ACCORDING TO the Government, the total number of potentially dangerous perverts and other “unsuitable individuals” in need of vetting is up to 9.5 million people. And it has the nerve to accuse the media of stoking up a panic about paedophile teachers.

As a parent (the magic word to gain entry to this debate), I want to see my children protected against an atmosphere of fear and mistrust in which it is assumed that anybody who wants to work with kids must be suspect. But institutionalising a perverse attitude to adult-child relations now seems to be government policy.

Some of the key measures announced by Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary, yesterday simply bring forward the Government’s planned response to Sir Michael Bichard’s inquiry into the Soham murders of 2002. These were set out last year in documents such as Making Safeguarding Everybody's Business: a Post-Bichard Vetting System — a semi-literate title that points to other pressing problems in our education system. But the message was clear enough.

The streamlined vetting and barring scheme for those working with children or “vulnerable adults” is intended to cover up to eight million teachers, school caretakers, dinner ladies, lollipop persons, nurses, doctors, nannies, childminders, home tutors, social workers, sports instructors, priests, policemen and care workers, along with another 1.5 million less obvious jobs such as hospital cleaners and catering staff. If you deal with children on the phone or the internet, volunteer to run a sports club, or supervise after-school shelf-stackers in a supermarket, you will come under official suspicion.

The documents spell out how the vetting system will be extended to cover not only those who work with children, but also anybody “whose work offers them the opportunity for regular contact or places them in a position of trust in relation to children”. So the message is: trust nobody because anybody could be looking for an opportunity to make contact with your children.

But why stop there? Why not vet all the bus drivers, shopworkers and cinema ushers too? Given that this vetting frenzy began with the Soham murders, it is worth reminding the authorities that Ian Huntley, the school caretaker who killed two ten-year-old girls, made contact with his victims through his girlfriend’s job as their classroom assistant. So shouldn’t we vet the near and dear of those 9.5 million adults as well? And why exclude other children’s parents from the surveillance? After all, we often trust them to supervise our children alone.

The new vetting system will also rely on “soft” intelligence. The Department for Education proposals talk about using police information on “convictions, cautions, reprimands, warnings and allegations”, as if these were all the same thing. The distinction between a criminal conviction and an unsubstantiated allegation might once have been thought of as a foundation of justice. Now it is looked upon as a loophole, along with that other “licence for perverts ”, the presumption of innocence.

If this continues who is going to become a teacher or work with children? Already, as I witnessed recently, a football coach is not allowed to put a plaster on a child’s cut leg, never mind give him a hug. And the Scout Association has announced that 30,000 wannabe Scouts are being kept out by a shortage of adult volunteers willing to run the risks of being in charge of children.

Our children’s future is at greater risk from educating them in this mean spirit of suspicion than from the possible presence in the classroom of a few teachers with an unhealthy interest in boys’ underpants. We should recognise that no bureaucratic system can guarantee absolute protection. But we can do serious harm by trying to impose one.

Ms Kelly’s defenders claim that she has been the victim of a media witch-hunt and a national mob mentality. Do me a favour. The Government has done more than anybody to lay the basis for these periodic paedophile panics. Yet its critics claim that new Labour has still not gone far enough in spreading the net. Who will vet the vetters? The idiots who daubed “Paedo” on the house of a paediatrician are not the only ones in danger of losing the distinction between those who are after our children, and those who look after them.

Mick.Hume@spiked-online.com

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