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Wicked adults

We seem to be fast reaching a point in Britain where adults won't be allowed to have any contact with children unless they're expressly authorised to do so.

We're turning into a totally paranoid society which sees children as permanently threatened by sinister adults intent on molesting or harming them.

Where this raging hysteria has come from, I don't know. Every so often there are dramatic stories of children being attacked, but are they really any more frequent than fifty years ago?

The change in attitudes is extraordinary. When I was a child, I played on the streets for hours every day without the slightest fear of adults, and nothing serious ever happened to me. The only incident I can recall was at the age of ten when a man approached me in a department store, wanting to see my willy. And that was it. So why this sudden widespread alarm?

Anyone having regular contact with children is now vetted for a possible criminal record, and this screening will soon become stricter still with the start of the Vetting and Barring Scheme. You will then need an official permit that confirms you aren't any known threat to children.

Seeing all these precautions, children themselves must be getting terrified of adults and assuming that any adult they don't know might be about to attack them. The reality of course is that the vast majority of adults have no such intentions and seek only to protect and nurture children, just as they did when I was growing up.

But like many adults, when I'm out on my own nowadays and there are children nearby, I take care to avoid them in case the parents start wondering about me. As it is, they often give me suspicious looks, seeing as I have no companion.

The irony is that most child abuse is committed not by total strangers, however heavily vetted they may be, but by people already known to them, including parents and relatives. Yet relatives are always assumed to be safe and benign and incapable of doing harm.

There's something seriously topsy-turvy here.