This story was heartbreaking. As a parent, I can certainly understand the anguish such an investigation would cause, no matter how unsubstantiated the charges.

If we as a society expect photo shop clerks to be the arbiters of which pictures launch a legal investigation, then photo shop clerks are going to need some basic legal training. Or at least the ability to quickly send the photos to someone in the company who does. As it stands, once the system is set in motion by one prudish clerk, as described in this article, a sort of inertia sets in, in which no one (the police officer who realized nothing fishy was going on, the case workers who knew they didn't have a case, but kept the investigation going) felt they had the authority to put an end to it. Any reasonable person would want to err on the side of protecting children when there's actual evidence of suspicious activity, but the evidence here doesn't point to anything more than a fun weekend in the woods.

To the author,

My heart goes out to you and your family. To have suffered through this experience is a tragedy. To share your story and be met with some of the responses that are posted here is inexcusable. That a wholesome family outdoor experience could go awry so quickly is downright scary.

I object to the responses of those who snidely comment on your falling into a depression and feelings of victimization. Are they parents? I would think the fear of losing your child is among the top debilitating fears for parents--especially the potential of losing a child to a social services agency based on an unfounded and unwarranted case. To be up against "the system" in that fashion must have been absolutely terrifying. And to have that experience call into doubt your existing parenting skills and practices just adds to the misery of the situation.

Let me close by saying that I work for a nonprofit organization that offers child abuse counseling services and works closely with law enforcement to help social workers identify potential cases. I applaud the work of the many in this field, but still find it horrifying to hear how quickly an innocent family can be swept away by their efforts.

Thank you, thank you, thank you for sharing your story. Even when it seems overcautious or downright crazy, I intend to be much more guarded about what I do and where I do it. In today's US society, apparently, you just can't be too careful.

I am sorry your family had to go through this in order to teach this lesson to me.

Darcie

Hoooray for Eckerd photo Employees setting our moral stndards. Did DFCS really put the childrens interest first by tearing the family apart? I know I'll never step foot into an Eckerds store again. To the man who wrote the reply It was Jody's fault by having the pictures developed at public store ( Eckerds )....You are ignorant! They were camping photos! What is moral and what is not moral should not be decided by a photo employee..thier should be standards set and photo employees should be trained as to what the standards are. Is that to much to ask of Eckerd?

A non Eckerd consumer

LemurMaster,

I spent a week at a French nude beach once, loved it. Loved the intergenerational celebration of skin, sun, wind. There was no hanky-panky on the beach, I noticed (I was with a groups of 20-somethings)...we were chaste as babes, playing cards in the dunes. It was nice to see each other's bodies but nobody leered or made wisecracks. (Well, one. My hosts called me something that sounded like "fess" (pron.) pales" which I gathered mean whitebutt.) There was no sexual energy to the nudity, and it was nice. In the evenings we got dressed up and went to the nightclubs and danced, and then, va-va-voom.

My point. I think kids in nudist camps are taken there by their parents and should not be videotaped or photographed. Their pictures could wind up in a porn store.

That wouldn't be good for kids, would it? It seems disrespectful to me. They're free and innocent and their beauty should not be taken advantage of for dark adult desires. THEY ARE NOT OBJECTS.

(Nor are naked women in magazines, but sadly, the culture's done a great job of helping a whole new generation of Britney wanna-bes remain confused about that.)

The experience of Jody Jenkins is illustrative of how horrible it is to try to raise children in the god-demented, cop-infested United States of America. No one should voluntarily raise children in this blighted land. Parent and children are collective fodder for the sick crazies who set the cultural agenda.

This article is a nauseating exercise in self-pity; the author's martyr pose is not only unconvincing, it's offensive. Fine, you're not a pervert. But if you're taking pictures of children and adults together with their genitals exposed, you are basically inviting the kind of investigation that you ended up being subject to.

The behavior engaged in during this camping trip is clearly on the borderline of normal. It's one think to take a picture of your naked three-year-old at home in the bath; it's another to take a picture of her in public, on a camping trip which, keep in mind, included non-family members. Throw in a naked eight-year-old, grown men exposing themselves, a kid holding a beer (which the author CLAIMS was innocuous, but how are we, or the authorities, supposed to know?), and it's hardly surprising that this batch of photos raised some red flags.

In the end, the author was exonerated, not persecuted; his case worker offered no apology because she didn't owe him one. I am heartened, not disturbed, that the investigation was as thorough as it was.

This is not to say that there is nothing about the process that needs to be reformed. But any competent investigation is going to include basically the same things that the author complains about the most -- interviews with the children, teachers, etc. I'm sure this was a most unpleasant experience. I'm sure it's an unpleasant experience for anyone who is suspected of committing a crime. But I'll take the author's unpleasant experience in exchange for the ability of society to root out and punish genuine child pornographers.