UFO Info Week-End

In both cases the claim is very clear: specific medical benefits will ensue from the publicity

In both cases the claim is very clear: specific medical benefits will ensue from the publicity. They, as parents, have decided that these benefits outweigh the benefits of privacy.This must be a subjective judgement. The parents have decided to use the missing child and their own emotions to earn the co-operation of the media.The media interest is clearly in the drama, the sensation, and the police would claim to be exploiting this interest for reasonable ends. The routine, however, has taken over, the event has become a convention, the appeal for help or the warning has become secondary, almost unnoticeable.Sara Keays and Jaymee Bowen’s father wished to break the legal protection of their children for a very definite reason. Obviously neither democracy nor human well-being is really served by the mad confessions on these television shows. But what about those cases on the evening news bulletins where police parade parents of missing children, often in tears, before the media?These events are taken to be good things either because they might help find the child or because they will provide a warning for other parents. They are intended to use the emotions aroused by a child lost or perhaps in distress to achieve a specific end.

The nuts ‘n’ sluts shows on American television, in which victims are persuaded to reveal their most intimate lives, can claim that it is both psychologically healthy to reveal yourself and democratically desirable. The wrecked family, drunk on the momentary fame of television, can, in a sufficiently crazed democratic society, be made to seem as significant as the Watergate investigation.The problem is that claims for the benefits of publicity can become very tenuous indeed. So two apparent virtues collide: the protection of the child and the raising of money for beneficial medical treatment; the state’s ideals versus those of the parents.This notion of publicity as an absolute good is, in fact, central to our culture – as central, in its way, as our belief that children require protection. It is based on the democratic assumption that informing the people is intrinsically better than keeping them in ignorance and it is, to a greater or lesser extent, built into almost every type of institution. At its best it genuinely helps us to make informed decisions; at its worst it justifies the crudest exploitation. The memory of some celebrated case or scandal should not be allowed to taint the whole of a life.But in both the Keays and the Bowen cases, courts and parents have been at odds. The courts have applied the ideal of privacy, one parent in each case has wanted publicity.

Their argument has been that, in these unusual circumstances, publicity represents an indisputable good – it would help money to be raised for a desirable end or it would provide support for a worthy cause. In most of these cases the courts and parents would agree: protect the child. Publicity is like all of those things: habit-forming and life-changing. They all require a reasonably mature mind to grasp their implications. Making a child famous, as Michael Jackson should testify, is risky.Pop fame, in general, is seen as good Most parents, perhaps foolishly, would not resist Legal or intimate fame or notoriety is different. She now lives under a new identity, to protect her from her own childhood notoriety – a clear example of the permanence of a media “baptism”.Rightly, therefore, we assume that children should not be exposed.

Children might not agree; most are dazzled by the idea of any kind of fame. But then many children probably want to drink, smoke, gamble or have sex. Like innocence, complete privacy once lost cannot be regained. In fact, the High Court injunction protecting the Keays child is known as a Mary Bell order Bell, as an 11-year-old, killed two children in 1968. The Mirror would only do the story if Child B could be identified and, eventually, the courts agreed on the basis that the treatment, which might be life- saving, must constitute a greater good for the child than privacy.But the belief that children ought to be protected from publicity is clearly well-founded Publicity is a kind of absolute.