Interesting responses to the article. I guess we can put to rest any assumptions that the Right has exclusive domain over narrow-mindedness and prudery.

What kind of sick person automatically assumes any picture of a nude child--context be damned!--is pornographic?

All mature individuals repeat after me: Nudity does not equal sex. Nudity does not equal sex. Nudity does not equal sex.

to the bright sparks who misread the article: the author has 2 daughters and 1 son. both his daughters went on the camping trip: the 3-year-old girl was skinnydipping in the pictures and the 8-year-old boy was shown drying his underwear by the campfire. one of the other family's children, a girl, was in a picture holding a broken beer bottle she had found. the author states on page 3 that these were among the six photos (out of an entire roll) that the police turned over to DFCS. so, no, one 3-year-old girl did not go camping with a horde of males who would have surely ravished her.

it's all there in the article, folks. if you hadn't read it so fast (why, were you rushing/hoping to get to the dirty parts?), you would have got your facts straight before submitting a LTTE on the internet. in fact, as i was writing this, i referred back to the article in question several times to make sure i was getting my facts correct. y'know, FACTS. so i don't open my mouth and say something stupid in front of the entire internet.

Urinating on a fire simply does not indicate or imply any type of abuse.

Probably not. But taking family portraits of the whole family standing around bare-butt naked pissing out a fire as a "ritual" is not exactly the stuff healthy parenting is made of.

Grown men running around naked in the woods with a little girl and pre-adolescent boys AND alcohol involved. Simply indefensible.

The people protesting this as "harmless nudity" are either drunk themselves or out of their minds. Or worse.

Wow! Just about fifteen years ago, when my daughter was a round-tummied toddler and I knew nothing about digital cameras, I took plenty of naked kid photos of her. But then, my little girl wouldn't keep clothes on long, which means today I would have practically no photos if I had to have her dressed.

Now, since I have those photos, I get to remember my daughter as she was then with her round tummy and little pink bottom splashing in lakes, rolling in the sand - just a free and blissful little person, unaware of all our adult fears, phobias, fetishes, and paranoias.

Ugh! That story made me sick. That could've been us.

I would be amazed if more than 1% of abusive photographs are taken using traditional photographic film and sent off to commercial centers for development. As others have pointed out- digital cameras have become the new standard and this holds true multiplied by a million for people who want to take abusive photographs of children.

The mathematics of false positives would probably show that the vast majority of photographs that are turned into the police are completely innocuous. I don't have the numbers, but I'm sure that someone has done research into this.

You would probably have an equal chance of catching child abusers if you arrested random parents on the street. Some might object that this would infringe our civil liberties- but those whiners probably have something to hide.

Few letters implied that grown men should not be around a young naked girl. Where do these people come from? Would they say that a mother should not see her young boy naked? Did you read the story, these guys are the fathers of these children. Most men are not abusers, and those who question the author probably have dark secrets they should be dealing with their shrink, not in a letter to the editor...

And about pissing on fire, what can be more innocuous than that. it's almost a ritual for boys on a camping trip. Those who see something wrong in that picture are really twisted. I fail to see how the author did anything wrong whatsoever.

The investigation should never have taken place once it was clear that the pictures clearly were taken within the context of a family vacation.

Jody Jenkins sets a new benchmark for personal angst over something he could well have avoided altogether with use of a little common sense, and in the process helps advance the negative stereotype of social workers who as we already know from watching TV too much are all out to snatch our children from our loving arms on the merest pretext. Oh, bullshit! Prior to nationwide child protection laws we were all potential victims with no hope - nor even any intention - of telling anyone what had been done to us. That people like Jenkins have their cage rattled once in a while for doing things that rest upon the fine line of good sense anyway is no price at all, really, for us to pay or at least weigh. How would Jenkins have felt if someone had victimnized - or just appeared to maybe have victimized - one of his children? Would he call child protective services? The police? Be perhaps cruising suspect areas with a baseball bat or a gun? But he and his equally clueless wife and friends (this friend of his with the extremely sensitive government job) go out and do a few dumb stunts in the woods, get their chain pulled by responsible people with a mandate to do just that, and he's having a freakin' breakdown, screaming at his kids (who of course are the bottom line reason this "happened to him" anyway), sits on the crapper in France sobbing from the post-trauma of the whole thing, then writes four goddam pages for us to become outraged over and start blaming the Church, "puritans", etc., etc.

Jesus awready! You can't WIN!! Anyone god forbid should ever actually violate one of Jenkins' kids and it seems likely he'd either commit murder or, more likely, suicide, given his reaction to this gross intrusion by the mean ol' state into his "life", but if someone is looking out for those same kids and it happened to be HIM and his WIFE who put those kids in the position of looking as though they just might have been exploited by a person or persons unknown, and....well, it winds up here, four pages of pathos, hysteria and self-pity.

Living with a worker in child protective services (in another, far less benighted state than the ever-primitive, rednecked, frog-faced Georgia of course) I know far more than I ever wanted to about what really goes on Out There. And yes, a good 70 per cent of it is unfounded, baseless or "good intent" calls. Thank you Jesus! We haven't descended into the basket of snakes some people believe we wallow in. The reason we can know that is because we have dedicated, well-trained, compassionate and extremely strong workers out there, coordinating with the police to, more often than not, "unfound" these alarums. But 30 per cent of those calls DO result in some sort of "founded" outcome, sometimes uncovering the unspeakable. We, the people, know this because it is a matter of public record and reported by the media. So why is Jenkins so incredulous that this could happen to him? He and his wife practically invited child protection services into their lives! They know this sort of thing can happen - unless, of course, they wisely gave up watching television more than a decade ago as "unnatural."

The reaction on the part of the writer (and one helluva lot of the respondents here) suggests just a little too much anguish and guilt. No, I'm not suggesting they're pervs, you morons! I'm talking about Original Guilt, that phenomenon described by Ernest Becker, which is the real basis for much neurosis and despair - NOT original sin. Assuming he is so flawed (blame this on the protectors, of course) Jenkins starts to question his own attentions to his children. WHY?? Who is the REAL puritan here? If this had happened to me I would have appreciated the good intent involved, known I had done nothing horribly wrong, kicked myself for using flim when I knew it would be scrutinized by people who are forced to use totally subjective judgement, even thanked them for keeping their eyes open, and learned from my little dumbheit - although my wife would have stopped any of this before it happened, even if I were stupid enough to have started to do it. OK, so I have an unfair advantage. I live with one of those unapologetic bitches who come out to ask annoying, invasive questions when someone suggests something "funny" might be going on involving your kid. Maybe she and her ilk should all find something less puritanical to do for a living - something that pays better and has a better image. Yeah, screw the kids. It's all about US. I keep forgetting.