> World Socialist Web Site http://www.wsws.org
>
> 48-year-old Ohio mother charged for photographing her daughter
>
> By our correspondent
> 20 March 2000
>
> Cynthia Stewart, a 48-year-old bus driver, will go on trial
> in Lorain County, Ohio in May charged with illegally photographing
> her eight-year-old daughter and "pandering" sexually oriented
> material. This is only the most recent in a series of cases in which
> parents, generally mothers (and even grandmothers), have faced
> state prosecution in the US for taking pictures of their nude offspring.
>
> Stewart, who has been suspended from her job in Oberlin (35 miles
> southwest of Cleveland) pending the outcome of the trial, has systematically
> photographed her "miracle" daughter, born after several miscarriages,
> the girl's entire life. She has taken some 40,000 pictures in all. Among
> the snapshots were a few of the eight-year-old in the bathtub last summer.
> When an area photography lab turned the pictures over to the police,
> Stewart faced criminal prosecution.
>
> Supporters have organized protests and vigils in her defense and have
> raised some $35,000 for her legal costs. Stewart has refused to accept
> a settlement that would include an admission of wrongdoing. If convicted,
> she faces the possibility of up to 16 years in prison.
>
> Amy Wirtz, a lawyer representing Stewart, told the press, "It's the
> witch-hunt of the twenty-first century. They persecute parents out of fear of
> pedophiles." The associate legal director of the American Civil Liberties
> Union in Ohio (ACLU), Gino Scarselli, noted that in Stewart's case, "just
> the act of taking photos is a crime. There's no sign of abuse at all." The
> ACLU argues that the Ohio state law used to prosecute Stewart is "so
> vague and overbroad" that it puts all parents who take innocent photos
> of their children at risk.
>
> Whatever the outcome of the case, the prosecutor's decision has already
> cost Stewart a great deal of anguish, as well as expense. The media have
> played their normally odious role. The Oberlin News-Tribune placed an
> article on her case alongside a story about a couple who had intentionally
> starved their child, under the common headline, "Bus driver, parents charged
> with abuse." Other local news sources published her mug shot as part of
> their coverage of her arraignment, and in general sensationalized the
> proceedings.
>
> Police in Montclair, New Jersey recently arrested Marian Rubin, a 65-year-old
> social worker and professional photographer, after photos of her
> granddaughters, four and six, were handed to police by photo lab employees.
> A spokeswoman for the Essex County Prosecutor's Office asserted that the
> photographs met the standard for prosecution because they "depicted nudity
> for sexual gratification."
>
> In 1994 photographer and Wayne State University professor Marilyn
> Zimmerman was threatened with prosecution in Detroit on similar charges.
> And there are other cases.
>
> The religious right-including Focus on Family, the American Family Association
> and Randall Terry of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue-has led a
> campaign for years against the work of photographers Jock Sturges and
> David Hamilton, who take pictures of children or entire families in the nude.
> The far-right has organized more than 40 protests outside bookstores.
>
> In 1998 an Alabama grand jury indicted Barnes & Noble, the bookstore chain,
> for selling Hamilton's The Age of Innocence and Sturges's Radiant Identities.
> Barnes & Noble faced a similar campaign in Tennessee. Police in Bethel Park,
> Pennsylvania-a suburb of Pittsburgh-considered charging Borders
> Bookstores in 1997 for selling Sturges's book, after a fundamentalist radio
> program urged listeners to take action. Barnes & Noble has declared
> that "under no circumstances will we remove books from our shelves."
>
> There is something particularly diseased about the arrests of Stewart
> and Rubin. As one of Stewart's friends commented, "Only someone with the
> most contaminated imagination could construe these [photographs] as
> pornographic." Critics note the irony of charges being brought in such
> obviously
> innocent circumstances in a culture whose advertising and entertainment
> industries widely and profitably sexualize youth.
>
> Beyond that, the cases, ludicrous as they are, represent yet more instances
> of the sustained campaign against freedom of expression and democratic rights
> being waged on many fronts by the political and legal establishment, urged on
> by the extreme right, in the US.