“Let’s see here – is Mr. Stross here a convicted paedophile? Well, he’s alive, so I guess not. You pass, congratulations sir!”

Paedophilia is problematic. The effects of it are fully and immediately evident in the wake of a physical assault – groping / rape / whatever – the victim feels instantly as if their ability to control their environment has been torn away, and the permanence of that can vary according to the situation.

Undergoing funny strips and touches in the gym by phys.ed. teachers also impacts, but not necessarily as quickly. The individuals realise what was happening at a certain stage in their growth, and a hole emerges in their self-confidence.

It’s all bad, and I live to see around me the few victims I am aware of, and the utterly devastating impact it has had on their capability to live happy, fruitful lives. They don’t have that capability. Traumatic events as adults can possibly be managed, but as children, the fertile fears and anxieties creep around the personality rendering the entirety fragile and angry. It’s kind of irrecoverable.

Teaching assertion has an amazing effect: kids become more confident, and in the event of any difficulties, the perp. can be so taken aback that they retire from their intentions completely.

Martial arts can be useful – buys time to get away. Of course, a 7 year old can’t make a KO blow, but they can poke someone hard in both eyes.

The trouble with all of this database mallarkey is opportunism. It leaks out of the box. That’s why being careful with kids and knowing their associates, maintaining awareness and giving them self-determination is so important.

Opportunism, and collections of organised paedophiles. They are extremely dangerous, and tend to migrate to child-caring areas.

In a group of six women friends discussing safeguarding children from harm in a faith group, all but one had multiple experiences of sexual abuse in their childhoods. I do not think figures are exagerrated. Ask any group of females in a trusted group of friends, and they will report the same. I have friends who were assaulted by the relatives of friends, and random strangers.

The lie that most sexual abuse is perpetrated within the family is what leads most people to doubt the figures: most general abuse and neglect is perpetrated within the family, but only 3% of sexual abuse is perpetrated by blood relations.

Most sexual abuse is perpetrated by people known to the victim and not strangers, but it is just the not-a-stranger-but-not-related people like workers or visitors to schools, parents of friends, neighbours and casual acquaintances who are likely to be the perpetrators.

I want children to be protected from abusers, but the current CRB checks and the more stringent checks sugesed for authors, seem completely over the top… particularly since they treat women and men as equally risky. The truth is that although examples exist of sexual abuse of children by women, they are incredibly rare. Most sexual abuse is perpetrated by men.

Someone in the comments said that it hasn’t yet got to the point where parents have to be screened to go into class, but that is exactly where it has got to in the UK. If a mother who is known to the school and the children, and is statistically very, very, unlikely to be sexually abusing children, has to be checked in order to go into school and help with a jumble sale, it seems unlikely that Phillip Pullman, who is a man and therefore statistically far more risky for a school, will get away with not being checked.

I think the major risk of the system is that it is wasteful, in that you need multiple CRB checks for multiple organisations, you can’t be checked by one and have that apply to all instances where you have contact with children, and that it provides a false sense of security. Most people who sexually abuse children are not caught, and of those that are prosecuted, few are convicted.

In any case, if someone is so divorced from morality to be able to sexually abuse children, it seems unikely that they would baulk at providing false information for their CRB check. These measures will merely prevent those who have are known to have offended from working with children… and even that isn’t absolutely sure, if they have indeed changed area or name.

My feeling is that we are afraid to face up to the reality of sexual abuse of children and really examine what it tells us about our society, preferring knee-jerk, bureaucratic solutions which can be pointed to as evidence that something is being done, rather than actually putting effort into discovering the root of the problem of sexual abuse and solving that.

1. As a long time developer of billing systems and rating engines for the fixed and mobile phone markets let me point out the accuracy issue regarding the automatic capture (i.e., no typing involved) and calculation of data. It is known by all telecom watchdogs that at BEST a phone bill is +/- 4% accurate. Over time it tends to balance out to this figure.

2. On a large manual data input project involving millions of personal records and using the BEST copy typists available (budget was a limiting factor here – this is an important note) we were looking for 98% accuracy. We considered ourselves LUCKY when (through random sampling analysis) we achieved 91.7%. These were the customer data records of their bank details that could not be electronically transferred.

Try this exercise: Take the lead story from a newspaper or a single page from a book. WITHOUT correcting your errors, type this out. How accurate were you?

There is also an issue regarding corrupted data that has not been mentioned. All of these add up to a significant margin of error in data accuracy. The greater the number of records, the higher the likelihood of errors.

And what’s wrong with listening to Philip Pullman?

Well, what’s inherently right about listening to him? Arguments to authority aren’t really logically valid: it’s the reasons behind a person’s thinking, their logic, that counts.

Pullman thinks Satan is the hero of Paradise Lost, a fallacy that most Miltonists, and many general readers, would catch. Pullman is also outraged over these laws, which is quite justifiable: they’re over-the-top, ineffective, what everyone’s said above. So he’s right and wrong, just like the rest of us. If ipse dixit doesn’t work for Aristotle anymore, it sure as hell doesn’t work for Pullman.

Rhetorically, though, Pullman does seem to find Evil Authority Figures everywhere.

It seems to be fuelled by the same combination of prurience, sexual fear and cold political calculation

could have been lifted right out of the HDM trilogy, from one of Lord Asriel’s speeches against the Magisterium. Great rhetoric, but like Milton’s Satan–whom Pullman misreads and fetishizes–Pullman’s words seem often as much about Pullman as about their ostensible subject.

/Pullman rant from disgruntled English prof.

That said, these laws are crazy. I’m with Pullman on this one.

The craziest thing is, the area I work in has the longest turn around for CRB checks to come through. Checks lasting over a year are not uncommon.

And during that time, you can’t work. So thanks government!

These days I wouldn’t dare. Even when I was on the way home the other week and my friend called to me from the park where his little daughter was playing, and I went over and hung out with him for a while until it was time to go home (around the corner), I felt nervous. A couple of the other parents gave me (and him) funny looks. We’re too old to be the parents of little kids, you see (even though he really is one) and therefore unless some kid calls us “grandpa” periodically we’re automatically Up To No Good.

Britain really isn’t worth visiting any more. Not because the plus side has decreased, not at all: because the risk and cost are too high. Not enough protection for civil rights, too many cameras, and automatic suspicion if an old bald guy takes delight in the presence of children. I guess we’re supposed to just yell at them to get off the lawn, and that makes us better.

Nuts to you, UK. No, the US isn’t much better, but I’m kinda stuck here.

Consider the incredible evil wrought by the simple: “oh what a good idea; let’s listen to this priest”

I watched the program “Who’s Watching You?” and one town in the UK even had loudspeakers on the cameras so that if you were caught littering the person watching the video from the cameras could yell at you over the loudspeakers and tell you to pick up the litter.

The trick of course is that you don’t want to spook them too much. So you walk slowly and take it in stages. Works every time. Cattle are pretty stupid.

<1% x "Can't visit schools"
>1% x dead/raped/molested/etc

No comparison. The potential harms are simply too great and the potential inconvience is a foolish reason to fail to protect children.

WaveyDave, it’s not a question of how many CRB checks yield false positives; it’s how many “positives” are false.

This is the explanation on the website of the Independent Safeguarding Authority (my bold)

“Following the murders of Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells by Ian Huntley (a school caretaker) in 2002, the Bichard Inquiry was commissioned. One of the issues this Inquiry looked at was the way employers recruit people to work with children and vulnerable adults.

The Inquiry’s recommendations led to the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act 2006, which recognised the need for a single agency to vet all individuals who want to work or volunteer with vulnerable people.

Lest we forget ?

Granted, the background checks are generally one-size-fits-all, although I had to consent to fingerprinting and a background check before temping at a K-12 district in New Jeresey a few years ago.

I believe field trip chaperones are now required to go through a similar screening process.

My parents taught religious ed. at their Catholic church, and were also required to go through the same exact process (although the paranoia in that case has some considerable historical justirication)

I’m generally not one to buy into this sort of hysteria, although it actually does seem at least somewhat justified in this instance. The bureaucratic absurdities present in the proposal need to be eliminated, along with the requirement for one-off visitors to be extensively checked. However, there have been enough cases of abuses in schools to warrant background checks for staff members and regular visitors.