Photographing Your Own Child: Paedophilia!
I’ve seen some crazy stories about police harassing photographers, but nothing which can match this one:
According to his blog, Kevin visited the Bridges Shopping Centre in Sunderland with his son to spend the £10 his father gave the boy on a family visit. While there, he seated his son on a coin-operated train ride and snapped a photo of him with his cameraphone. At this point, a Bridges security guard came by and ordered him to stop taking pictures. He said that it was mall policy, and implied that Kevin was taking pictures because he was a paedophile. Kevin told him that this was ridiculous and took his son to find his wife and get out of the mall. He also took a picture of the security guard “so that if I later wanted to make a complaint to the centre I would be able to identify him.”
Outside of the mall, Kevin was stopped by a police constable who had received a complaint from mall security that a suspicious potential paedophile had been taking pictures on its premises. The PC threatened to arrest Kevin “for creating a public disturbance” and ordered him to delete the photo of his son. The PC also averred that the Bridges Shopping Centre is a hotbed of paedophile assaults.
Has the world gone completely mad? Threatening a man with arrest for taking photographs of his own son? And in what way is the shopping centre a ‘hotbed of paedophile assaults’? Do those (whatever the plod meant) normally occur in the full glare of hundreds of busy shoppers? Where do the police think this wave of alleged paedophilia, which merits such interventions and indeed a whole Independent Safeguarding Authority, is coming from?!
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Lots of these stories around at the moment. I think the key to understanding what’s going on is to understand the incentives behind what the police and the security guards are doing. They’re doing something common sense says they shouldn’t. Why? Where is the pressure on them coming from? What are they worried will happen if they don’t challenge photographers?
I don’t have the answers, but I’m kinda sure those are the questions.
I think those are great questions and I wish I knew the answers. Where is the pressure coming from? It’s happening everywhere now, so it can’t really be an accident – it’s happening without any other incidents or moral panics taking place too. I think part of it is power – give someone unreasonable powers and they’ll just use them, but it’s far from a complete answer.
I’m sure some research has been done on why people misuse power. Can’t find any online just now (can’t work out what to google for).
I’m have a stab at answering my own question though. When Tony Blair was talking about anti-terror legislation years ago, part of his justification was that in the event of a terrorist attack in this country, he didn’t want people to look back and say “why didn’t you do anything?”. In essence, trading civil liberties for increased security was the safe thing to do, even if it wasn’t the right thing to do, because by taking some action – regardless of what it was – he was protected against future criticism.
Now imagine you’re a security guard and you see someone taking photos. Your life would be easier if he wasn’t taking photos. He probably isn’t a terrorist or a paedophile, but imagine if he were. You had the powers to stop him and you didn’t. So the path of least resistance – even if it makes no common sense – becomes to challenge everyone all the time.
By the way, your comment form looks a bit broken. I’m on Firefox 3.5 and there’s a checkbox floating around with no label below with some huge overlapping writing I can’t read!