What sort of person takes selfies at a Holocaust memorial?

Tourists hoping for a better shot caused a section of Hadrian’s Wall to collapse

Three months ago, I was standing outside Los Angeles’s Museum of the Holocaust, willing the teenage girl leaning against its fittingly bleak, brutalist façade to stop taking selfies. Maybe it was the micro shorts or the compulsory “duckface” (the ironic Insta-pout where cheeks are sucked in and lips pushed out), but the more she snapped, the more I seethed.

I thought of that girl yesterday, as seething masses took to social media to slam an Instagram snap taken by glamour model Katie Price’s boyfriend, Kris Boyson, at the 9/11 memorial site in New York.

Grinning into the camera, the aspiring reality television star rests his foot on the Ground Zero bronze memorial panel inscribed with names of the 2,977 victims. His caption reads: “Took the mother to NYC for her birthday didn’t I… She’s always wanted to see the city at Christmas!”

Any negative comments – “You have your foot up on a memorial… very disrespectful”, “It’s a place for reflection, not a selfie” and “I hope you know people died in the place where you are smiling and putting your foot on [sic]” – seem to have been outweighed by the 5,912 “likes” that the picture had garnered by yesterday morning. After all, Boyson has not, at the time of writing, deleted the post.

But as the Very Rev Dr John Chalmers, one of the Queen’s chaplains, publishes a heartfelt plea in Life and Work magazine, imploring the “narcissists” who reduce churches and monuments “to no more than a backdrop” in their blind pursuit of “likes” to instead embrace “modesty” and “self-effacement” rather than “pride” and “arrogance”, I have a couple of ideas that might help wipe the smile off every selfie-tourist’s gurning face.

First, ban selfies at memorial monuments, memorial museums and places of worship. Like the beach in southern France where locals grew so sick of “holiday spam” that the council erected signs featuring a little man holding up his iphone with a cross through it, make it illegal, make that sign ubiquitous – and make transgressions punishable.

Implement a form of community service that involves the enforced watching of a three-hour documentary on 9/11, on the Holocaust, on Auschwitz (where, earlier this year, custodians were forced to plead for respect after visitors posted selfies on the railway tracks leading into the former concentration camp); on the history of the Sacré-coeur (where visitors are banned from taking selfies); and on Catholicism.

Then chuck in a fine. With fear of death not proving a strong enough deterrent (250 selfie-takers have died

at global landmarks in the past six years), the Spanish city of Pamplona soon realised that a fine was the only way to prevent tourists who had swapped their frontal lobes for ibrains from running with the bulls in an attempt to get “like, a sick selfie”.

Likewise, Mumbai introduced “no-selfie zones” – punishable by fines – in 2015 at 16 of the city’s major attractions, after an incident in which three teenage girls fell into the sea while selfie-ing on rocks; the Japanese authorities decided to issue fines to the numbskulls “chasing” geishas through the Gion district in Kyoto; and conservative Muslims on the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca grew so sick of this “form of unacceptable irreligious self-worship” that they issued a fatwa against selfie-takers.

Drastic measures are also being considered by the National Trust after selfie-tourists caused a 10ft section of Hadrian’s Wall to collapse, so intent are they on climbing on to the largest Roman archaeological feature in the world to get the perfect post.

Thinking along similar lines are the managers of Lake Tahoe in California, where a ban on visitors taking selfies “with” bears hasn’t proved sufficient, respect not being so much the issue as the fact that you are turning your back on bears as you click away; and the city of Amsterdam, where selfietourists congregate outside Anne Frank’s house, photography being forbidden inside.

Anyone on social media can understand the impulse, without condoning the action. When I took up Instagram, I was surprised by how much fun it was and how quickly my mind began to jump to “how can I make use of this?” mode in covetable places, and in the company of covetable people, but also anywhere of heightened beauty and emotion. Only you can’t “make use” of other people’s sacred landmarks and religions, just as you can’t make use of the senseless death of innocent people.

You can’t create an artificial moment out of the most authentic time and place there is. So maybe take a mental picture. Better still: make a mental note.