Mother defends putting kiddie pics on eBay
A mum who sold photographs of her bathing children on eBay insisted today: “I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong.”
Emotional mother of four Sara Fox was paid just £5.50 (€7.90) in a bid to raise cash for a family holiday in the United States before the pictures were withdrawn from auction after a barrage of internet complaints.
At her home in Ballymena, Co Antrim, she said: “With hindsight, I suppose it was ignorance on my part. But they were put there for a genuine reason and I never imagined it would have caused such a fuss.”
One of the photographs showed her 11-month old daughter naked in the bath with her young brother and sister.
With her husband due to lose his job, the auction was an attempt to fund a holiday back to her home state of Wisconsin where a fourth child, her seven-year-old daughter, lives.
Mrs Fox, 24, said: “Mothers allow their babies to model nappies, bathtime products and baby foods where there is more showing, and nobody takes offence with that.
“I respect people’s rights to do what they want, but I maintain I wasn’t doing wrong showing anything of my children which you can’t see in a photograph on a child’s bottle, a packet of nappies or whatever.
“The woman who bought the pictures didn’t even want them. She did so because she sympathised with my plight – £5.50 isn’t going to get me very far and the way it’s looking, I’ll probably not make it back home.
“I just thought it was worth a try. It was like desperation and I don’t know how I’m going to tell my daughter.”
Mrs Fox said it never occurred to her that paedophiles might access the site.
She added: “Maybe that’s my shortfall, maybe that’s my ignorance. Nothing clicked in me. A kid in a bathtub is a kid in a bathtub. You see them on TV and that’s okay. What I was doing was personal, but I did take the pictures off the sale.
“If I had put more thought into it; if I had put more thought into the photographs I was posting…obviously it was the bathtub one which put everybody off. When I put them on, I never thought in those terms.
“I was thinking: ‘My kids look absolutely beautiful and they’re together’. I couldn’t see how people could take such offence and I still maintain they still show them better that those who advertise baby products.”
