Protecting Our Children: A Wasted Expense?

There have been a number of very high profile cases of paedophilia in the media. This abuse has the potential to scar the child’s emotional state for years to come; possibly for the rest of their life. It’s natural that this should cause some concern then and that we should do what we can to safeguard children in their environments.

There is a certain amount of security which we rightly expect when people are dealing with our children. A parent would no more leave their children with someone that they didn’t trust than they would allow them to cross a busy street on their own without looking for traffic. Recently, legislation and suggestions about the level of protection we should give our children have been escalated.

New guidelines from Of-stead insist that children should feel safe in a school premises. It is not clear quite what this means or how to achieve it, but schools are suggesting installing sophisticated perimeter security and fences into schools. Continuing down this road, should our schools be a fortresses, with only schoolchildren and teachers able to penetrate their defences?

There are guidelines about CRB checking being enforced on anyone that has any contact with children. Authors are objecting to this, and rightly so. An author of a children’s book can no longer go into a school and read an extract of their book without paying for the CRB check. Never mind that they are never unsupervised with the children or even with a small group. Even if we assume that there is a criminal intent within the mind of the author, which goes against the premise of being innocent until proven guilty, there is no opportunity for them to act on it. And a CRB check only finds if someone has been previously convicted; it cannot gauge people who have not been caught.

If we continue along this route, where does it end? Do we want to prevent anyone looking at children, so removing any image of them from our magazines or media. Do we end at a point where Home Alone becomes banned, in case a paedophile should watch it?

Even with all of the safety measures in the world our children will always interact with people outside of our controls and remits. It is not feasible, practical or indeed desirable to stop our children from buying sweets or comic books in the local corner shop. If someone wants to get close to our children, there will always be ways for them to achieve this, whatever systems we put into place. And ultimately, our children need to learn how to deal with people they don’t know.

It is natural to want to protect our children from any danger, and certainly for the more overt ones, it is crucial. But if we hide our children away and wrap them in cotton wool, safe from any danger, they won’t learn important lessons about the world and will grow into insulated and adults who lack necessary skills for surviving in the real world. The idea that your child might be snatched away is undoubtedly a terrifying one, and it’s very high profile when it happens; we need only look at the Madeleine McCann story to know that. It is also incredibly rare.

While we continue to worry about pedophiles and the threat they pose to our children, the government throws money at the problem. This is money that is also needed for training teachers, buying educational tools and school books, or could even be invested into healthcare or policing. With the information at my disposal I can find no reference to a child being snatched from a school playground, security fences or not. Nor of an author abducting, or doing anything malicious, with a school children at a reading. Should we be spending the public purse to protect our children against this rare, unlikely and unspecified threat? If these precautions should be in place, where does the spending end and common sense say that we have taken all reasonable measures?