Up to a quarter of all adults are to be vetted to ensure they are not kiddie-abusing maniacs, as part of an effort to protect youngsters under the age of 16 in cases such as voluntary organisations and so on.
And people wonder why there is sometimes a shortage of volunteers for things like youth clubs and the like. The destruction of civil society, of the bonds of trust that are vital to such an organic, grass-roots cluster of non-state institutions, is remorseless and deliberate. This government, in its totalitarian way – I use that word quite deliberately – wants to make all human interactions subject to its tests. The consequences for the long term health of civil society, and of the ability of people to grow up normally, are ignored.
None of this is to say that the issue of child abuse is not serious, nor deserving of legal action to protect children from child abusers, who deserve the strongest punishment. I really do wonder, however, whose interests are served by the sort of vetting processes that the state is embarking upon. One hears examples of how adults are sometimes reluctant to help a kid because they are frightened they will get some sort of complaint later on. That cannot be good.
It is sometimes lazily assumed that this present Labour government is not “radical” like its predecessors. But that is only a superficial issue. In substance, this is arguably the most dangerously radical government in modern times in terms of its view of how individuals interact not just with the state, but with each other.
It might be quicker if you did a list of reasons for having a government in the first place (and yes, there are a few!).
1. National defence
2. Public Infrastructure
3. Contracts and rights enforcement
4. Immigration (but not movement/emigration) control*
5. X of ‘last resort’ where X might be ‘educator’, ‘lender’, ‘job provider’. Of course, you really, really, really want to have strict controls on this one
6. Country marketing. Maybe
7. Money printer (mint) probably
8. (for UK only) Top Gear production. Down with all libertarians who do not want the Beeb to get subsidised for this greatest of all British exports. Well, that and English. And “Mind your language”. And the common law.
*yes, I know some Samizdatists gonna have problems with this. But when a majority of people do not want a bunch of wetbacks/gringos/abos/chinks**/dagos/whatever-insulting-phrase-for-foreigners-you-want-inserted-here in the country, you probably have to go along with it.
**yeah, I’m a chink. Human cockroaches. Will outlive the rest of you, in a racial sense. Except our cousins the Jews. Hell, yeah, I’m racist.
“Vince Gaskell, the bureau’s chief executive, said he did not believe that CRB checks were poisoning the relationship between adults and children.”
Well, f*ck me. State official defends State practice. What worries me isn’t just the scope for the State to abuse this, but the number of people (mostly men, naturally) who will be labelled paedophiles because the State fucked up the check. A quarter of all adults? The State will f*ck up at least 10% of those checks, whether during the check itself or querying the results of it. Half a million people who will be vulnerable to neighbours saying “Well, he failed the CRB check. Makes you wonder…don’t let your kids near him”, etc.
Is it still paranoid to think that the Government policy is to actively destroy society?
Rob, the answer to your question is yes and no. What this government wants to do is to create a constant climate of fear so that it control our lives. The reason for this is lust for power, born out of the deep, psychologically fucked up nature of most of the people who choose to go into politics and some other branches of public life.
In an ideal world, we’d be all armed and could go out and just shoot these bastards. It may yet come to pass.
A former helper at the after-school club my children go to is currently charged with child p*rn offences. If guilty he is unsuitable to care for children but he cleared all the police checks. Go figure.
While I agree with all the comments and I agree that this is a pure CL issue. But as well…
The cost and time this will take will be outrageous.
I also see it as a way to bring in the ID cards. What’s the phrase they use for the plan on this? It’s about not making them compulsory but stopping you doing anything without one. This is a brilliant wheeze. It’s a quarter in one go.
And yes, many innocents will suffer because even the vaguest hint of being a kiddie-fiddler will destroy your life. It happened with Operation Ore. Some people yanked in on that had had their credit cards cloned by the real peadeos.
This whole scheme is like something from Brass Eye’s Peadogeddon spoof. It’s on Youtube BTW which is good because the Beeb will never dare show it again.
Just read the telegraph piece. Say it ain’t so. Are people really that paranoid when it comes to the children of others?
As for the vetting scheme. That’s one foul Government you got going on over there. Kill it with fire asap.
According to this book advertised on the COE: Child Sex Abuse in Europe.
So 1 out of every ten, perhaps even 1 out of 5 children have been sexually abused. What absolute toss.
I’ll wager both my kidneys and someone else’s spleen that 90% of those surveyed fell under that vague category “peer sexual violence” which no doubt covers such horrendous acts as snapping bra straps, slapping asses and daring someone to kiss the ugly boy.
Children get date raped? WTF?
“Children get date raped?”
I’m not sure how else it would be described if both parties were 17.
Good points Dishman and Walter.
It’s like statutory rape in the US. A 17 yr old lad getting a blow-job from a 15 yr old goes into the mix. And it absolutely wouldn’t surprise me if teenage fumblings and games of “show me yours” and “I’ll show you mine” are chucked in the same category (either here or the US).
Now here’s the real kicker (in two parts):
Let’s say the whole schtick of these people is to say sex-abuse is the worst thing that can happen, like ever. Is that helping anyone who’s had a a vaguely unpleasant, incompetent, sexual encounter in their teens? Isn’t that more likely to screw them up? I mean sexual assault is doing something against the other person’s will. It isn’t doing something that someone late regrets or even just didn’t find as fun as they thought it would be.
Second. Remember Middlesborough? Remember the Reflex Anal Dilatation Technique? The buggers imposing this stuff are frequently de-facto child molesters.
Completely OT, but SCOTUS hands down Heller, 2nd Amend. ruling.(Link) (PDF)
News story(Link)
Jonathan,
…child abusers, who deserve the strongest punishment.
Maybe. It depends what you mean by “child abusers”. It is such a vague term, deliberately vaguened by those whose mission in life is to detect “abuse”. Some caught by the catch-all probably don’t deserve any punishment at all, others severe punishment.
I hope you are not affected by the witchfinding tendency exhibited here(Link):
That’s how the CRB sells itself. but that’s not what the figures actually show. What they show is that 20,000 people were refused jobs on the strength of a CRB check. That doesn’t mean any one person was in any way a danger to children, merely that something in the check caused a potential employer to decide they were ‘unsuitable’. Since “enhanced disclosure” CRB checks can include unsustantiated suspicions and accusations against the subject, and records of arrests and charges that were dropped (as well as criminal convictions for a wide range of offences whose relevance it is left to the potential employer to determine), it is almost certain that some of those 20,000 were not only not really unsuitable but entirely blameless.
AFAICT the goal of the current British government isn’t to create a ‘climate of fear’, it’s far simpler and far worse. They want to mediate every possible human relationship from boss-employee to parent-child, both in the abstract (declaring the parameters for such relationships) and individual so that every single marriage has the government as a new third partner.
I’ve never seen anything quite like it (and wish the British public would get off its ass and send them all packing before their pernicious and inhuman model can spread.
The checks are annoying and their value is not enough to justify them, but I don’t think they really have much effect on volunteering.
I’ve worked with Scout groups and other organisations for years, and stuff like this is tedious, but it’s nothing compared to the other paperwork that will come your way as part of doing the work.
First off, I don’t really see a huge problem with a shortage of volunteers, but that may be down to the social group or geographical area I’m in.
Secondly, if there’s one single big factor that changed, it’s that parents no longer feel any sense of duty or obligation to get involved, or sometimes even to express their thanks. In the past, even if you didn’t think much of the people running the outfit, at least you recognised that they were working hard for free, and that you could either volunteer to do it better or shut up.
The other factor that has changed is that logistics, especially with driving and vehicles is much harder. The current minibus tests are quite onerous and expensive. Because of this, few people have the licenses, no-one wants to get one because then they know they’ll have to do all the driving! I think the Government is actually going to relax this so the test only applies to driving minibuses commercially, but that hasn’t come into effect yet.
So, the problems are exaggerated, and where they exist it is much more the Government reflecting the existing mood of the people than imposing their bizarre laws on a baffled populace.
And finally, in the realm of sensible people, an awful lot of this kind of stuff is quietly ignored….
It is simply another example of the socialist bureaucratic philosophy of society.
Indeed, it is pretty far down the road to the Benito Mussolini’s definition of fascism (which pretty much fits for international socialism as well.) As I recall it goes something like this: “Everything within the state; Nothing outside the state; Nothing against the state.”
To take the specific example, rather than focus on controlling a modest number of predatory paedophiles, the law trawls through more than ten million innocent adults. The same mentality is behind our whole criminal justice system which largely refuses to deal with genuine criminality. (Scotland’s senior sheriff (In Scotland he’s a civil and criminal judge, not a policeman.) said recently words to the effect that his disposals (sentences) were largely illusory and did not protect the public.)
Another aspect of this is the assumption that only the state can do this or any other important task.
In essence in the bureaucratic worldview, all private citizens are viewed with enduring suspicion by the authorities – half devil, half child. But at the same time all public sector workers carrying out these controls and checks are assumed to be reliable, trustworthy, competent and disinterested. As always a severe case of quis custodiet ipsos custodes.
At least this government isn’t encouraging its’ citizens to go around randomly killing each other, unlike the Supreme court In US! Washington DC is ALREADY the murder capitol of the country- how much worse will it get now that law-abiding citizens can also shoot people?
What about the criminals? don’t they have a right to earn a living as best they know how without harassment from their ‘clients’?
Count your blessings, Britons!
It’s time some of us woke up and took a reality check, instead of sleepwalking back to 1984!
“1 out of 5 children have been sexually abused. What absolute toss.”
Yep, along with the “1 in 3 children are obese” story which was used last year to justify yet more State interference in parenting. Take a look around you – 1 in 3 are obese? Do I happen to live in a town where the children are unnaturally thin? Of course not.
Here in Australia, we are told that we are now the most obese nation on Earth, AND that we are the 2nd-longest live-span nation, behind Japan! I suppose it depends which paper you read…