IMPORTANT NOTICE

I regret to say that due to widespread hysteria amongst an alarmingly growing section of the population, whose ability to make rational judgements for themselves appears to have been vaporised through over-exposure to a mass media continually looking for sensational scare stories, I am no longer willing to photograph any public event at which children may be present unless I am issued with a disclaimer whereby the client accepts full responsibility for waht happens to the pictures after handover. I simply do not have the facility (or patience) to actively seek consent from the parents of every child present. Those who do not wish to have their children photographed must take it upon themselves to ensure this doesn't happen.

In the space of less than 10 years, largely due to the medium we are employing at this very moment, an entire profession of dedicated and reputable individuals (as well as many more amateurs, many of whom are more gifted and dedicated than many a professional but who come in for even more flak) now find themselves walking under a cloud of suspicion, branded as potential paedophiles-by-default simply because of their line of work or hobby. The very fact that I have to be vetted in order to photograph primary school children, in their classroom, with their teachers present, would strike me as little short of defamatory if it didn’t first make me think of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. I have yet to hear of one single substantiated - or even unsubstantiated - case of a professional photographer committing any remotely related offence in the course of their work.

While there certainly exist circumstances where people may have very good reasons for not wanting pictures of their children published, these people are the exception, not the rule. Moreover, they tend to take their own precautions and are usually fair-minded people who have no wish to diminish the enjoyment of others. However, most objectors are simply acting out of a combination of cussedness and reactionary ignorance. If they are so concerned about it, they should not take their children to public events or, indeed, allow them to be seen in public at all, lest a "bad man" looks at them. Those who do so and then complain later are simply looking for excuses to parade their self-righteousness and get their own pictures published in the course of suing somebody. Sadly, the law is now tilting in favour of them doing so successfully. I also suspect that some protesteth too much.

Come to that, I have never heard of one single case of a paedophile committing offences in such public situations. By their very nature, paedophiles seek more discreet locations and circumstances for their deeds – in 90% of cases, the family home, a well-known but only seldomly unacknowledged truth. I also rather doubt that pictures of fully clothed, happy children on a bouncy castle with their faces painted eating toffee-apples at a publicly staged and properly managed “family-day-out” play any part in their staple diet of perversion – if this were the case, then we would have to ban all publication of pictures of children, regardless of whether the photographer had been vetted by MI5, Interpol or the CIA.

Given that the bodies charged with carrying out any vetting frequently seem incapable of preventing homicidal paedophiles from working in nursery schools, it makes it all the more ridiculous – and offensive – to subject hard-working photographers to such slanderous scrutiny.

Ironically, or perhaps not, the same people who now view every photographer with suspicion, are the same people who lap up every last drop of pointless celebrity tittle-tattle and drool over photographs taken by paparazzi, those most irritating of creatures who make life misery for anybody in the public eye and who simultaneously bring our profession into disrepute – 99% of us have not the inclination, time, energy or interest to go chasing Z-list nonentities around nightclubs or trying to peer through their private windows with long lenses to see if they’re snorting coke, brushing their teeth or reading a newspaper.

This corrosive idiocy has got to stop. It criminalises the innocent and contributes to a general trend which is steadily turning us into a society of shut-off individuals, suspicious of everybody. And, as anybody connected to the sharp end of the issue of child abuse will testify, it protects nobody from anybody. Historians will look back on 21st century Britain and ask "where were all the children?"

I make absolutely no apology for branding all those who have contributed to the creation of this ludicrous state of affairs or who help perpetuate it in any way as paranoid and witless morons who really need to give themselves a shake.