bad behaviour’: Independent, 23 September 1996.
a poster campaign: Daily Mirror, 29 April 2002.
Lloyd de Mause: (1976) The History of Childhood, London: Souvenir.
a group of authors: Beatrice and Ronald Gross’s (1977) The Children’s Rights
Movement, New York: Doubleday Anchor, was a libertarian polemic; Lloyd de
Mause’s The History of Childhood (above) argued that historical changes are
brought about by ‘psychogenic factors’; Alice Miller’s influential Thou Shalt Not
Be Aware (above) came from a practising psychoanalyst who had come to doubt
the validity of psychoanalysis.
‘Child abuse is so common’: D. Bakan (1971) The Slaughter of the Innocents,
San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. On knowing and not knowing, see also Cohen
(2001) above.
p.164 A medical and forensic image: John Grady, ‘The manufacture and consumption
of child abuse as a social issue’, Telos, 56 (Summer 1983), pp.111–18.
‘battered baby syndrome’: Henry and Ruth Kempe (1978) Child Abuse, London:
Fontana.
those who threaten children most: NSPCC (1999) Out of Sight, London. Between
one and two children are killed by care-givers each week: 40 per cent before the
age of one, 33 per cent by the child’s mother, 49 per cent by the father, step-
father or mother’s partner.
Tyra Henry: Guardian, 19 December 1987.
Social workers in particular have been condemned: Meryl Aldridge, ‘Poor
relations: state social work and the press in the UK’, in Franklin (ed.) (1999) above.
p.165 dangers from without rather than disintegration from within: Jenny Kitzinger
(1999) ‘The ultimate neighbour from hell? Stranger danger and the media
framing of paedophiles’, in Bob Franklin (ed.) Social Policy, the Media and
Misrepresentation, London: Routledge.
The dangerous world: Ben Neasmith, brought up near Cromwell Street in
Gloucester, the home of Fred and Rosemary West, writes, ‘The discoveries at
Cromwell Street made us realise, all those years later, that our parents were
right. The bogeyman, the evil stranger really did exist and he was more terrifying
and depraved than we could have ever possibly have imagined.’ Bournemouth
University Student Press, January 2002.
Despite the evidence: NSPCC (1999) above.
newspapers offer rewards: during the search for Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman,
Express Newspapers offered £1 million reward, the Sun and the News of the
World offered £150,000. However, the Guardian noted that ‘little, if any of the
£2 million offered in rewards by five papers over the past six years has been
paid, prompting claims that such offers are simply commercial ploys’. 10 August
2002.
A hazy snapshot or a school photograph: it is the job of a picture agency or a
newspaper to approach the family for a photograph of a murdered or missing
child. A moving account of the difficulty of this task is given in the television
programme The Troubleshooters, about the Pacemaker photo agency based in
176 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

Belfast (Granada for ITV, 14 March 1995, Prod. Jeff Anderson). In an extra twist
to post-modern communications, in a snapshot reproduced across the media
during August 2002, Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman were both wearing
T-shirts with an eye-catching logo advertising Vodaphone, which at the time
was sponsoring Manchester United football club. The company saw it as ‘brand
contamination’. Johann Hari, ‘How tragedy damages a brand’, New Statesman,
9 September 2002.
p.166 photographing shocked and grieving parents: Jon Snow, ‘What should the
message be’, Guardian, 18 March 1996.
a boys’ club run by Hamilton: Independent, 15 March 1996.
the danger to children from the world beyond: in 1991, press coverage
contained 47 items on the prevention of sexual abuse outside the home, and
only two discussing ‘incest-prevention’. Paula Skidmore, ‘Gender and the
agenda: news reporting of child sexual abuse’, in Cynthia Carter et al. (eds)
(1998) News, Gender and Power, London: Routledge, p.211. See also Kitzinger
(1999) above.
p.167 ‘break their will’: ‘Break their will betimes: begin this great work before they can
run alone, before they can speak plain, or perhaps speak at all…make him do as
he is bid, if you whip him ten times running to effect it ,’ wrote Susannah Wesley
to her son John in 1828, quoted in M. Jobling (1978) ‘Child abuse: the historical
and social context’, in V. Carver (ed.) Child Abuse: a Study Text, Milton Keynes:
Open University Press.
oral and social histories: for example in many television programmes produced
by Stephen Humphries at Testimony Films, Bristol.
what counts as abuse: see Allison James, Chris Jenks and Alan Prout (1998)
Theorising Childhood, Cambridge: Polity, p.152, on the emergence of a concept
which had previously been ‘unseen or unintelligible’.
‘I was never frightened of walking home alone’: Childwatch, BBC1, 30 October
1986. Radio Times, photograph: Judy Goodhill.
p.168 after the programme went out: after its first year of operation, ChildLine
estimated that 8000 calls were made daily, of which about 800 got through.
Guardian, 14 September 1996.
First in Cleveland: Beatrix Campbell (1988/revised edition 1996) Unofficial Secrets:
Child Sexual Abuse, the Cleveland Case, London: Virago.
the answer was, unequivocally: Elizabeth Ward (1984) Father/Daughter Rape,
London: Women’s Press.
Florence Rush: (1980) The Best Kept Secret, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
Sex abuse happens in normal families: Mary McLeod and Esther Saraga, ‘Abuse
of Trust’, Marxism Today, August 1987.
p.169 ‘Perhaps I stared at my father’: Ellen Petrie, ‘Incest’, News of the World ‘Magazine’,
early 1980s. Photograph: Conrad Hafenrichter.
‘No one knows the inner torment’: ‘Liz’, ‘Too afraid to speak’, Leveller, No 78,
2–15 April 1982.
‘Going home’: Star, 1 July 1987, ‘For this family the ordeal was over…for now.
But for other parents the nightmare goes on. The youngsters must stay in care.’
p.170 Lost in Care: see Christian Wolmar (2000) Forgotten Children: the Secret Abuse
Scandal in Children’s Homes, London: Vision.
‘named and shamed’: News of the World, 23 and 30 July 2000.
‘Don’t house them, hang them’: Independent, 26 September 2000. Photograph:
Tom Pilston.
‘Beyond belief ’: for example Guardian, 1 August 1998.
 C RY BA B I E S A N D DA M AG E D C H I L D R E N 177

Questions arise around secrecy, denial: Jenny Kitzinger, ‘The gender-politics

of news production: silenced voices and false memories’, in Carter et al. (eds)
(1998) above.
an article by Nick Davies: ‘A terraced street in suburbia that shrouded a guilty
secret’, Guardian, 25 November 2000.
where child prostitutes may be available: Judith Ennew (1987) The Sexual
Exploitation of Children, Cambridge: Polity, Chapter 5; Montgomery (2001)
above. Sex tourism has been exposed in many part of the world, such as Sri
Lanka and Thailand. At the same time these are working children, making a
contribution to the tourist economy of poverty-stricken states.
 7
Gender, sexuality and a
fantasy for girls

‘Part little girl’: girlhood and female sexuality

Lipstick smeared across a sulky pout, tousled hair, a crumpled gingham dress,
an absent, heavy-lidded look: this is not a picture of a child, yet this 1990s
fashion spread is dealing in the mythology of childhood. ‘If Alice was a modern
heroine she would wear these clothes,’ says the caption. They are ‘part folk,
part gypsy, part Bohemian and part little girl’. The myth of Alice, the girl child
of unstable size, puzzling her way through a mysterious Wonderland, returns
constantly in the imagery of little girls – not least because of its undertow of
barely suppressed sexuality. (A network of child pornographers, arrested in 2001,
described themselves as the Wonderland Club.) Alice’s image is fixed for ever
by the inspired drawings by John Tenniel which accompanied the first edition.
Her long, swept-back hair – even if not actually held in place by an Alice band
– and her mid-Victorian pinafore dress, are instantly recognisable. The myth
has another dimension, since portraits of the real Alice are amongst the best
known photographs of the nineteenth century. Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in
Wonderland and a respected Oxford don, was also a celebrated photographer
who kept a cupboard full of dressing-up clothes and transformed his many
‘child friends’, including the original Alice, into beggar maids, popular char-
acters and oriental princesses. An image which is ‘part folk, part gypsy and part
Bohemian’ would certainly have appealed to him – especially as it remains ‘part
little girl’.
Unlike the even lighting and calm decorum of Lewis Carroll’s girl children
– even his nude studies achieve a cool distance – the young women playing

178
 G E N D E R , S E X UA L I T Y A N D A FA N TA S Y F O R G I R L S 179

at being children in this fashion spread have parted legs, open mouths and
theatrical gestures. The chiaroscuro presentation throws half the face into deep
shadow. The sophisticated styling and knowing references to cultural history
play with the titillations of child prostitution and corrupted girlhood. This is
the ‘kinderwhore’ look, part of a fashion repertoire which has included such
styles as ‘heroin chic’, sexual ambiguity and a cult of the very thin – all of them
constructions which bring into play the complex relations between childhood,
sexuality and femininity. Post-modern cynicism, reflexivity and playfulness
in the face of moral danger legitimise presentations that touch the edge of
acceptability.
Such pictures are embedded in highly attractive, ornamental presentations,
crammed with pleasures of the text. They are part of an all-pervasive re-
alignment of sensibility and morality, an aestheticisation of everyday life which
belongs to consumer culture. And being part of consumer culture is another
way of distancing them from seriousness. As promotional images they are not
for themselves alone, they are primarily for selling: ‘frill hem asymmetric dress
£300, voile dress £125…,’ continues the caption for the ‘modern Alice’. A fashion
spread from the 1970s uses a 15-year-old model to sell nightwear to those who
are ‘too old for toys, and too young for boys’. The viewer of a fashion spread may
purchase and wear the clothes and fantasise the roles on offer. The model in
this genre of photograph, whether child masquerading as child or adult woman
masquerading as child, is herself a commodity with a price on her head.

Fashion spread, Observer ‘Magazine’, 1978. Photographs: James Wedge.

180 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

The 1990s image pushes excess and knowingness even beyond that of the
1970s. It is no accident that images of this sort have developed in parallel with
a growing awareness of the reality of sexual abuse and a greater protectiveness
towards real children. The obsession with sexuality which characterised the
last decades of the twentieth century was partly a consequence of feminist and
psychoanalytic explorations which brought to the fore issues that had previously
been unspeakable. Women’s greater confidence in the public sphere had allowed
private sexuality and the borderline between childish and adult knowledge to be
publicly discussed – and also to be playfully exploited. Unexpectedly, the fashion
image discussed above has much in common with the picture on the cover of
Jane Gallop’s influential Feminism and Psychoanalysis, which was subtitled ‘the
daughter’s seduction’ (the theme of the book is that the daughter – feminism –
can seduce the father – psychoanalysis – ‘out of his impassive self mastery’). This
is a picture of a child, and it too plays on the borders of the permissible. This
little girl also has long hair – held in place by an Alice band – and looks directly
at the viewer with an expression of profound ambiguity. She clutches a bitten
apple. Once more the chiaroscuro suggests unnamed dangers held by the darkness,
but in this picture the child’s legs are together and they are curled away from
the viewer.
The visible sexuality of young girls has had immense consequences for the
imagery of childhood. Lindsay Smith points out that Lewis Carrol wanted his
child ‘friends’ to stay young and small (‘you’d better grow a little younger – go
back to your last birthday but one,’ he wrote to one of them) just at the time
when there was agitation for the age of consent for girls to be raised from 13 to
16 in England and Wales (it was raised in 1885). Smith here points to a recurring
theme. In order to keep childhood separate from adulthood there must be a
continuous effort to repress or redefine children’s sexuality. Girl children in
particular must not be seen to explore sexual knowledge on their own terms.
Instead they must perform childishness as if unaware of their sexual appeal. This
disavowal has added another fold of interpretation to pictures of pre-pubescent
girls (and, in an extra twist, to pictures of young adults playing the part of pre-
pubescent girls). Like all taboos, it draws attention to itself and tempts playful –
and sometimes dangerous – experiments with the image. Post-modern reflexivity
works on the borders, taunting the taboos with kitsch and excess.
 G E N D E R , S E X UA L I T Y A N D A FA N TA S Y F O R G I R L S 181

Doubling the image

Although the moment of transformation from child to adult is laden with signi-
ficance, I want to go back to a point which is arguably even more radical: the
point at which a gender-differentiated childish identity is constructed and the
available imagery creates a set of distinctions which ensure that the image of
childhood is not one but two – always crossed by the firm categorisations of
male and female. So much hinges on this difference that distinctions built into
the language make it a condition of humanity itself. It is only when we are told
whether a newborn is a boy or a girl that we can allow the child to enter the
social world and refer to ‘it’ with one, and only one, of those mutually exclusive,
domineering, erotic and culturally explosive terms ‘him’ or ‘her’. It is only in
relation to these two apparently opposing categories that social behaviour becomes
appropriate. Despite heated debates around the possibility of transgressing sexual
boundaries and the important distinction between (biological) sex and (social)
gender, we continue to live in a divided society in which the (still) unequal
division of gender is underpinned by the difficult relations of sexual desire and
power. ‘Even at play, today’s children are practising skills they’d have needed
10,000 years ago,’ wrote a child psychologist in Woman. He was rehearsing an
increasingly familiar theme that is sometimes stated triumphantly, sometimes
regretfully. It asserts that Western society is to be congratulated on modern-
ising gender relations and painlessly adjusting the grosser inequalities, and it
concludes that we can now settle back into a post-feminist world where the
brute facts of difference continue to impress us with their old, immutable forms.
No amount of tinkering with cultural patterns can affect those inbuilt relations
of power and desire. ‘Men don’t want their sons to be effeminate, so they go for
masculine toys,’ the National Association of Toy Retailers told Woman.
But things are never that clear-cut. As sexual difference is explored with relish
across the range of public imagery, our attention is drawn again and again to the
effort that goes into maintaining it as a fact and to emphasising its apparently
natural social consequences. It has been subject to endless exploration, experi-
mentation and reshaping within changing circumstances. The imagery seeks to
produce two alternative types of individual, and in doing so it restates and
overstates differences that at one moment seem oh so natural, so obvious and
inevitable, and at the next so fragile that they must be strictly enforced.
To build my collection I tend to buy greetings cards in pairs, since they are
produced that way. Even the image of babies tends to be doubled, with striking
differences between congratulations cards for the birth of a baby boy and those
for a baby girl. Two cards from the 1980s show the male baby self-reliant and
Greetings cards, Sharpe’s Classics, 1980s. Simon Elvin, 2000s.
 G E N D E R , S E X UA L I T Y A N D A FA N TA S Y F O R G I R L S 183

upright, while the female baby is lying on her back, passive and relaxed, legs
apart. A birthday card for six-year-olds from the 1970s has a boy posing with a
football. He is photographed from below, giving a sense of height and power –
which, admittedly, has some irony to it. But it is contrasted with a girl who
crouches beside a dolls’ house and is photographed, without irony, from above.
By the year 2000 the difference could not presented with such straightforward
innocence. A much more dramatic pair of birthday greetings (described as
‘boggle-eyed peepers’) have cartoon-style drawings of both boy and girl with
clumpy trainers, swivelling 3-dimensional eyes and huge toothy smiles. Never-
theless the girl is surrounded by flowers while the boy zooms along on a scooter.
On another card, an energetic five-year-old on rollerblades, fairly androgynous
at first glance, could only be a girl once we note her wispy hair and the flowers
and hearts that float across the background. The difference continues to be
created as it is lived through, in interaction with the image.
Although there has been a greater willingness to accept biological deter-
minants in recent debates around gender difference – sometimes from feminists
endeavouring to bring up boys in a non-sexist way – when I look at the
changing imagery in my collection, it seems that the depiction of difference may
now take it for granted that an enjoyment of femininity need not automatically
lead to social disadvantage. There is a world of difference between the grinning
girl and boy on the ‘boggle-eyed peepers’ and the upstanding boy and crouching
girl of the 1970s cards. However, despite the glimmerings of a weakening link
between masculinity and power, as strategies of visual differentiation shift and
change, there are always new opportunities for that linkage to sneak back and
claim its ‘natural’ status.

Strategies of differentiation

Conventions which indicate the sex of children range from the minimal, in
which a line drawing eliminates all but the essentials, to the maximal, usually in
advertising images which draw on huge resources to pack information into a
dense presentation (a technique which Erving Goffman described as ‘commercial
syncretism’). Either way, the image seeks a recognition that will be instant,
involuntary and unquestioned. A line drawing by the inimitable children’s
illustrator Dick Bruna on the front of the Observer ‘Magazine’ used only the
starkest indicators. Two children are represented by heavy outlines: circles for
heads, strokes of the pen for hairs, dots for eyes. As is frequently the case, the
difference between them centres on the depiction of the girl. She is recognised
184 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

by an addition of visual elements, in the form of six extra lines to stand for hairs.
She is what is described in linguistics as the ‘marked’ term, in which an addition
to a word indicates a deviation from its basic form (child, children; man, woman
etc). Those extra lines reinforce the impression, already embedded in the
cultural environment, that femininity is a variation on a masculine norm. By
indicating the girl’s collar with curves, while the boy’s has straight lines, this very
simple diagram of difference also manages to suggest that femininity is softer
and more decorative.
Any reading of an image of this sort inevitably calls up an active distinction
between male and female which is part of everyday practice. Looking at this
rigorously simplified presentation, a viewer is forced to make a series of judge-
ments and understandings across the emotional and social spectrum. This live
network of assumptions includes expectations about social roles, child-rearing
practices, living arrangements within households, power relations between the
sexes, sexual attraction, erotic relationships and our very sense of personal
identity. A social and moral universe hinges on six little hairs. A single picture,
by enforcing a positive act of differentiation on the part of the viewer, brings
into play multiple biological, psychical and social structures, and secures the
viewer’s own place as part of those structures. The whole complex of overlapping
and inter-related systems is emotionally underpinned by the forces of sexuality
and desire. It is only when we pause to consider the process more closely that
its instability becomes suddenly, startlingly visible. Despite the occasional
exploration of sexual ambiguity, there seems to be a need to state, restate and
overstate the strategies of differentiation, particularly when children are the
subject of the presentation.
In the rich imagery of advertising, differentiation between the sexes is
elaborated in great detail across the spectrum of consumer goods, ensuring that
sexual difference is confirmed in the moments of purchase and consumption.
In their consumer activity, children repeatedly reconstruct their gender roles.
Advertisements celebrate present pleasures and open themselves to challenging
and critical meanings at their peril. A promotional message must ensure that
information is precisely directed, and must hold every element firmly in place
to ward off any possible escape of meanings. However, in a critically aware
society, overstatement may shake the security of the message, hence the increase
in advertisements which are ironical or deconstructive. An example from the
late 1970s gives an impression of the fullness of the genre.
A pair of advertisements for Heinz tinned foods appeared at the height
of feminist campaigns concerning the representation of women and girls. They
set out to persuade mothers to buy processed food, which was presented as
 G E N D E R , S E X UA L I T Y A N D A FA N TA S Y F O R G I R L S 185

Advertisements, late 1970s.

nourishing, convenient and enjoyable. They use photographs which employ a

casual naturalism, making it seem as if viewers are catching the children unawares,
as is the adult’s right. Yet these are no documentary pictures, snapping the world
as it passes before the lens. They have been expensively set up, carefully lit and
framed, with every detail controlled to construct a heightened realism. Both
presentations are organised around gender, the numerous props creating a space
that in the one case could only be filled by a boy, and in the other only by a girl.
Nothing confuses the viewer’s expectations, nor hampers the task of discrimi-
nating between the two. The girls are in a bedroom, the younger one pulling
clothes from an open drawer, the other trying them on in front of a mirror,
playing at being an adult woman. The boys are in a garden shed full of tools,
oil cans, paintbrushes and the paraphernalia of masculine activity. Unlike the
girls, they are not pretending but are engaged in authentic work. They really are
mending a bicycle. The activities and positioning of the bodies in the two
presentations follow patterns recognised as characteristically male or charact-
eristically female. One girl has her head bent back, admiring her reflection and,
incidentally, displaying her body to the viewer in a double performance – for her
own eyes and for others. The boys lean forward over a purposeful task, their
heads bent away from the viewer of the image. The controlling opposition
between male and female has brought into play associated oppositions between
indoors and outdoors, clean and dirty, play and work, self-absorption and
object-absorption.
186 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

Confident in its aggressive statement of difference, this presentation – and

many others like it – assumes a reading by viewers who are themselves secure in
their own sex/gender positioning. Viewers are expected to allocate each object
securely to its place – bikes to the boys, dressing-up clothes to the girls – and to
repress any slippage between the two. A sense of social maleness or femaleness is
established, regardless of any insecurity in living out those categories in real life.
Homosexuality, lesbianism, sexual non-conformity, seem inconceivable in this
comfortably divided world. Pictures like these calm our anxieties, helping us to be
aware, as Stephen Heath put it, ‘of the absolute fact of difference’, despite ‘needing
to deal with the simultaneous absence of difference in any one individual’.
‘The absolute fact of difference’ is visually stated again and again. Loveable,
grubby young boys, each with a bold and impudent grin, are placed beside coy
young girls, whose soulful expressions pose the enigma of sexual knowledge.
Girls may bend their heads to one side; boys almost always face the camera/
viewer directly; boys grin, girls simper; in a pair of advertisements for Nesquik,
the girl puckers her lips to suck at her straw with a wide-eyed look at the camera,
whereas the boy tucks his into the corner of his toothy smile; girls lean back,
boys lean purposefully forwards. But the imagery of gender differentiation has
proved infinitely flexible. It has its progressive moments (young girls in dungarees,
boys in less aggressive postures) but the old distinctions continuously reassert
themselves, ever seeking a form which will adapt to a changing social climate.
The promotion of toys is gender divided from the earliest years.
Manufacturers may show both sexes playing with building bricks or Lego, but
from the toddler stage boys have Action Man and dumper trucks, girls have
Barbie dolls, fairy wings and toy prams. Boys do not have tea sets, dolls’ houses,
Care Bears or My Little Pony. Girls do not have weapons of war, micromachines
or radio-controlled cars. Non-sexist parents faced with this chasm are caught up
in acts of discrimination eagerly embraced by the children themselves. ‘Lots of
manufacturers advertise and package their toys for both girls and boys. But
research tells them that sometimes it can be a waste of time and money. Girls
simply don’t buy the toy and manufacturers also risk alienating boys by linking
them with girls at all,’ wrote toy retailer Gerry Masters. The continuing problem
is to disentangle gender differentiation from a masculine fantasy of dominance.
Boys simply do not want to be linked with girls.
The image of the ‘tomboy’ (George/Georgina in Enid Blyton’s ‘Famous Five’
books is an archetypal example), in which a young girl resists the markers of
femininity and subordination (George ‘wore her curly hair short’ and was ‘very
fierce’) has, in contemporary imagery, been pre-empted by unisex fashions and
a veneer of equality. In promotional material for clothing, girls and boys are
 G E N D E R , S E X UA L I T Y A N D A FA N TA S Y F O R G I R L S 187

both shown wearing jeans, tracksuits, clumpy shoes and T-shirts. However, the
principle remains: girls must also have skirts and frilly dresses – even though, in
the 2001 H&M catalogue, the little girl in the lace collar and velvet skirt plays as
energetic a part in the tug-of-war as those dressed in trousers and jerseys. Girls
may learn welding along with the rest of the class, but their shoes must have a
more decorative shape, as they had in a shoe advertisement headed ‘Times are
changing’. Times may well change, but the feminine remains the marked term in
a difference that continues to subordinate. The indicators of difference, like those
decorative hairs in the Dick Bruna drawing, remain on the feminine body. And
that body must display itself in such a way that reveals its awareness (even if the
child is ‘unaware’) of its sexuality, for, in this rigorously heterosexual visual
regime, a drab differentiation based on housework, childcare, unequal pay and all
those other mundanities is secured by the thrilling potential of sexual excitement.

Sex and gender: children and adults

Within many of the social contexts in which childhood is pictured and defined,
the imagery is chiefly concerned to police the boundary between children and
adults. At school or in the home, childhood is constructed as that which adult-
hood is not. However, in the broad scope of the imagery, the indicators of
childhood are always crossed by the pervasive markers of gender and sexuality,
which confuse distinctions based on age and generation. When the focus is on
gender, the image of a child is confirmed not by the characteristics it has in
common with all other children, but by its contrast with children of the opposite
sex and a more complex set of relations with adults.
Advertisements and promotional imagery make use of the childishness of
children as a justification for adult behaviour and patterns of consumption. But
they also show children as trainees, displaying the characteristics they share with
adults, learning to take their place in an appropriately gendered adult world.
Imagery which confirms a girl’s training for domestic labour and child-rearing
has been modified by powerful critiques from feminist voices, but it continues
to figure in advertisements for consumer goods from washing machines to toys,
and from foods to toiletries. Modulated by a new sense of independence and
dynamism in the children themselves, mothers are still helped by daughters
around the house and initiate them into the use of clothes and cosmetics. The
role of boys has expanded slightly. Just as men now figure much more frequently
in a childcare role, boys are more likely to be encouraged to engage in domestic
duties such as washing their own clothes – especially as those duties can now be
188 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

shown to be simple and undemanding with the use of appropriate household

technology. Even so, boys are far more often seen together with their fathers
in training for physical activity, intellectual control and leisure choices. They
appear in advertisements for cars, sports equipment, TVs, insurance and other
‘masculine’ fields. An imitative relation with the adult of the same sex – children
as little men and little women, sharing the visual indications of masculinity and
femininity – has remained remarkably consistent, despite the arrival of a free-
flowing independent childhood and the ‘new man’ about the house.
Images of cross-gender relationships between children and adults bring a
range of different problems. Within the context of the home, the image of a
charming young boy may be used to give rise to motherly feelings in the viewer.
Mothers are seen serving their sons with food, medicine and other forms of
care, while sons accept and indeed demand their services. But there is more at
stake than parenthood when the image of a young girl is viewed by an adult
man. The image of a girl child inevitably reaches beyond the family, beyond
men as fathers, to address men in general with an appeal which is potentially
sexual. In the Heinz advertisements discussed above, the boys’ world is shown
as self-sufficient, while that of the girls is centred on a mirror. The older girl
is looking at herself – and preparing to be looked at by another. Her angled
position, just off-centre in the picture, causes her to display her framed and
decorated body to the viewer, at the same time as she displays it to herself. The
mirror is a central icon of femininity, and the little girl in the advertisement is
rehearsing her adult role, styling her body to conform to the expectations of her
gender. But the mirror suggests more than a future relationship with a viewing
male. It creates a present link between the child in the picture and any of the
grown men who may catch sight of it. ‘I just look into the mirror and I’m an
ordinary girl, but I am aware others see my looks,’ 12-year-old model Elizabeth
Preston told the Daily Mail. From the earliest years, the feminine body is
constructed for display.
Questions about imagery which implies childhood sexuality have been forced
to the forefront of public discussion in the context of scandals around paedophilia
and incest. ‘As soon as you are sensitised to the reactions of paedophiles you
start to see unhealthy images of children where before you might only have seen
cute ones,’ wrote Geraldine Bedell. What begins as a fantasy for a little girl
dressing up in front of a mirror may be transformed into a quite different
fantasy for adult men. From flirting bimbos to pouting babies, we have been
trained by the imagery itself to read pictures of girls in an erotic way. Little
girls have a difficult route to negotiate as they actively engage in the process of
becoming women.
 G E N D E R , S E X UA L I T Y A N D A FA N TA S Y F O R G I R L S 189

Catalogue, 2000s.

Girl Heaven

At Christmas 2000, a mail-order catalogue called Girl Heaven offered little girls
the opportunity to transform themselves into an angel, a fairy or a bride by
choosing a veil, a posy, a halo or some sparkling wings. Any of these could be
added to a ruched top and a net tutu – a bargain at £35. Other goodies on offer
included a wand and tiara set, pink sequinned shoes and a heart-shaped bag.
Really generous parents may spend another £35 on a pink satin ball gown with
a hooped skirt. The girls who appear in the catalogue modelling these fantasy
clothes are clearly delighted with themselves. They hold up their net skirts with
their finger tips, stretch out their wands and display their tiaras – all in a leaflet
of intense pinkness.
190 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

Girl Heaven is a recent manifestation of a fantasy for girls that has long
resonated through the imagery of childhood. It appears in girls’ books and
comics and is filtered through advertisements and magazine features. It is the
fantasy of the fairy princess who becomes a bride. In the storybooks she wears
a white dress, often down to her ankles, which makes it difficult to do anything
more than romp gently in the palace grounds. Long golden hair and a fair skin
are axiomatic – this princess is almost never black. She wears a crown or a tiara,
and servants and admirers pay homage to her status and beauty. Frequently she
is a ballet dancer as well – she may be the Sleeping Beauty or may strap on her
wings to transform herself into the Sugar Plum Fairy. Dressing up, being
treated as someone special, being beautiful, putting on a show, being magic –
these themes still pervade the fantasy world of healthy, assertive twenty-first-
century girls.
The image of pre-adolescent girliness owes much to the romantic image of
girl children in the nineteenth century in which beauty and vulnerability add
poignancy. (I have a postcard from around 1910 in which a long-haired girl
is surrounded by a cornucopia of flowers and fruit – an excess of sensuous
abundance.) It also owes something to the image of the fairy, which in a popular
genre of Victorian paintings and book illustrations transformed an earlier more
adult supernatural being into a creature who was small, light, sexless and magic,
borne up by little insect wings. The swirling graphics of girls’ comic books of the
1970s and 1980s picked up on the iconography of stars, flowers and flowing hair
for girls as they entered their teens. Angela McRobbie’s 1978 analysis of the
magazine Jackie revealed narratives in which girls’ lives were dominated by their
emotions, and where every girl was transformed into a romantic heroine. The
imagery was taken up in the airbrushed style of Athena posters in the early
1980s, whose ‘Unicorn Princess’ decorated hundreds of bedroom walls. In more
recent years the narratives of romance have largely disappeared, but the image
remains – acted out by girls over many generations. This is not so much a
‘masquerade’, in the sense that true feelings are concealed and hidden behind an
acceptable front, as a lived fantasy. It may be a performance, but it is one that is
personal and self-absorbed.
Feminist critics have noted how the specialness of the princess prefigures
the moment when her prince arrives and she colludes in her own subordination
by becoming a bride, surrounded by more little princesses/bridesmaids. But
I would argue that it is not necessary to pose this forward-looking, teleological
interpretation of the image, since that harsh critique, while aiming to be liberatory
by undermining the deceptive magic and revealing the covert workings of social
expectations, nevertheless overlooks the ways in which the image is used –
 G E N D E R , S E X UA L I T Y A N D A FA N TA S Y F O R G I R L S 191

particularly by pre-teens. Even when acting out the visual fantasy of the bride,
the little princess may not be living in anticipation, but revelling in present
performance and present enchantment. Her future is by no means determined.
As with all imagery, the meanings of this image are observably re-constructed
and re-appropriated within changing social circumstances.

Dancing on the boundary

The central questions asked by this book when considering an image are: what is
it for? Who is invited to look at it? What has been made of it? What emerges is a
contest over use. While we discuss images of girlhood as they are enjoyed by girls
themselves, we know that girls are by no means the only envisaged audience for
a group of pictures which have frequently evoked criticism and sometimes even
demands for censorship. As boys reach manhood they tend to be represented in
ways which are sometimes comic, and often, as we have seen, threatening. But the
image of the girl child reaching puberty is all about sex. At this transitional point,
the image of the young girl becomes a taboo image, surrounded by signals, fears
and warnings, scrutinised for its dangerous potential and dissected for its move-
ment into risky territories. In a real and active struggle over construction and
meaning, parallel themes feed off each other. There are concerns about the
processes of creating the pictures and the role of children as models; concerns
about the part played by the image itself in a changing moral climate; and concerns
about the possible use of the image by adult men with dubious motives. A central
issue is the degree of knowledge expressed by the child in the picture. Is sexuality
just in the eye of the viewer, or are we observing a precocity in knowledge and
behaviour which leads to a premature loss of childhood?
Popular imagery shows many pictures of confident young girls who look the
camera in the eye with an unembarrassed directness, but it needs only a slight
adjustment, a slight tilt of the head to one side, to add a bashful self-awareness.
One strand of the imagery routinely seeks to bend the head of the girl, to
sexualise her image and to exploit the fascination of that transitional time when
she is ‘too old for toys, too young for boys’. The imagery of girl children balances
childhood and femininity in contradiction and competition. At the same time,
a fascinating exchange between knowledge and ignorance reaches beyond the
boundary between girl and woman towards the forbidden attraction of innocence
itself, the sexuality of the child. A little girl may be denied knowledge of sex, but
as a feminine creature – for those who choose to look at it that way – her image
cannot fail to indicate sex. I shall be discussing several strategies adopted by the
192 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

Observer ‘Review’, 31 August 1997. Photograph: Evan Corbis Sygma.

available imagery in which sexuality and femininity are contested, in a struggle

in which children themselves are by no means passive.
First, the pleasures of a five-year-old may be adapted to charm adult eyes.
The child’s enjoyment in trying on adult roles, decked out with the earrings, high
heels and other paraphernalia of a sophisticated woman, can be transformed
into a major performance for an adult audience. Familiar images include over-
dressed infants strutting through a mini-beauty contest; the five-year-old trophy
winner having her diamante necklace fixed; the six-year-old American beauty
queen Jon-Benet Ramsey facing her audience in mascara, lipstick and feathers.
In a strange way, by enacting a femininity which is itself an excessive performance,
such an image effectively keeps the concepts of adulthood and childhood sharply
separate, even though the symbols of both of these states are brought together
 G E N D E R , S E X UA L I T Y A N D A FA N TA S Y F O R G I R L S 193

within the frame of the picture. These little girls would not convey their ironic
message if they did not retain something of the unaware childishness that viewers
have come to identify as signifying childhood itself.
A more ambivalent game of hide-and-seek is played with an image of girls
close to adolescence whose youthful freshness is sought by adult model agencies.
In 1988 Milla Jovovich, at the age of 12, was described as the ‘hottest new
American fashion model’, remarkable for the contrast between ‘her siren’s head’
and ‘pre-nubile body’. Kate Moss was signed up by the Storm model agency at the
age of 14, and was at the forefront of a 1990s trend for ‘superwaifs’. In 1998,
pictures of 12-year-old Elizabeth Preston leaning towards the camera in a light,
strappy dress were reproduced in both the popular and the broadsheet press and
provoked a spate of articles which lamented the loss of childhood. ‘What sort of
a message is it giving out to paedophiles? The fashion for very young girls looking
sensual must be a terrible temptation to these sick individuals.’ While the image
of infants dramatising the sexual display of adult women is an ironic comment
on the impossibility of keeping categories of femininity and childishness together,
the presentation of young models like Milla and Elizabeth as if they were women,
draws attention to the impossibility of holding them apart.
(There is a sense of judgement and retribution in the narratives which make
the headlines. In a strange way the shortened lives of pure Victorian innocents are
paralleled by the endangered lives of exploited twentieth-century child performers.
In a moral lesson for our times, child stars have frequently been unable to cope
with the pressures, and have either destroyed their health in an orgy of drugs and
sex or have died young. Child singer Lena Zavaroni is a notable example; Sue Lyon
– who played the original Lolita – is another. Jon-Benet Ramsey was murdered
at the age of six in mysterious circumstances. The excess of the child spectacle
becomes the more exciting for the sense of danger that accompanies it – both to
the child and to the moral regime of which she is part.)
A third strategy in staging the tension between feminine sexuality and child-
hood is the drama of transition – observed with relish by the popular press,
frequently with the willing collaboration of the adolescents concerned. A familiar
theme is the escape from institutional constraints. Teachers voice their disapproval
as a young girl abandons the constriction of school uniform and enters a public
world where men may openly respond to her sexuality. ‘My figure has always
brought a lot of comments,’ said 16-year-old Samantha Fox when her career as
a Page Three girl was launched in 1983, ‘so why not show it?’ The Star followed
a 15-year-old model in a series of pin-up pictures which, despite protests, culmi-
nated in a topless pose on her sixteenth birthday. The visual transformation was
presented as a masculine triumph. School uniform itself may become a salacious
194 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

joke. Young women in uniform can turn sensible shoes into sexy ones; they can
advertise ‘men’s’ magazines; they can poke fun at the ‘prudes’. The joke is that
the uniform attempts to control bodies that now refuse to be controlled. Breasts
and buttocks burst out and insist that femininity will not be contained by the
limits imposed by the institutions of childhood. Severe gymslips are lifted to
reveal stocking tops, frilly knickers and suspenders. Forbidden parts of the body
are indicated by old-fashioned underclothing that has itself become part of the
stock-in-trade of pornography. (There is a porn magazine called Schoolgirl.)
The uniform brings with it a sado-masochistic fantasy of school as a place of
sexualised discipline.
Relations of power through sexuality underlie a game of provocation and
denial, titillation and outrage, played around the unstable division between
adult woman and girl child. The word ‘girl’ can refer to a woman of any age,
implying a continuation of her defenceless availability. The pin-up girl, the
chorus girl, the girlfriend – a word which stands for a child in whom sexuality
must be repressed also stands for a woman at those very moments when she is
defined by her sexuality. The word summons up childhood as a paradigm for
dependency, vulnerability and subordination, and imputes those characteristics
to the whole female group. The domination–subordination relationship between
men and women is paralleled and reinforced by the domination–subordination
relationship between adults and children.
The image of the child-woman balances that of the too-knowing child. In
the first case, seductiveness seems an innocent condition of a woman’s being
which she does not choose and cannot reject; in the second, seductiveness may
be consciously displayed but its consummation is tabooed. As adulthood and
childishness merge and blur, what disturbs is the disappearance of the boundary.
‘I lead an adult life, but I won’t throw childhood away,’ said a 15-year-old model
who admitted that she first had sex at 13. ‘I’ll still be a child at eighty and have
Coco Pops for breakfast.’
At the end of the 1970s a spate of American films worked a genre pioneered
by Lolita in the previous decade and produced a more overt and disturbing
image, that of girl children whose loss of innocence made them openly seductive.
At the age of 12, Brooke Shields played a child prostitute in Pretty Baby (1977).
At 13, Jodie Foster leaned provocatively against a lamppost in Taxi Driver (1976).
By the time Lolita was re-made in 1997, with 14-year-old Dominique Swain, the
reality and extent of child abuse had been publicly debated and the production
of the film was accompanied by concerns for the well-being of the child actor.
But the image of a child who has chosen to be sexually available continues to
fascinate, and continues to be reinterpreted. Two teen magazines in summer
 G E N D E R , S E X UA L I T Y A N D A FA N TA S Y F O R G I R L S 195

2001 featured articles on prostitution, both using the resonant image of a young
girl in cropped shorts bending over a car, negotiating with a client.
It may be that a loss of innocence is the best protection against exploitation.
In that spirit, a newer fantasy for girls, prominent in teen magazines and pop
culture, sets out to shock the moral purists and to dramatise their worst forecasts.
Using the strategies of camp, a familiar image of teenage girlhood challenges
morality by pushing it to its limits and throwing it back at the accusers. Magazines
such as Mizz, Smash Hits, Shout, Bliss and Just Seventeen are full of ordinary
teenagers who are as sexy and knowing as the celebrities. An archetypal teenager,
created in a montage in The Observer, is wearing a cropped top with bellybutton
exposed and the words ‘porn star’ across her slight bosom (the word is slightly
blurred, perhaps deliberately?). She wears a diamante choker in Edwardian
brothel style, blue make-up on her heavy lids and has a partially open mouth.
Despite – or rather because of – its excess, the distancing force of such an image
is instantly recognisable, particularly to an audience familiar with female
performers from Madonna to the Spice Girls.
Campaigns to preserve the purity of childhood risk turning their backs on
precisely those areas most in need of a playful, if fearful, exploration. The little
girl tottering on her high heels in front of the mirror is trying on adult identities
but is also experimenting in turning them to her own advantage. An exploration of
childhood sexuality and its rapid transformations will inevitably venture near the
edge of what is acceptable. The consequent sense of transgression is undoubtedly
pleasurable in itself – even when the pleasure is expressed as outrage.

Feminised boys

The image of the girl-woman is a threat to the masculine position in several ways.
A familiar popular narrative tells of men who are seduced into transgression
either by the irresistible innocence of the feminine or by rapacious Lolitas.
Another tells of young males who are in danger of becoming feminised because
they too stand in a subordinate relation to adult male power. This makes the
sexuality of boys an even more impossible topic than that of girls. A masculine
sexual assertiveness poses a dangerous challenge to adult males, while passivity
and softness tends to be seen as feminising and homo-erotic. Unlike the ‘tomboy’,
who is destined to abandon her resistance to female positioning, a feminised boy
may risk losing his claims to masculinity.
However, the image of the feminised boy has an important place in the public
repertoire. The image of a young boy in ruffled collar, velvet suit and curly hair
196 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

Postcard, 1910.

displays all the qualities of softness and sweetness usually associated with girls,
and is still a recognised figure appreciated for its kitsch appeal. Little Lord
Fauntleroy, first published in 1894, was made into a BBC television serial just
over a century later. One of the earliest images of children to be commodified was
Bubbles, the popular Victorian painting by John Everett Millais which became
an advertisement for Pears soap and continues to be one of the most reproduced
pictures of children (the postcard I have was posted in 1910). But in a climate
where the power differential between boys and girls is under challenge, such
visual ambivalence tends to be combated by masculine toughness. The contemp-
orary image of the pre-adolescent boy needs to be strongly defended against
feminisation, and also against fears of homosexuality and paedophilia. Thus
the symbols of power are marshalled to secure the boy as the inheritor of the
dominant position of the adult male. In contemporary advertisements, boys are
much more likely to distress, threaten or judge their mothers. Their choice of
toys involves tools, machines and weapons. They are rarely shown in repose.
Instead they run, leap, throw, climb or engage in effective activity. The image of
 G E N D E R , S E X UA L I T Y A N D A FA N TA S Y F O R G I R L S 197

the young toughie has become the regular face of an engaging boyhood. His
knowingness is not sexual, but a cheeky naughtiness. Amongst my collection of
greetings cards I have a choirboy whose angelic face is belied by the catapult in
his pocket, and a birthday card which shows a golden-haired youngster amongst
some foliage – shooting with a toy bow and arrow.
It is not until boys reach their teenage years, when male potency is assured,
that the image can afford to play with an effeminate look. Then the girls’ maga-
zines go for male pin-ups and boy bands who may well be floppy-haired and
doe-eyed. A late 1990s fashion sought out ‘male waifs’ who exhibited a Brideshead
Revisited foppishness.

Evidence of a crime

The cheeky face of a smiling boy may be read as an invitation to pornographers

and paedophiles. A low-intensity image such as a school photograph or a snapshot
may have meanings projected onto it that resonate beyond the bounds of social
acceptability. However, there is another group of pictures which moves beyond
the mere implication of paedophilic attraction and shows children actually
involved in sexual acts or as sadistic or fetishistic objects. Such pictures are illegal
and hidden from public view, and yet their very possibility provokes intense
public fascination as well as horror. They appear to establish a link between a
sexual attraction for children and abusive behaviour which divides paedophiles
and ‘perverts’ from the rest of society. And yet the forbidden questions are
implied: are images of physical punishment also linked to sexuality? Is the disgust
aroused by degrading images part of a continuum of sexual response?
Secrecy and prohibition are central to the social structure which contains
such images. When television personality Carol Vorderman followed a police
investigation into child pornography on the Internet, she repeatedly reminded
her audience that she could not broadcast the pictures she was calling up on
a computer screen. Instead their disgusting nature was relayed through her
expressions of revulsion. But the prohibitions have been gradually relaxed. When
a group of men who called themselves the Wonderland Club was traced and
arrested, the press could only indicate the nature of the pictures that had been
circulated. They published hazy images with blanked-out faces, which neverthe-
less made it clear that the children shown were being appallingly maltreated –
several of them appeared to be bound and chained. When the BBC transmitted
The Hunt for Britain’s Paedophiles in mid-2002, some of the pictures of children
hoarded by the convicted men were transmitted in a far more explicit form.
198 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

These are pictures which hover at the very edge of available imagery, judged to
be only for the eyes of criminals and those who would prosecute them. They are
seen by the police as evidence of a crime, since it seems obvious that, at the
moment the picture was taken, a child was actually being abused.
The situation is more problematic when the suspected abuse is in the mind
of the beholder. Even if a photograph does not document abuse taking place, it
may nevertheless be offensive to some viewers, who consider it abusive in itself.
A picture of a naked boy sitting gazing at the camera with his hand covering
his crotch was considered to be illegal in Western Australia, under a law which
only requires a person who ‘looks like’ a child under 16 years of age to be
photographed ‘in a manner that is likely to cause offence to a reasonable adult’.
The judgement was made even though the photograph had been taken by the
boy’s mother, as part of her course work as a photography student. Although they
were outraged by the incident, the publishers of the academic journal Continuum
hesitated before using it on their cover. The picture is a reversal of a notorious
photograph of ‘Rosie’, taken by Robert Mapplethorpe in 1976, in which the child
is fully dressed but reveals her private parts, not only to a particularly sensual
photographer, but to those following generations who continue to gaze at his
work. The Australian student remained on remand for more than two years, but
the photograph of her son made it onto the cover of the journal. In London, the
Hayward Gallery left ‘Rosie’ out of its 1996 Mapplethorpe show.
In the UK, the law states that ‘It is an offence to take, or permit to be taken,
any indecent photograph of a child’, and, in a 1988 Court of Appeal judgement,
‘indecency’ was defined as whatever right-thinking people understood it to mean
by ‘applying the recognised standards of propriety’. In 1989 another Court of
Appeal judgement stated that pictures suspected of being indecent must be judged
outside the context in which they were created. No witnesses could be called to
explain the motives of those who took them. The assumption is precisely the
opposite to that argued in this book. My position, which is explained at length
in the Introduction, argues that the meanings of imagery are always fluid. It is
in the very nature of a visual presentation to shift and change its meanings
according to context and usage.
In my view, these problems can only be untangled by distinguishing three
different phenomena; first, the process of making a picture, which may well be
an abusive act, whether or not the abuse is visible in the final image; second, the
picture itself, usually a photograph, accepted as a record, as evidence of a crime;
and third, an offensive picture, which may not have been abusive in the taking,
and may not record a criminal act, but whose content is considered deserving of
criminal prosecution because of present or future effects. These distinctions are
 G E N D E R , S E X UA L I T Y A N D A FA N TA S Y F O R G I R L S 199

thrown into greater relief by the use of electronic imaging, in which a present-
ation may create, with apparent photographic exactitude, an event which never
happened. (In 2002 two policemen were charged with possessing and making
‘pseudo-photographs’ of children under the age of 16.) The fact that an image
is shocking does not remove the need to treat it as an image, rather than taking
its evidential qualities at face value. It is of crucial importance to trace the
history of its construction, its context and its past use. In the case of a picture
which is censured because it may be ‘offensive’, questions are posed about a
possible future use. But, as I have argued throughout, images may be put to
many uses and their meanings modulated by different groups of users and in
different contexts. There is no way of predicting that a picture which neither
records abuse nor was abusive in the taking will, in the future, give rise to abuse.
If it merely ‘gives offence’ it may well be amongst many challenging images which
legitimately test the boundaries of contemporary meanings.

Wealthy, intelligent, passionate and have-it-all

The drama of childhood sexuality is taken a step further when shocking, familiar,
but less spectacular public narratives tell of young girls’ bubbling sexuality
bursting forth in the disaster of unwanted babies or an otherwise ruined child-
hood. This image tends to be heavy with moral judgement. The teenage mother
is often shown head in hands, slouched and unkempt. Viewers are forcibly
reminded that a girl is no longer alluring once she is degraded by prostitution
or becomes a ‘gymslip mother’. The transformation from child to adult is often
presented in punitive terms. ‘Thirty-six hours in labour, which is common,
changed them dramatically’, the principal of a school for teenage mothers
commented grimly.
By the mid-1980s, the views of Mary Whitehouse, Victoria Gillick and other
moral purity campaigners achieved a new credibility as the backlash against
‘permissiveness’ gained momentum and the advent of AIDS introduced new
cautions. Yet AIDS made it possible to speak of sex to young people, with the
discourse of danger sometimes coming perilously close to a debate on pleasure.
Even so, in the view of the campaigners, too much knowledge deprived children
of their innocence and, indeed, of childhood itself. ‘How young is too young for
love?’ demanded the Daily Express.‘If kisses were not forbidden in school,’ said one
headmaster,‘twelve- and thirteen-year-olds would be making love in the corridors’.
‘Is there anybody in this country who really cares about our innocent
children?’ asked Barbara Jones in the Mail on Sunday of the relationship between
200 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

50-year-old Rolling Stone Bill Wyman and 13-year-old Mandy Smith. ‘To hear
the story as I did from Mandy’s own lips as she curled up childlike on the sofa
in her mini-dress would bring tears to the eyes of any decent mother or father.’
But the other side of Mandy’s spoilt innocence was her assertiveness. She was
presented as the archetypal ‘bimbo’ – one of a new and shameless breed of
exploitative girl-women, the gold-diggers of 1986, planning to trap wealthy
middle-aged men. In subsequent years Mandy Smith regularly appeared in Hello!
In June 2001, aged 30, she was showing off her new baby. There is always more
than one way of understanding a picture, and the narrative of spoilt girlhood
tells a quite different story when the perspective is switched around and the
image is seen, not with the eyes of a sexually interested male, but with those of
the inventive and assertive girl herself.
Yet, playing with their image is a risky business for young girls as they
balance welcome pleasures with dubious pressures. ‘We speak their language,
they respond,’ IPC told advertisers of its young women’s magazines in the mid-
1980s. ‘Romance is here. Your message can reach her at her most receptive.’
Adolescent femininity, they argue, is about living for the moment and for a
future made up of similar moments, ‘Today is what you make it. Tomorrow will
be even better.’ The point about romance is that sex is deferred or implied. But
at the beginning of the twenty-first century, a joint report by the UK Houses of
Commons and Lords into teen magazines had branded many of them ‘immoral’
in their focus on sex, and a Teenage Magazine Arbitration Panel was set up.
Seven- to eight-year-olds leave Girl Heaven and Princess World and rapidly move
on to publications which feature celebrity photographs and beauty tips, and have
little time for romance in its traditional forms. They adopt a frank, if cheeky,
attitude towards teenage health worries and body problems – and are open about
sex. ‘There is a new breed of girl out there – wealthy, intelligent, passionate,
have-it-all. Cosmo Girl! will do for her what Cosmo did for older women 29 years
ago,’ declared editor Claire Baylis when Cosmo Girl! was launched in 2001, aimed
at 11–16-year-old girls. ‘Girls these days still crave privacy and are interested in
boys but they are more media savvy, more cynical, take sexual equality for
granted and are more aware of the competitive nature of the adult world.’
Young femininity has been commodified, but partly on its own terms. Girls’
magazines now come under fire from those who would preserve romantic girl-
hood and who deplore their explicit information and their refusal to accept the
decorum of previous ages. This fantasy can be lived through with the aid of
clothes and make up, and there’s still a ‘prince’ in the shape of a young pop star
plastered over the bedroom walls. Girl power – personified by the Spice Girls
in their mid-1990s heyday – sees no contradiction between assertiveness and
 G E N D E R , S E X UA L I T Y A N D A FA N TA S Y F O R G I R L S 201

old-fashioned sexiness, and the ‘ladette’ of the 1990s set out to match the boozy,
leery culture of boys becoming men.
A final fantasy for girls is expressed in the lusty energy of contemporary
magazines; a challenging, provocative, come-and-get-me look; girls who are
open about their sexual experiences, who look the camera in the eye and turn
up to jeer the male stripper. The confidence of childhood, instead of being
transformed into nervous coyness, has taken on board the sexual knowledge
of the adult world and refused to be cowed by it. Paradoxically, such a new
rumbustiousness may preserve rather than break the values of childhood.

NOTES ON CHAPTER 7

p.178 ‘If Alice was’: Independent ‘Magazine’, 12 December 1998. Photographs: Justin
Smith.
A network of child pornographers: ‘Warped world of Wonderland’, Daily Mail,
14 February 2001.
John Tenniel: Punch cartoonist who collaborated closely (and argumentatively)
with Carroll. Jackie Wullschlager (revised 2001) Inventing Wonderland: the Lives
of Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, J.M. Barrie, Kenneth Grahame and A.A. Milne,
London: Methuen, Chapter 2.
p.179 an aestheticisation of everyday life: Mike Featherstone (1991) Consumer Culture
and Postmodernism, London: Sage, Chapter 5.
p.180 Jane Gallop: (1982) Feminism and Psychoanalysis, the Daughter’s Seduction,
London: Macmillan, p.xv.
‘you’d better grow’: Lindsay Smith (1998) The Politics of Focus: Women, Children
and Nineteenth Century Photography, Manchester: Manchester University Press,
p.101.
p.181 ‘Even at play’: Dr John Richer, quoted by Karen Farrington, ‘Would you buy
your son a doll?’ Woman, 20 December 1988.
‘Men don’t want their sons to be effeminate’: Gerry Masters of the National
Association of Toy Retailers, quoted by Farrington (1988) above.
p.183 recent debates around gender difference: for example Lynne Segal (1990) Slow
Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men, London: Virago; Angela Phillips
(1993) The Trouble with Boys: Parenting the Men of the Future, London: Pandora.
‘commercial syncretism’: Erving Goffman (1976) Gender Advertisements,
London: Macmillan.
A line drawing: Observer ‘Magazine’, 5 November 1978. Illustration: Dick Bruna.
p.186 ‘the absolute fact of difference’: Stephen Heath (1982) The Sexual Fix, London:
Macmillan, p.139.
a pair of advertisements for Nesquik: Nesquik milkshake mix, mid-1980s.
‘Lots of manufacturers advertise’: quoted by Farrington (1988) above.
‘wore her curly hair short’: Enid Blyton (1947/1967) Five on Kirrin Island Again,
London: Hodder and Stoughton.
p.187 the 2001 H&M catalogue: The Last Days of Summer, catalogue for children’s
clothes.
‘Times are changing’: advertisement for K shoes, mid-1980s.
202 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

p.188 styling her body: Frigga Haug (ed.) (1987) Female Sexualisation, London: Verso,
is an account of a group project by which a group of women explore the minute
detail of the construction of femininity in their own bodies (specific projects
focus on hair, legs and the slave-girl myth), relating visual imagery to lived
experience.
‘I just look into the mirror’: Daily Mail, 23 February 1998.
‘As soon as you are sensitised’: Geraldine Bedell, ‘This girl is for sale’,
Independent on Sunday, 22 July 1990.
p.190 the fairy princess who becomes a bride: Marina Warner (1994) From the Beast
to the Blonde: on Fairy Tales and their Tellers, London: Chatto and Windus.
romantic image of girl children: explored by Anne Higonnet (1998) in Pictures
of Innocence: the History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood, London: Thames and
Hudson.
the image of the fairy: Jeremy Maas et al. (1997) Victorian Fairy Paintings, London:
Royal Academy of Arts. This was a catalogue to an exhibition in 1997–98; Susan
P. Casteras (2002) ‘Winged fantasies, constructions of childhood, innocence,
adolescence and sexuality in Victorian fairy paintings’, in Marilyn R. Brown
(ed.) Picturing Children: Constructions of Childhood Between Rousseau and Freud,
London: Ashgate.
Angela McRobbie’s analysis: (1978) Jackie: an Ideology of Adolescent Femininity,
Birmingham: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies Occasional Paper; and
‘Just like a Jackie story’, in Angela McRobbie and Trisha McCabe (eds) (1981)
Feminism for Girls: an Adventure Story, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
‘Unicorn Princess’: designed by Robin Koni for Athena posters. Lindsay Baker,
Guardian ‘Weekend’, 10 November 2001.
the narratives of romance have largely disappeared: Angela McRobbie (1991)
Feminism and Youth Culture: from Jackie to Just Seventeen, London: Macmillan;
and (1995) ‘Shut up and dance: youth culture and changing modes of feminin-
ity’, in Postmodernism and Popular Culture, London: Routledge.
colludes in her own subordination: Valerie Walkerdine (1990) ‘Some day my
prince will come: young girls and the preparation for adolescent sexuality’, in
Schoolgirl Fictions, London: Verso.
p.191 the only envisaged audience: Valerie Walkerdine (1991) has discussed at length
the complex family relations behind a snapshot of herself as a ‘Bluebell Fairy’.
See ‘Behind the painted smile’, in J. Spence and P. Holland (eds) Family Snaps:
the Meanings of Domestic Photography, London: Virago.
p.192 five-year-old trophy winner: Radio Times, 27 January–2 February 1996, stills
from Under the Sun: Painted Babies (BBC2, 31 January 1996) showing young
Brooke Breedwell, who has won more than 600 trophies.
Jon-Benet Ramsey: Tim Cornwell, ‘Too much too young’, Independent, 13 January
1997.
p.193 ‘hottest new American fashion model’: Glenn O’Brien,‘Milla Dollar Baby’, Sunday
Times ‘Magazine’, 1988.
What sort of a message: ‘Outcry over sexy photos of girl aged 12’, Daily Express,
23 February 1998; ‘What kind of mother would allow a daughter of 12 to pose
like this?’, Daily Mail, 23 February 1998.
Lena Zavaroni: ‘I was to marry Lena’, Daily Mirror, 4 October 1999. The singer
died at 35 following depression and anorexia.
Sue Lyon: was quoted as saying ‘my destruction as a person dates from that
movie. I defy any pretty girl who is rocketed to world stardom at the age of 15
in a sex-nymphet role to stay on a level path’: Radio Times, 15–21 September
 G E N D E R , S E X UA L I T Y A N D A FA N TA S Y F O R G I R L S 203

2001, p.61. By contrast, Shirley Temple, the most famous child star of all, went
on to a successful career in diplomacy. Shirley Temple Black (1988) Child Star,
an Autobiography, London: Headline.
‘My figure has always brought’: Shan Lancaster, ‘Sam, 16, quits A-levels for Ooh-
levels!’, Sun, 22 February 1983.
p.194 sensible shoes into sexy ones: advertisement for Clarks shoes, late 1970s.
they can advertise ‘men’s’ magazines: ‘Our class of ’78’ was a double-page colour
spread in Campaign showing eight dishevelled young women partying in high
heels, stocking tops and crumpled school uniforms, inviting advertisers to Men
Only and Club.
The image of the child-woman: see Goffman (1976) above for a discussion of
women’s ‘childish’ gestures in the advertisements he studied.
‘I’ll still be a child at eighty’: quoted by Bedell (1990) above.
a spate of American films: Lolita (US, 1962) Dir. Stanley Kubrick; Pretty Baby
(US, 1977) Dir. Louis Malle; Taxi Driver (US, 1976) Dir. Martin Scorsese; Lolita
(US, 1997) Dir. Adrian Lyne.
Two teen magazines: ‘Dirty Money’, More!, August 2001; ‘I was a teenage prostitute’,
Bliss, September, 2001.
p.195 An archetypal teenager: Observer, 19 August 2001.
Madonna: E. Ann Kaplan and John Fiske both have extended discussions of
Madonna and her image in Robert C. Allen (ed.) (1992) Channels of Discourse,
Reassembled, London: Routledge. Kaplan discusses two videos by Madonna,
‘Express yourself’ and ‘Justify my love’, pp.272–76. Fiske quotes Judith Williamson
that Madonna ‘retains all the bravado and exhibitionism that most girls start off
with, or feel inside, until the onset of “womanhood” knocks it out of them’,
pp.306–18.
in danger of becoming feminised: in the context of a discussion of child abuse,
Florence Rush (1980) argues that the social bisexuality of children is female. See
The Best Kept Secret, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
p.196 Little Lord Fauntleroy: by Mrs F.H. Burnett. (My copy has a dedication, ‘To dear
Daisy with love and best wishes from Nell’, 1896.) The television serial was on
BBC1 in January 1995.
p.197 ‘male waifs’: Dominic Lutyens,‘Move over Schwarzenegger’, Independent on Sunday,
25 February 1996 (the picture of model Lee Williams was disrespectfully
captioned ‘That’s no lady, that’s my waif ’); ‘Boy band’, Observer ‘Magazine’,
19 August 2001.
Brideshead Revisited: by Evelyn Waugh, adapted for television by Granada
1981. The image of Sebastian Flyte (played by Anthony Andrews) clutching his
teddy bear has become a reference point for gay imagery as well as upper-class
decadence.
are images of physical punishment: James Kincaid (1992) Childloving: the Erotic
Child and Victorian Culture, London: Routledge.
television personality Carol Vorderman: carried out a series of investigations
for Tonight with Trevor Macdonald, ITV, 25 October 2000; 9 November 2000;
15 March 2001.
hazy images with blanked-out faces: globally, police estimated, 750,000 such
images were traded. ‘Candidates had to offer 10,000 new indecent images to
be admitted to the club’, and sometimes abuse happened live online. Although
the material was seized in 1998, only 17 of the children had been identified.
Daily Mail, 14 February 2001. See also Panorama on the Wonderland Club
(BBC1, 11 February 2001).
204 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

The Hunt for Britain’s Paedophiles: BBC2, three 90-minute programmes trans-
mitted in June 2002. Produced by Bob Long.
p.198 only for the eyes of criminals: see Carole S. Vance (1990) ‘The pleasures of looking:
the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography versus visual images’, in
Carol Squires (ed.) The Critical Image, London: Lawrence and Wishart, p.48, on
the contradictory way in which even child pornography was made available for
viewing in the context of the US Commission which sought to condemn and
outlaw a wide range of visual material.
A picture of a naked boy: John Hartley, ‘Juvenation, news, girls and power’, in
Cynthia Carter, Gill Branston and Stuart Allen (eds) (1998) News, Gender and
Power, London: Routledge.
notorious photograph of ‘Rosie’: ‘Siding with Rosie’, New Statesman, 20 September
1996. The outcry over pictures of naked children included the arrest of news-
reader Julia Somerville and her partner when the technician at Kodak responsible
for processing their pictures reported them to the police. Amidst the barrage of
publicity and debate that followed, Amateur Photographer launched a ‘Campaign
for common sense’. Emily Barr, ‘Snap judgements and an age of innocence’,
Guardian, 7 December 1996.
‘It is an offence to take’: 1978 Protection of Children Act Section 1 (1). David
Newnham and Chris Townsend, ‘Pictures of innocence’, Guardian ‘Weekend’,
13 January 1996.
p.199 In 2002 two policemen: ‘Soham cops are released from prison’, Daily Express,
17 September 2002. One policeman was cleared in August 2003.
‘Thirty-six hours in labour’: Corinna Honan,‘The Dilemma of Schoolgirl Mothers’,
Woman, 1980.
the advent of AIDS: for a discussion of many aspects of AIDS and the media, see
David Miller et al., The Circuit of Mass Communication, London: Sage, 1998.
‘How young is too young’: ‘Making love in the corridors’, Daily Express, February
1980.
‘Is there anybody in this country’: Barbara Jones, Mail on Sunday, 24 August
1986.
p.200 report by the UK Houses of Commons and Lords: Jessica Hodgson, ‘Hello girls’,
Guardian, 2 July 2001.
have little time for romance: McRobbie (1991) above.
‘There is a new breed of girl’: Observer, 24 September 2000.
 Postscript

Escape from childhood

Pictures of children have been made in a world which sees childhood as a precious
quality which may be stolen or wantonly rejected. Since children are open to
exploitation, some argue that their childishness must be protected above all other
considerations. Yet the bitter experience of being a child is very often a continuous
struggle to escape from childhood, to leave behind precisely those qualities of
simplicity, ignorance and innocence that are so highly valued.
Like everyone else in Western, urban civilisation, children live in a world
of meanings and of visual spectacle. They too respond to the imagery that
surrounds us all, and make use of it to define themselves and account for their
experiences. To be a child is not to inhabit a mythical dreamland, but to be a
thinking, acting individual, with the ability to make sense of the material to
hand. Yet, living through childhood means coping with continuous change.
Children’s bodies undergo rapid transformations and the social expectations to
which they are subject are constantly re-adjusted. Some aspects of the imagery of
childhood are able to draw on the richness of this resource, but all too frequently
the available imagery avoids such radical instability and seeks to impose its own
nervous limits.
Of all social groups, children have been the least able to explore their view
of themselves in the public domain. They have found themselves trapped by
received definitions, which are underpinned by powerful adult emotions. Yet,
where they have gained greater access to a public voice they have been able to
make a significant contribution to the broad sweep of social meanings. The
result has been not a more ‘childish’ set of images, but a more diverse one.
As adults pay attention to children’s own contribution, we are forced to readjust

205
206 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

our concept of childhood and its contexts. That means that our notion of what
it means to be an adult must also become more flexible.
Children should certainly be heard as much as they are seen. We could then
expect an even richer pleasure from the image.

From Focus on Images, 1991, courtesy of Save the Children Fund.

Index

Abbas, Ali Ismaeel 151 Baker, Kenneth 91

Abbey Life 88 ‘Balaclava Boy’ xii, 122
Aberdeen 170 Balkans, the 149
Abrams, Rebecca 98 Band Aid 152
Action Aid 150 Bangladesh 151
Action Man 186 Barbie 18, 68, 110, 186
Adams, Paul 98, 108 Barclays 61
Advertising Standards Authority 31 Barnardo, Thomas 151, 152
Advisory Centre for Education 109 Barnardo’s 146, 163
Afghanistan 149 Baron, Laura 160
Africa 148, 149, 153, 157, 158 Barthes, Roland 6, 7, 15, 96, 128
Alice in Wonderland 178 Bartle, Bogle, Hegarty 44
Ally McBeal 44 Bash Street 88
America 10 Bash Street Kids 106, 107
Amnesty International 158, 159 Baudrillard, Jean 2
Amnesty International Journal 159 Bauman, Zygmunt 152
Anebesol 41 Baylis, Claire 200
Archbishop of Canterbury 15 BBC 30, 43, 197
Argos 67 Beano 106
Aries, Phillipe x, 26 Bechuanaland 95
Asilone 41 Beckford, Jasmine 164
Athena 44, 190 Bedell, Geraldine 188
Atkinson, William 91 Belfast 111, 122, 170
Austria 102 Belsen 128
Benetton 31, 111
Baby Bond 40 Berg, Leila 98, 103, 108, 110
Baby Club 34, 36 Beryl the Peril 107
Baby Gap 34 Betts, Leah 135
Baby Milk Action 38 Big Issue 99
Babysafe 38 Birmingham 57
Baghdad 151 ‘Black Papers’ 86
Bakan 163 Blair, Leo 60
‘Baked Beano’ 107 Blair, Tony 60, 87

207
208 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

Blake, William 95 Campaign 40, 66, 69, 131

Blazer 104 Candelaria Church 159
Bliss 195 Care Bears 186
Bloody Sunday 122 Caribbean 21, 130
Blyton, Enid 186 Carlile, Kimberley 164
BMA 36, 37, 42 Carlsberg Special Brew 131
Bob the Builder 68 Carlyle, William 144
Body Shop 44 Carpenter, Mary 103
Bogota 151, 159 Carr and Hartnett 87
Bogside 122 Carrie 125
Bombay 61 Carroll, Lewis 9, 178, 180
Booth, Cherie 60 Carter, Jennifer Ransome 54
Boothby, Penelope 144 Cartier-Bresson, Henri 118
Boots 58 Carvel, John 124
Bournville 57 Changing Childhood 108
Boyson, Rhodes 75, 86 Channel 4 145, 161
Braindamage 104, 105 Chapman brothers xiii
‘Breadline Britain’ 145 Chapman, Jessica 166
Brideshead Revisited 197 Charity Commissioners 155
Brighton 122 Charity Organisation 152
Bristol 136 Charter of Children’s Rights 109
Britain xi, 38, 55, 56, 63, 67, 76, 122, Chechnya 149
132, 136, 165 Child Accident Prevention Trust 36
Brixton 108, 137 Child and the City, The 100
Broadcast 67 ChildLine 168
Broadwater Farm 136 Children Act, 1975 56
Brown, Gordon 91 ‘Children of War’ 151
Bruna, Dick 183, 187 Children’s Rights 2, 103, 106, 108
Bubbles 196 Children’s World 28, 29
Buddha 33 Child’s Play 102, 108
Bulger, James xi, 102, 116, 118–20, 136, Childwatch 167
166 Christopher Robin 57
Bush, George W. 69 Chucky 108, 119
‘Bust Book’ 103 Churchill, Winston S. 150
Cleveland 168, 169
Cadbury 57 Climbié, Victoria 164
Calinescu, Matei 11 Cohen, Phil 130
Cameron, Julia Margaret 9 Cole, Michelle 92
 INDEX 209

Colic Drops 41 De Vil, Cruella 145

Colombia 149, 159 Declaration of the Rights of the Child
Colwell, Maria 164 102
Comic Relief 152 Deineka, Aleksandr 75
Committee for Advertising Practice Dennis the Menace 104, 106
146 Dennis the Menace Fan Club 107
Constantine, Elaine 99 Department of Health and Social
Contact 82 Security 61
Continuum 198 Derry 122
Convention on the Rights of the Child Dinnefords 41
103, 110 Disability Now 145
Cook, H. Cauldwell 80 Dombey, Paul 144
Cornhill 41 Dowden, Richard 152, 156
Cosmo Girl! 200 Duchess of York 35
Cosmopolitan 200 Duke of Westminster 165, 168
Council of Europe 101 Dunblane 166
Court of Appeal 30, 198
Cow and Gate 27, 37 ‘Early Learning Goals’ 80
‘Crying Boy’ 160, 161 East Lynne 144
Culkin, Macauley 145 East Timor 149
Cunningham, Hugh 132 EastEnders 131
Cupid 26 EC 155
Edelstein, Jillian 64
Dadd, Richard 26 Edinburgh Festival Fringe 38
Daily Express 135, 136, 199 Education Act, 1902 87
Daily Mail 60, 78, 88–90, 119, 124, 127, Education Reform Act, 1988 86, 91
132, 151, 188 Eiffel Tower 54
Daily Mirror 39, 90, 91, 121, 124, 134, Eisenstein, Sergei 7
136, 137, 151, 158, 161, 162 England 136, 180
Daily Star 118, 119, 132, 169, 193 English, David 151
Daley, Janet 119 Eros 26
Dalmatian puppies 145 Etchart, Julio 96
Dandy 106 Ethiopia 151, 156
Darwin, Charles 13 Europe 146
Davies, Nick 170 European Court of Human Rights 163
De Beers 61 Evening News 90
De Mause, Lloyd 163, 165 Exorcist, The 120, 125
De Tocqueville, Alexis 10 Fairy Liquid 27
210 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

Family Income Supplement 61–63 Greenhill, Richard and Sally 63

Family of Man, The 95, 96, 102, 111 Guardian 65, 77, 89, 92, 109, 120, 146,
‘Famous Five’ 186 155, 156, 170
Fang 104 Gulf War 43
Fanon, Franz 21
Farley’s Ostermilk 38 H&M x, 187
Fauntleroy, Little Lord 9 Hackney 104
Feminism and Psychoanalysis 178 Halliwell, Geri 152
Fenton, Roger 55 Hamilton, Thomas 166
First World War 102, 152 Hamleys 67
Fisher Price 39, 68 Harrison, Paul 152
Forma, Aminatta 30 Hartlepool 122
Foster, Jodie 194 Hattersley, Roy 122
Foucault, Michel 79 Hayes 58
Fox, Samantha 193 Hayter, Teresa 155
France 54 Hayward Gallery 198
Franklin, Bob 109 Health Education Council 134
Freud, Sigmund xiii, 37 Health Visitor 38
Fyvel, T.R. 129 Heath, Stephen 186
Hebdige, Dick 128, 130
Gallop, Jane 180 Hegarty, John 44
Galt, James 81 Heinz 184, 188
Game Boy Advance 67 Heller, Zoe 159
Gascoigne, Paul ‘Gazza’ 160 Hello! 35, 200
GCSE 88, 92 He-men 68
Gearon, Tierney xii, 123 Henley Centre for Forecasting 1
Geddes, Anne 25, 28 Henry, Tyra 164
Geldof, Bob 152 Hewlett Packard 41
Germany 102 Hill, Matthew Davenport 126, 137
Gillick, Victoria 199 Hitchens, Peter 124
Girl Heaven 189, 190, 200 Hobsbawm, Eric 55
Goffman, Erving 183 Holt, John 103
Gold Greenlees Trott 131 Hong Kong 108
Golden, Andrew 122 Home Alone 145
Goldwater, Mike 158 Horlick, Nicola 43
Goodman, Paul 20 House of Commons 200
Grant, Linda 123 House of Lords 200
Greenaway, Kate 57 Hovis 58
 INDEX 211

Illich, Ivan 104 Kings College Cambridge 88

Independent 89, 100, 110, 145, 146, 151 Kismaric, Susan 9
Independent on Sunday 159 Kitzinger, Sheila 37
Indian subcontinent 148, 149 Klein, Melanie 37, 101
Infa-care 36 Kline, Stephen 66
Inner London Education Authority 82 Kodak 54
Institute for Public Policy Research 146
International Save the Children Fund ‘La Tristesse’ 160
152 Lamb, Joey 134
International Year of the Child 102 Lanvin 44
Internet 197 Latin America 148, 159
IPC 200 Lawrence, Philip 121
Iraq 149 Lawrence, Stephen 166
Isaacs, Susan 80, 81, 101 LCC 100
Islington 90 Leach, Penelope 39
Istanbul 61, 158 Leboyer, Frederick 32
ITV 30 Lego 67, 68, 186
Leicestershire 170
Jack, Ian 131 Leveller 169
Jackie 190 Lever family 57
James and Prout 21 Libertarian Education 104
Jebb, Eglantyne 102, 152, 156 Life 28
Johnson, Mitchell 122 Lisbon x, 11
Johnson’s baby powder 27 Little Lord Fauntleroy 196
Jones, Barbara 199 Little Nell 144
Jonesboro, Arkansas xi, 122 Little Ones 34
Joseph Rowntree Trust 146 Live Aid 152
Jovovich, Milla 193 Liverpool 57, 102
Junior Disprol 39 Lolita 193, 194, 195
Just Seventeen 195 London 67, 82, 83, 99, 104, 110, 121,
149
Kalashnikov 158 London Evening News 83
Kemp, Gail 40 London Royal Academy xiii
Kempe, Henry and Ruth 125 Look at Kids 98
Kent 58 Lord of the Flies 119
Kids 103 Lost in Care 170
Kincaid, James 163 Lugg, Stephen 44
King, Truby 41 Lyon, Sue 193
212 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

Madonna 35, 195 National Society for the Prevention of

Mail on Sunday 67, 122, 199 Cruelty to Children 163, 168
Major, John 121 National Union of School Students 75
Malting House School 101 Neave, Rikki 121, 166
Mapplethorpe, Robert 198 Neill, A.S. 101, 103, 108
Marsh Arabs 131 Neill, Zoe 101
Marshall, Andrew G. 60 Nesquik 186
Masters, Gerry 186 Nestlé 38
May Day 99 New York 95
‘May Queens’ 99 New York Museum of Art 9
McCall, Davina 60 News of the World 129, 135, 165,
McLeod, Mary 168 168–70
McLintock, Anne 59 Newsletter (Belfast) 122
McLuhan, Marshall 119 Nikon 10
McRobbie, Angela 134, 190 Nilsson, Lennart 28
Merlin 84 Nintendo 66, 67
Middle East 149 Nobel Prize 31
Millais, John Everett 9, 10, 12, 196 Noddy 68
Millard, Rosie 43 North Africa 33, 149
Miller, Alice 159, 165 North Vietnamese 151
Minnie the Minx 107 North Wales 170
Miscarriage 104, 106, 109 Northern Ireland 122
Mizz 195 NSPCC 109, 147
Montessori, Maria 75, 80, 82, 106
Moore, Mike 158 O Povo 159
Morant, Robert 87 Obscene Publications Squad xii
Moss, Kate 193 Observer 88, 100, 136, 183, 195
Mother 44, 78 OFSTED 101
Mother and Baby 34 Ogilvy and Mather 155
Mother Countries 150 Oliver, Ron xii
Mother Nature 36 Omen, The 125
Mother Teresa 152 O’Neill, Rose 27
Mothercare 116, 118 Opie, Iona and Peter 97
My Little Pony 186 Orkney Islands 168
Ovenden, Graham xii
National Association of Toy Retailers 181 Oxfam 150, 153, 155
National Childbirth Trust 36 Oxford 178
National Children’s Bureau, the 163
 INDEX 213

Pakistan International Airlines 59 ProLife Alliance 30

Parent’s Guide, The 7, 125 Proops, Marje 121, 124
Parents 33, 42, 78 Protestants 111
Paris x
Paton, Keith 104 Queen Victoria 10, 55
Patyna, Joanna 83
Payne, Sarah 166 Rackham, Arthur 25
Pears Company 12 Radio Times 167
Pearson, Geoffrey 121, 122, 132, 136 ‘Rambo Boys’ xi
People 137 Ramsey, Jon-Benet xi, 192, 193
Perrier 38 Rantzen, Esther 34, 167
Peter Pan 57 Raphael 27, 28
Peterborough 121 Rego, Paula xiii
Picture Post 32, 33 Rejlander, Oscar 9, 27, 144, 162
Pilston, Tom 124 Renaissance 26
Pingu 18 Reynolds, Joshua 144
‘Play School’ 80 Richards, Yvonne 64
Playstation 68 Richie, Jean 136
Plowden Report, The 81–83, 86, 89, 104 Rio 159, 163
Pooh Bear 68 Robertson, Grace 32
‘Poor Jo’ 144, 162 Robertson, Matthew 60
Port Sunlight 57 Roman Catholic Church 35
Postman Pat 68 Romania 156
Potter, Harry 67 Rosendale Infants School 110
Poverty Answering Back 145, 161 ‘Rosendale Odyssey’ 110
Power Rangers 67, 68 ‘Rosie’ 198
Practical Parenting 34 Rossetti, Christina 26
President Ford 151 Royal College of Paediatricians and
Preston, Elizabeth 188, 193 Child Health 163
Pretty Baby 194 Royal Festival Hall 149
Prince Albert 27, 55 Royal Society for the Prevention of
Prince, Brenda 63 Accidents 67
Prince William 39 Rush, Florence 168
Princess Anne 34 Rwanda 149, 152
Princess Diana 10, 55, 152
Princess Eugenie 35 Saatchi and Saatchi 109
Princess of Wales 10 Saatchi Gallery 123
Princess World 200 Safeway 107
214 PICTURING CHILDHOOD

Saigon 151 Stirling Council 110

Sainsbury’s 34 Storm model agency 193
Salgado, Sebastiao 156 Straw, Jack 124
Samuel, Raphael x Sudan 149, 154
Saraga, Esther 168 Sugar Plum Fairy 190
Save the Children Fund 21, 96, 102, 110, Sultanahmet Mosque 158
153, 155, 158 Summerhill 10l, 104, 108
Schoolgirl 194 Sun 63, 90, 91, 121, 136, 161
Schwarzenegger, Arnold 157 Sunday Express 151
Scotland 106 Sunday Times 28, 56, 131
Scott, Anthony 122 Sunderland 69
Scream, The 145 Swain, Dominique 194
Second World War 81, 86, 126 ‘Swampy’ 128
Sharp, Cecil 99
She 43 Taxi Driver 194
Sheffield 122 Taylor, Damilola 121, 166
Shields, Brooke 194 Teen Dreem 131
Short, Clare 154 Teenage Magazine Arbitration Panel
Shout 195 200
Sierra Leone 158 Teletubbies 67, 68
Sistine Madonna 27 Tempest, Douglas 27
Skegness 88, 89 Tenniel, John 9, 78
Skinners’ School 106 Tesco 34, 36, 78
Sleeping Beauty 190 Third World, the 38, 155
Smash Hits 195 Thompson, J. Walter 155
Smith, Lindsay 180 Thompson, Robert 118–20
Smith, Mandy 35, 200 Thomson, D.C. 107
South Lanarkshire 124 Time-Life 42
Spence, Jo 54 Times 44
Spice Girls 68, 195, 200 Times Education Supplement 89
Sport Aid 152 Tokyo 61
St David’s 84 Tooting Bec 100
St Ivel 27 Toscani, Oliviero 31, 111
St Paul’s 136 Townsend, Tracy 160
Staffordshire 170 Toys R Us 67
Stallone, Sylvester 157 Trafalgar Square 33
Steele-Perkins, Chris 154 Turner, Bryan 57
Stipendiary Magistrate 122 Triumph 37
 INDEX 215

Truly Scrumptious Model Agency 160, West, Fred and Rosemary 164
161 Western Australia 198
Tweenies 68, 108 W.H. Smith 39
Whitehouse, Mary 8, 15, 20
Uganda 158 White Lion Street Free School 104,
UK 146, 163 109
UK Toy and Game Council 67 White Negroes 122
Ulster 122 Whitear, Rachel 135
UNICEF 111 Whitehouse, Mary 199
‘Unicorn Princess’ 190 William Tyndale School 90
United Nations 102, 103, 109, 111 Williams, Raymond 8
US 157 Williams, Rowan 15
Winnicott, D.W. 34, 35, 40, 42
Vale, Edward 39 Woman 181
Vanguard 105 Wonderland Club 178, 197
Venables, Jon 119, 120 Wood, Henry Mrs 144
Vicious, Sid 134 Woolworths 88
Victoria and Albert Museum 27 World Health Organisation 38
Vietnam 151 World Press Photography Awards 149
Virgin Mary 35 World’s Children 96
Volvo 60 Wylie, Donovan 63
Vorderman, Carol 197 Wyman, Bill 200

Wales 180 Y-Front 105

War on Want 155 Yale University Clinic of Child
Ward, Colin 100, 102 Development 42
Ward, Elizabeth 168 Yorkshire Television 31
Warner, Marina 7, 35, 125, 145 Youth Opportunities Programme 134
Waterhouse, Sir Ronald 170
Weidel, Janine 75 Zaire 150
Wells, Holly 166 Zavaroni, Lena 193