Jody Jenkins's daughters can take nude pix of him and post them on the Web. Jenkins won't mind. Nudity is natural.

...about how many ACTUAL "child pornographers" are nailed annually by the outstanding hypervigilence of our local citizen-cops, the photo clerks?

All of the letters justifying what this family went through seem to accept on face value the notion that somehow "children are being protected" when something like this happens.

"Yes, Sheila and Shane EveryClerk never miss the opportunity to phone the cops if just a wee bit of an underage butt cheek sneaks into a photo frame, and that's the way we LIKE it! You can't be too careful, after all..."

Has any true child pornographer dropped a roll of film off at the local Wal-Mart since the advent of digital?

These law-n-order types who think the "system" worked (and hey, it's not so bad to be investigated) really ought to go through it first. I saw a dear friend who loved his stepdaughter to death accused falsely by the kid's father in the midst of the messiest, nastiest divorce you've ever seen. He stayed on my couch for weeks (because he didn't want to even be in the house during the investigation, lest Ex-H/Dad might hurl more shit). He drank, and he cried, and he cursed. Six months later, the case was "closed" but "kept on file" (just in case, you know, everybody was lying and he really was a molester). He never quite recovered and died a few years later.

Get a grip, people. There are not child diddlers around every corner. (Well, maybe there are. But seizing family photos and plunging families into Kafkaesque realms of accusation, investigation, and months of uncertainty does nothing to find and stop them.)

I used to be a one hour photo printer at a one hour shop in the mall (a chain store). We saw nudity in a lot of photos. A photo really had to cross the line before it was brought to a manager, then the manager would decide if it should be passed on. While I saw whole entire rolls of film devoted to sex acts among adults (one guy shot a whole roll of himself getting a blow-job and I had to stand in front of the printer when the pictures came out so that the little kids in the store and their mom wouldn't see them coming down the final bend to the cutter!) and various nudity of all ages, the only picture I saw that raised any flag was a picture of a naked little girl, about 2 years old, who had "put" stickers all over her body. They were covering her chest, legs, arms, etc. That in itself was not enough, but one picture in the series showed her bending over to show the photographer stickers on her "private" areas which seemed to be too expertly placed for a two year old. Still, that photo was not enough and the manager said without knowing what was going on it could ruin someone's life to have the police called if this was something innocent that happened.

We often had people come in asking if nude pictures were ok to be printed. Yes was our standard answer. We were even able to tell them that places like Wal Mart would throw out the negatives of such pictures, in addition to not printing them (I don't know if that was actually true about the negatives but was/is about printing them) and that if someone was really concerned, the best thing was to send it in to be processed somewhere else, not a one hour lab. While that may seem like instruction to perverts to some out there, the truth is I have no rason to suspect someone of doing something illegal or harmful until I have evidence - this is a free country and free speech still reigns, well most of the time - and it wasn't my job to prejudge someone's intentions. This was all before digital cameras. This was also before everyone evidently automatically thought the worst of everyone they didn't know. Scary times, these.

I'm not surprised this happened, actually, but I think it's way beyond a reasonable reaction to these pictures. It's by no means the job of a photo lab worker to police the way people raise their kids. A picture may be "worth a thousand words" but that's no excuse to put words in the picture's mouth.

Stephanie

This is just a symptom of the real society-wide disorder: fear. Americans are now afraid of everything. Everyone is a potential child molester, or murderer, or terrorist. Everything needs a warning sticker beacuse it may kill you. Kids are over-protected, families cocoon, and too many of us are paranoid. These families have been forever injured because society is borderline hysterical.

I am more shocked by the reponses to this article than anything that Jody wrote about. I am reading a lot of projection onto this story from the responses and people creating their own interpretations from what was written.

It's obvious that everybody has their own opinion about whether kids should be naked ever and if parents should photograph them. And everybody is entitled to have their own opinion about this. What's strange is that everybody feels that their opinion is right and everybody else's is wrong. Being naked is ok, it's not ok, taking the photograph is ok, they are not ok, and the amount of judgement either way towards the LW and the other responders...

Why is it so bad for a parent to take a picture of a child naked? There were several responders talking about taking pictures of a child naked in the bathtub or on the toilet? To me that just shows parents who love their child so much they want to capture the moment. That's my opinion. You may not agree, but then don't do that to your child, but don't shame my kids with your opinions. We have become a society that is so quick to judge and shame people who don't behave the way they "should". It does seem like we need people to demonize.

My parents took pictures of me and my brother naked on the toilet. Yes, I was embarrassed whenever friends came over and saw the pictures while I was growing up. But my parents didn't do it to deliberately embarrass me, they were proud of me. If I felt ashamed of the pictures while I was a teenager or if I felt that way now, that is on me not on my parents. That's how I internalized the "event".

There is a lot of hosility on this site, though. The other writers writing about how this make liberals look bad and on....I don't like George Bush as a President, I want to see control shift to Democrats in the house and/or senate this year, I also want to capture Osama and end the war in Iraq, but whatever happens with all of the above, life goes on and if I focus all of my energy on just winning the election this year then I am not living my life...YIKES...