The tangled web: Use caution when posting pictures of your children

It was the kind of thing any new father might have done. Eager for far-flung relatives to share in the experience of welcoming his new baby into the world, Peter posted a clip of the first nappy change on YouTube. This being his third child, he had posted clips of family rites of passage before; but this time the clip attracted so many hits, Google contacted him and asked him if he wanted to put advertising on it.

At first, the 46-year-old from Edinburgh was happy to agree. The stakes weren’t very high. He was only being offered around 0.01p for every click on the advert, but if this scene of run-of-the-mill domesticity was resonating with a wide audience, why shouldn’t he make a little extra money from it?

Yet as the number of hits passed the 10,000 mark, doubts began to grow: why were so many people interested in this particular clip when previous ones had attracted only 30 to 40 hits? Could it be the motives of some of those watching were not entirely innocent? Peter couldn’t prove it. But while digging around for more information, he came across a disturbing story. Last year, US woman Kelli Clark, discovered footage she had posted of her two-year-old dancing in his “diaper” in the rain had been listed on a private “child porn” channel.

Having checked the statistics and discovered the majority of those who had viewed his clip were male, Peter removed it from the site. The problem for him, and for hundreds of other families in a similar position, is, that although his clip can no longer be viewed on YouTube, he has no idea if it was ever downloaded and saved. For all his efforts at reclaiming his privacy, the fleeting shots of his family sharing the most intimate of moments could still be out there circulating on the internet.

“I didn’t really think about it very much at first,” says Peter. “My wife sometimes looks up the internet to check how other people do things and I probably just assumed those viewing our video were doing the same. But when I read about Kelli Clark I thought, ‘Whoah’. That’s probably your worst fear – and I started to wonder whether it’s something parents ought to be thinking about more.”

Go to YouTube and type “children” into the search engine and all sorts of bizarre clips come up. You’ve probably seen the most of the popular ones by now.

There’s the baby in his walker who is terrified of his mother’s sneezing, the baby who laughs hysterically every time a piece of paper is ripped. And, of course, there’s the daddy of them all Charlie Bit My Finger, a 58-second clip in which an older child has his finger bitten by his baby brother, which went viral, notched up more than 400 million hits and became the most viewed video (excluding professional music videos) in the history of the site.

No-one knows exactly how much money the clip has made the family since the boys’ father, Howard Davies-Carr, from Buckinghamshire, posted it in 2007, but conservative estimates place it at around £100,000, much of which has been spent on private school fees.

To some, parading children online in an attempt to make money might seem ethically questionable, although Davies-Carr points out he posted the initial clip so Charlie’s godfather in Colorado could see it and did not anticipate the impact it would have. Much more worrying for most parents, however, is the thought innocent footage might attract attention from people whose interest in children is less than wholesome. For years local authorities have been clamping down on people taking photographs of children at events such as nativity plays in case they might be obtained and circulated by paedophiles. Yet many parents are willingly placing footage of their under-fives in the bathtub or running around semi-clad on a forum which absolutely anyone can access.

Although YouTube has privacy settings that would limit viewing to family members, many people seem to be either unaware of their existence or unable to see why they would be necessary. Since YouTube is frequently under attack for not censoring inappropriate content, or for allegedly failing to crack down on content on its site which could be seen as pornographic, however, it seems almost inevitable clips of naked children would attract interest from unsavoury quarters.

Certainly, those who work at the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) believe parents should be wary about what they post. A spokesman says: “There’s a lot of people out there with a sexual interest in children and parents might not always think about that when they are using the internet to share images with friends of family.

“From our work, we know there are forums, chat-rooms or other environments where offenders or those with a sexual interest in children will go to share images or likes; to normalise their behaviour. In the old days, they would have had to hang around the school playgrounds to watch children; now they can just access images on the internet.”

Shaun Kelly, head of safeguarding at Action for Children, spends a lot of his time warning teenagers to think before they post any compromising images of themselves on the internet. But he says the same advice applies to parents uploading innocent family clips. “When you upload images to a public site, you have to be aware of who the audience might be – it’s an open forum, it could be anybody,” he says.

“Also parents should be aware that once they’ve uploaded them, the images may always be out there. Even if you take them off YouTube, someone could already have downloaded them onto a hard disk somewhere and they might resurface.”

Dr Ethel Quayle, a clinical psychologist based at Edinburgh University, who has conducted research on internet-based sex offending, agrees there are issues around digital images and our capacity to control their use: “All images of children can potentially act as sexual stimuli for people who are sexually interested in children.

“However, we do need to have a balanced perspective about this, otherwise our anxieties about inappropriate use inhibit our ability to use digital photographs at all.”

The problem for law enforcement agencies is that, since the clips are not in themselves indecent and they’ve been placed on a public forum by their owners, there’s nothing much they can do about it.

When Kelli Clark took her discovery to the FBI she was told that since the user had merely listed other people’s videos, he had not acted illegally. “You can’t use the term ‘child porn’ with these images – a clip with a child in a nappy dancing around is not inappropriate, but, of course, it could be taken in the wrong context, ” the CEOP spokesman says. “It’s not illegal, but the question is – why would anyone want to create a private channel full of these images? It would be worrying. The police would probably look into it to see if anything more could be done or to glean a bit of intelligence around who might be doing it.” Criminal or not, the words of one contributor to a “psych forum” – a site where posters discuss their sexual desires – is enough to chill the blood of anyone who has ever uploaded innocent images such as Peter’s.

“I know that I used to search YouTube for videos of young boys or young girls in any sort of topic,” the poster says. “At one time when I was first becoming aware of my sexual desires for babies and infants I would search, looking for diaper change videos and found those very arousing and to be honest I still do.”

In the short-term, the best charities can do is offer parents advice. “If you want to share images you aren’t comfortable with everyone seeing, then make sure you use sites with privacy settings,” Kelly says.

Meanwhile Peter, who earned the grand total of £4 from his clip, has learned his lesson. “I used to love the sharing aspect of the internet, the fact that, at its best, it’s a community of people co-operating,” he says. “But I won’t be posting images like that on a public forum again.”