Childhood nudity
Depending upon conceptions of childhood innocence and sexuality in general, societies may regard social nudity before puberty as normal, as acceptable in particular situations such as same-sex groups, or unacceptable.
Other societies continue to maintain the need for openness and freedom for healthy child development, allowing children to be nude without shame in safe environments.
[9] In tropical parts of Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Oceania everyday nudity began to change only hundreds of years ago during the age of colonization.
[10] In contemporary rural villages of Sub-Saharan Africa, pre-pubescent boys and girls play together nude, and women bare their breasts in the belief that the meaning of naked bodies is not limited to sexuality.
There is now an issue with strangers taking photographs, and they worry about pedophiles, but parents want kids to have the same freedom they remember from their own childhood and grow up with a positive body image.
[23] In England during the Interwar period (1918-1939), a number of schools were established which practiced a utopian educational program that included coeducation and nudity while playing sports or sunbathing.
[34][35] A moral panic is "a social movement against an exaggerated or fabricated threat from individuals or groups believed to undermine the safety and security of society".
In the 1980s and 1990s, a number of charges were brought against daycare providers alleging sexual abuse and satanic rituals, but were rarely sustained; being based upon improper techniques for interviewing children, using leading questions and sometimes coercion to elicit the desired result.
[36] While not denying the existence of pedophilia, public response has often been exaggerated regarding its prevalence and the characterization of the threat as widespread and organized, as in the Pizzagate conspiracy theory.
[37] Pedophilia panics in France and the United States were found to be due to sensational media reports and political crusading rather than any increase in molestation incidents, which remain rare.
The situations ranged from a three-year-old being naked at a large gathering, to the use of a backyard swim pool becoming an issue when the children of disapproving neighbors participated.
[45] In a 1995 review of the literature, Paul Okami concluded that there was no reliable evidence linking exposure to parental nudity to any negative effect.
[48] In 2019, psychiatrist Lea Lis recommended that parents allow nudity as a natural part of family life when children are very young, but to respect the modesty that is likely to emerge with puberty.
[49] In an article by sociologist Jacqui Gabb, the relationships between fathers and children is recognized as a potential source of anxiety that requires setting boundaries to manage intimate relations.
It was found that contemporary family relations placed the response of the child as the controlling factor; it was the children who decided, usually in adolescence, when nudity became embarrassing and privacy was required in bathrooms.
[51][52] In their 1986 study on the effects of social nudity on children, Smith and Sparks concluded that "the viewing of the unclothed body, far from being destructive to the psyche, seems to be either benign or to actually provide positive benefits to the individuals involved".
[53] As recently as 1996 the YMCA maintained a policy of allowing very young children to accompany their parents into the locker room of either gender, which some health care professionals questioned.
[60] By the 1990s, communal showers in American schools had become "uncomfortable", not only because students were accustomed to more privacy at home, but because young people became more self-conscious based upon the comparison to mass media images of perfect bodies.
[69] In a 2018 survey of predominantly white middle-class college students in the United States, only 9.98% of women and 7.04% of men reported seeing real people (either adults or other children) as their first childhood experience of nudity.
[73] The health textbooks in Finnish secondary schools emphasize the normalcy of non-sexual nudity in saunas and gyms as well as openness to the appropriate expression of developing sexuality.
), a French picture book for children, was first published in 2011 with the stated purpose of presenting a view of nudity in opposition to media images of the ideal body but instead depicting ordinary people swimming naked in the sea including a teacher and a policeman.
In a subsequent series for teens and young adults, real people were recruited to have sex on TV as counterbalance to the unrealistic presentations in advertising and porn.
[78] A 2009 report issued by the CDC comparing the sexual health of teens in France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United States concluded that if the US implemented comprehensive sex education similar to the three European countries there would be a significant reduction in teen pregnancies, abortions and the rate of sexually transmitted diseases, and save hundreds of millions of dollars.
[80] Until the late 20th century, nudity of children was shown in the fine arts, photography, advertisements and film to evoke positive associations of innocence in childhood.
In a 1941 article on high schools, a photograph of boys in a gym shower included a caption indicating male communal nudity was symbolic of social equality.
Some contemporary parents see such photos as records of ephemeral childhood innocence that are precious, while other think of photography as an intrusion on behavior that should remain private.
[50] During the final decades before digital photography, labs processing film photographs might report them to the police as possible evidence of child sexual abuse (CSA), with some charges being filed but few sustained.
[88] In the absence of explicit conduct, the determination of whether a particular image violates the law is subjective, based upon speculation as to the intent of the creator and the response of the viewer.
[89] In recent years, the identification of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) has led to the development of programs that use artificial intelligence to flag images that are then reviewed by humans before further action is taken.
[90] The advocacy organization Electronic Frontier Foundation views these programs as a dangerous violation of the integrity of end-to-end encryption which is the basis for the privacy of online communications.
