Good riddance to the society of suspects

A while back the then goverment passed a bill according to which anyone working with children, including volunteers, part time volunteers, and generally helpers, had to undergo a check with the CRB (Criminal Record Bureau) to prove that they had no convictions for sexual offences.

The present government is proposing to relaxing this law, and the The Independant have an article on that that I find interesting:

"We might be scared, in the abstract, of a paedophile taking advantage of our child, but do we really think that the nice mother of our son's playmate is going to put her hand down his pants during a school trip? Of course not. So why should it ever have been necessary for her to undergo an expensive and intrusive Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) check before she was allowed to give up her free time to help supervise the class on the bus? "

"It is deeply insulting to treat people as potential paedophiles when, out of sheer goodness, they want to help others. At the moment, anyone who has contact with children, even just helping out with football club or arranging the flowers in a cathedral, has to go through the CRB procedure. It was one of the most ill-thought-out and socially damaging laws that the last government brought in. Now, thankfully, the Coalition's Protection of Freedoms Bill will lift the requirement for all but those with "close or regular" contact, taking more than four million volunteers out of the net."

""All men are rapists" was the pernicious slogan of radical feminists in the 1970s. "All adults are paedophiles" has been the governing rule of authority in the past decade. The two assertions are as false as each other and just as damaging, for they fill people with anger, fear and corrosive suspicion.

Society can't function without trust. Nor can individuals. As the sociologist Niklas Luhmann reminded us: "A complete absence of trust would prevent [one] even getting up in the morning." We generally assume that the commuter standing next to us on the platform won't push us in front of the train, or that the shopkeeper on the corner will give us the right change. A few paranoiacs have acute suspicion as their default, but most of us are more prepared to give the benefit of the doubt to others than we realise."


I see two issues here:

1) Where is the line between protecting children, and insulting everybody?
2) Does a community functions best with trust, or distrust?


http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion...s-2213881.html

A very good post thir, i always thought it was a bloody stupid law. So many people gave up trying to help for free the the last Government shot themselves in the foot.

Regards IAN 2411{lillirose}