The Bailey Report

I don't like it so you can't read it. That is their philosophy.

They are about to dramatically increase the censoring of the internet. The excuse is child protection but that is all it is, an excuse. There is no credible evidence that children need to be protected from most of the material to be banned and strong evidence that they will be harmed.

The Bailey Report and the British Naturism Response are linked from the start of this article for your convenience but we urge you to read the remainder of this article first. The formal BN response is very diplomatic, probably overly so. To be frank this article is also very diplomatic.

• The Bailey Report
• The British Naturism response to the Bailey Report but only for those people the censors allow to access our web site

Related material on the BN web site

• The BN web pages on censorship  but only for those people the censors allow to access our web site
• Other BN responses. Most are relevant to the issues raised by the Bailey Report.
• BN briefing notes. Short, single page, summaries of various topics

The Bailey Report recommended censorship of the internet but it is so seriously flawed that it provides no justification. That has has been pointed out on innumerable occasions but it is still being used to drive through sweeping censorship of the internet with no consideration of the harm to children that will result and with little or no debate and discussion. A small group of politicians is bullying the internet service providers into being censors. At least if Parliament was setting up the censorship there would be some proper discussion of the principles and some prospect of accountability.
The BN web site is already heavily censored. The mobile operators will not let you access it unless you first prove that you are over 18. You are unlikely to be able to access it from public access points such as coffee shops and public libraries. Social workers, police officers, planning officers, indeed anyone working for a council or government,  is unlikely to be able to access it from work. We have even had police officers request documents by email because they were not allowed access to our web site. That is a libel on Naturism and it encourages prejudice against naturists and Naturism.
The intention is to make that censorship total. You will not be allowed to access naturist web sites from any public access point and you will not be allowed to access it from home unless filtering for the whole household is turned off. Naturism is already very heavily censored and this will make it near complete.
Children in naturist households that refuse to accept the censorship will be denied protection from the material which really is harmful.
The report has worthy objectives and much of it is only indirectly relevant to Naturism. However the recommendation to introduce blanket censorship of the internet will have a very serious effect on both Naturism and in the longer term to children and young people.
They use various euphemisms in an attempt to make it more palatable but in truth it is both a libel on Naturism and censorship.

• Filtering – preventing access to material because they don't like it. How does that differ from censorship?
• Protection of children – most of the banned material is either beneficial or benign so how does blocking it differ from censorship?
• Some of the blocked material may be harmful but even Bailey admits that the evidence is far from conclusive. How does that differ from censorship?
• Stopping children accessing pornography – pornography has an enormous range of meanings and they deliberately refuse to define it. That has allowed them to use weak evidence about the more extreme pornography as an excuse to pursue the censoring of anything that they do not like. How does that differ from censorship?

The report title is:
Letting Children be Children
Report of an Independent Review of the Commercialisation and Sexualisation of Childhood by Reg Bailey
Straight away, before we even open the cover, it is misleading. It is not independent:

• Conflict of interest. Reg Bailey is the chief executive of a minority faith based parents group, a group that launched their Bye Buy Childhood campaign at the same time as Reg Bailey was writing his report. That probably explains a lot.
• He was selected and appointed by a politician. It is a well known technique to appoint a person who will give the report that the politician wants.
• It was written by a team from the Department for Education. (See page 4 of the report)
• It doesn't say who paid for it but presumably it was the Department of Education, directed by the politicians.

Reg Bailey has no obvious qualification for the role. Prior to working for the Mothers Union he was chief executive of the Danish Bacon Company. Who is more likely to get it right? Somebody with that background or the academic researchers?
It is important to appreciate that many of the failings are not matters of opinion. They are literally schoolboy errors in logic and methods, the sort of thing that makes the difference between good and poor A-level grades.
The part of the report advocating censorship is fundamentally flawed. It makes recommendations despite admitting that there is no real evidence of harm and despite, or perhaps because of, serious errors of logic.

• it admits that there is no good evidence of harm
• it attempts to link pornography with sex crime but makes two major errors of logic, either of which completely nullifies the argument
• it fails to consider the deleterious consequences of the recommendation to censor
• it fails to consider any of the contrary evidence

So there we have it. No credible evidence to support blanket body-censorship and strong evidence, see the BN response, that the attitudes encouraged will have very serious long term consequences for the children and young people of this country.
The objectives of the Bailey Report are very worthy and some of it may be correct, but the whole report is brought into disrepute by the numerous errors, especially those in the section advocating completely disproportionate censorship. No part of it can be trusted without first carefully checking the evidence, all of the evidence that is, not just the selection which Mr Bailey chooses to include.
A good summary of the dirty tricks used by politicians to pursue their personal (im)morality is given by the article “How the government uses dirty data to legislate morality” in The Register. That is a well respected online newspaper aimed at the competent. It is not difficult to find most of the techniques described in that article in the various reports advocating internet censorship. I suspect that many of those promoting body-shame, body-abhorence and body-ignorance are so certain in their moral self righteousness that it doesn't even occur to them that the children and young people of this country, and their own children, will pay a hefty price.
There has been widespread criticism of the report but the politicians and Department of Education seem oblivious. They appear to be so engrossed in playing the political game that principles such as objectivity and evidence-based policy making are totally forgotten.
Dr Petra Boynton wrote "UK Home Office reports seemed to follow a remit of identifying a politician-identified problem then looking for evidence to support it (while ignoring any evidence to the contrary)." Dr Boynton's article is a good general overview of the report and it has links to several other useful articles. That comment about the Home Office applies equally to the Department for Education.
This article by Charlie Brooker is written in a very different style but makes equally valid criticisms.
Ann Phoenix carried out a background literature review for the Bailey Report. It is worth comparing her review with what Reg Bailey wrote. Perhaps the inconvenient contradictions are the reason that the Department for Education did not publish it until several days after the report and generally made it less accessible.
Every poll quoted to support increased censorship that we have looked at has either been seriously flawed or the figures have been misapplied. Dr Petra Boynton wrote"Polling company YouGov have run their own research on sexualisation to tie in with the Bailey Review. Check the survey questions asked, there are some major problems with them – can you spot them?"
Writing in the Guardian, Jane Fae said "The real problem with Bailey is not just that it's the wrong answer. It's the wrong question. What society needs to be doing is understanding better what young people need. What pressures they are prey to; what solutions they require. Not an adult's interpretation of the same." That last point is particularly important. Bailey assumes that children interpret clothing, nudity and pornography in the same way as Mr Bailey and some other adults do. That is quite simply and fundamentally wrong. They don't. NB the preceding Guardian article supports filtering out the harmful material, not the sweeping body-censorship that is planned.
There have been numerous other articles pointing out the many problems with the Bailey Report. For example:

• Children Being Children by Nelson Jones in the New Statesman. He describes yet more ways in which the Bailey Report is flawed. 'Nodalongs', failure to define terms and treating non-problems as problems.
• Friend of the Family by Jennie Kermode discusses the emotive (mis)use of the word "family" by Bailey and others, comments on the danger of moral panics and asks if it is a smokescreen to distract from the need to spend money on improving the lives of children.
• Won’t you fuck off, Reg Bailey by "unity". Don't let the title put you off. It is a serious article well worth reading.

This article by Young Naturists America gives a useful overview of some of the research into the relation between exposure to nudity and outcomes. Our research, and all the rest of the research that we have encountered, supports those findings.
Onscentiy is an accademic groupwith a wealth of high quality material.
Further reading
Glamourous Careers for Girls. Dr Petra Boynton describes yet another example of a pseudo-poll.
Other reports
Papadopoulos
The Papadopoulos Report preceded the Bailey Report. Dr Papadopoulos is a psychologist and her treatment of psychological mechanisms was much better than the sociology. When time allows an article will be written. Here are some links to articles that others have written about.it. We haven't done any systematic work on this yet. If you know of other good articles please let us know.

• 63% of poll results are entirely made up Alison Macleod on some of the many failings of the report.

Claire Perry
We will be reviewing the Claire Perry, aka  Independent Parliamentary Inquiry Into Online Child Protection, shortly. Our initial impression is that it starts from the shaky (as in quick sand) foundations of the Bailey Report, repeats many of the same failings, and then seeks to trample on freedoms fundamental to a democratic society. Some of the figures much quoted by the media come from polls so seriously flawed that the results are worthless and this report adds to the problem. The Office for National Statistics was created to prevent abuse of statistics by government. Similar provision for "reports" is absolutely essential to prevent abuse of statistics and evidence by politicians.
Ms Perry is a fan of the mobile internet blocking currently in force.This is the The Open Rights Group opinion. Claire Perry won't be able to read this article on her mobile phone without first signing up for pornography. We discovered that we were blocked and we contested it with Vodafone. Eventually they backed down. Since then the block has reappeared. None of these censors ever has the courtesy to tell those censored that their freedom of speech is being denied. We do not even have the resources to argue with all the mobile operators. The thought of having to do that with the 450 or so ISPs is absolutely appalling.
Further developments
Today, Thursday 31 May 2012 we heard that the Parliamentary Body Image Group have published a report. It was sponsored by the YMCA. We hadn't heard of either the group or the report before. I started to respond to the survey on YMCA site but quickly gave up. Surveys are difficult to get right and this one is far from right. Indeed the results are likely to be downright misleading. Update 8 June - we are currently corresponding with the All Party Parliamentary Group.