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.

Kid gloves

There's a big fuss going on about the widespread vetting of anyone coming into contact with children. There's a feeling it's all gone too far and turned into pervert-paranoia.

Even writers visiting schools to talk about books will be required by the government's new Vetting and Barring Scheme to pay £64 for confirmation that they are no known risk to children.

Several of them, including Philip Pullman and Anne Fine, say they will stop visiting schools in protest.

The VBS, which launches in October, will oblige millions of people in indirect contact with school children to register with them for a risk-assessment.

That includes caretakers, cleaners, cooks, electricians, plumbers and anyone who gives talks to pupils like firefighters, police and paramedics. Even if a teacher will be present throughout, they still have to be vetted.

There are vociferous complaints that this huge new bureaucracy is a sledgehammer to crack a nut, casting undeserved suspicions on thousands of people without necessarily preventing offences against children.

The VBS is a consequence of the awful murders of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman by Ian Huntley, a school janitor. But Huntley didn't get the job because of a lack of vetting. On the contrary, he was already suspected of sexual offences but was employed nonetheless.

Oversights and negligence of this sort are bound to happen again, regardless of whether people's backgrounds have been checked. And surely the incidence of sexual assaults in schools is not enough to justify such a huge bureaucratic operation casting doubts on so many probably harmless people?

Once you start to see potential abusers on all sides, where do you stop? What about people who live close to a primary school (like me)? Or people who frequent sweetshops? or people who travel on buses with schoolkids? It won't be long before the entire population is under suspicion and every adult is seen as a lurking predator.

This isn't child protection, it's mindless hysteria.