There could hardly be any positions more ridiculous, or less defensible, than those at either extreme of the confected debate about the photography of pre-pubescent girls, stirred up again this week by a provocative cover on Art Monthly Australia. Not particularly provocative in any sexual sense, of course. Even if the usual suspects, who by now include Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, immediately suggested that it was. Rather, it was cleverly positioned by its editors so as to be on the wave of a serious debate about the use of sexualised images of children inspired by the Bill Henson affair.

Everyone played to script. There were Rudd and the ineffable grandstander on child sexual abuse, Hetty Johnson; and the advocates of unlimited freedom for anything in the nature of art; and editors of the magazine, pretending to be somewhat bemused at the controversy they have consciously stirred up. We are yet to have the spectre of self-important policemen, usually led by the NSW Police Commissioner, lining up to make fools of themselves, but the week is still young, and perhaps his Premier, known to be a bit distracted, has not yet signalled him how convenient a meaningless controversy could be.

There are serious questions in modern society about the sexual exploitation of young children, the increasing sexualisation of advertising and other materials focused at children, and questions about the vulnerability of children to sexual abuse.

The problem is plain from ordinary commercial television, from magazines and other media focused at young children and from the way advertising companies, clothing shops and other people market to children, particularly young girls. In many cases, direct sexual display may be coy, but the appeal of sexual images and the invitation, often as not to children of much the same age, to see the models in sexual terms are fairly explicit.

The community is worried not only about paedophiles in its midst whether those who seek directly to abuse such girls or to abuse girls influenced by such material, those who hope that the normalisation of such material helps condition young children into sexual activity, or even those who merely derive gratification from the images alone.

But this is by no means the only issue. Even without paedophilia, people would be quite entitled to worry about what this trend says about a loss of childhood, and of innocence. We seem to be putting an impossible pressure on young boys and girls to see themselves not as they are but as future sexual objects, players and actors, roles for which their age, experience and hormones have as yet not suited them. The pressure involved is not only a pressure into sexual activity (by no means necessarily with paedophiles) but into seeing everything, not least a wide spectrum of their friendships, in sexual terms, and this may well be a factor in the development of an apparent burgeoning of pathologies of self-hatred, despair and suicide.

Kids should be allowed to be kids until they grow up. They are not there at 12. They are not helped by being invited whether by advertising, television or magazines, modelling agents or artists to imagine themselves as players in a meat market.

That reasonable disquiet is, in appropriate cases, entitled to be expressed as disgust and a feeling that such children need the protection of the community sometimes, if needs be, from their parents. But common sense and discretion are warranted. There could hardly be any field less apt to hard and fast rules, or instant dogmatism. Some seem to think that any image of a naked child from an infant on a changing mat, a toddler in the bath or seven-year-olds running happily, naked, under a sprinkler is prima facie pornographic, crying out for the intervention of society. In many cases, such people will accept that these are, in context, innocent enough, but focus their argument on its potential to be gratifying to some paedophile.

That cannot be the test; those who suggest that it should be inevitably ridicule themselves. Likewise, few will argue complete laissez-faire in relation to vulnerable children to whom society has a particular duty. Claims of art do not give complete freedom with children as subjects, and few artists would claim otherwise. It can be legitimate art to conjure with some of the ambiguity of growing up, maturing and sexual development, but that cannot excuse exploitation, a lack of genuine consent (difficult to obtain, from an adolescent) or actual abuse. Police, particularly those used to playing to the shock-jock gallery, are usually not well equipped as arbiters.

Public taste and opinion have to be the primary guides, with the law an option only in extreme cases. Extremist ranters on either side tend to be black and white, and to see the argument as merely one between wowsers and paedophiles. That means that many sensible people, who well understand the complexity of the issue, are put off from bringing their wisdom to such cases.