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If Britain's top cops are to be believed, the country is currently awash with "child porn." But if that's true, then it's largely the metropolitan police who put it there.

On March 9th, north London's Saatchi Gallery was raided by Scotland Yard's child protection and Obscene Publications squads. They warned owner Charles Saatchi that he'd be prosecuted the following week, unless he removed at least two images-- taken of her children by US photographer Tierney Gearon-- from Saatchi's exhibition "I Am a Camera." Work by the well-known US artist Nan Goldin could also end up in the dock. And fine-art publisher Edward Booth-Cliborn had better pulp all remaining copies of his 436-page book of the exhibition, or he'd also find his neck in the noose.

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For eight weeks, these and other images of naked youngsters had hung on Saatchi's walls while several hundred members of the public filed past, largely without comment. A few favorable reviews of Gearon's oeuvre had appeared in several national dailies. Otherwise, the exhibition was ignored.

But, within hours of the raid, the liberal rump of England was provoking an inevitable philistine backlash. Both the Guardian and the Independent stamped their approval on Gearon by reprinting the photos in full color. The Independent on Sunday went one step further-- devoting a whole page to 15 exhibits from the gallery, half a dozen of which depicted kiddies in their natural garb. In retort, the sensationalist and reactionary News of the World fulminated against "upper crust 'art lovers' paying five pounds a head to ogle degrading snaps of naked children."

As the police deadline neared, millions of British readers now had these proscribed images on their coffee tables or on their walls-- even though possession alone is illegal under the country's draconian "Protection of Children" legislation. Six-year-old Emily Gearon and her four-year-old brother, Michael, had become the most notorious juveniles in the land. While their mother continued vehemently to maintain the "innocence," both of her offspring and her depictions of them had become implicitly sexualized.

Five days after the raid, and without offering a reason, the Crown Prosection Service (CPS) dropped proceedings against Saatchi, Gearon, Goldin, and Booth-Cliburn. Doubtless it believed that no reasonable jury would convict. The News of the World had been the first to alert Scotland Yard, which was only too willing to follow the paper's prurient lead. (However, it's likely that, had these same images first appeared on a "sex" website, the CPS would have had no such scruples).

But, as the story died-- swiftly yielding to foot-and-mouth disease as the even greater threat to the fabric of decent society-- several questions remain unaddressed.

No commentator had pointed out that this wasn't the first time British cops had intervened to intimidate an accredited photographer or those displaying their work. In 1996, Manchester Obscene Publications squad had threatened Britain's biggest book chain, Waterstone's, with prosecution if it didn't withdraw copies of a book by US photographer Jock Sturges, depicting nude adolescent girls and a few boys. No further action was taken, and a few months later the volumes reappeared.

Shortly after, London's Hayward Gallery succumbed to police pressure, "voluntarily" pulling a photo of half-naked, five-year-old, "Rosie" from its exhibition of gay icon Robert Mapplethorpe.

More puzzling is the fact that-- even as Scotland Yard was letting loose on Saatchi-- photos from Will McBride's Show Me! (a highly explicit children's sex education manual, featuring kids enjoying sexual intimacy) were sitting undisturbed in bookshops around Britain. In February, the country had been introduced to the disturbing work of contemporary Russian photojournalist, Boris Mikhailov, with its highly explicit depictions, on barren hinterland, of naked pubescent girl prostitutes and street kids pissing into the air.

Why, then, last March did the cops target childhood images which were not only much "softer" than any of these, but the very material that many parents proudly own?

Most likely, the Saatchi raid was a carefully-planned attempt to focus public attention, not on children's images per se, but on the pervasive and largely unpoliceable imaginative use to which they can be put. For 24 years, the Protection of Children Act had been used to indict men stirred by such pictures, even when they had committed no illegal act against a person. During this period, the pretended distinction between evil pedophile consumers and more "normal" appreciators of the reality of childhood, had already begun to blur. (Indeed, the dividing-line between kids-as-victims and adults-as-perpetrators was itself shaken at the end of March, when British police arrested a 13-year old boy, accusing him of distributing indecent internet images of children-- quite possibly including himself).

To the blue-coated guardians of childhood innocence, Gearon and Goldin must have appeared to be committing a uniquely insidious crime. Here were women, not men, delighting in the budding bodies, if not sexual awareness of the young. And, to cap it all, these transgressing mothers had been promoted, not by some dilettante leftwing ideologue or shabby underground publisher, but by a Pillar of the conservative establishment, and one of the richest men in England-- Charles Saatchi. No wonder the police felt impelled to act.