Free Britain

Source: Telegraph.

Christopher Hope

(Extract)

A quarter of the adult population faces an “anti-paedophile” test in an escalation of child protection policies, according to a report.

The launch of a new Government agency will see 11.3million people vetted for any criminal past before they are approved to have contact with children aged under 16.

But the increase in child protection measures is so great it is “poisoning” relationships between the generations, according to respected sociologist Professor Frank Furedi.

In a report for think tank Civitas, he said the use of criminal records bureau checks to ensure the safety of children and vulnerable adults has created an atmosphere of suspicion.

As a result ordinary parents – many of whom are volunteers at sports and social clubs – now find themselves regarded “potential child abusers”.

From next year the new Independent Safeguarding Authority will require any adult who come into contact with children or vulnerable adults either through their work or in voluntary groups to be vetted.

But Prof Furedi’s report, Licensed to Hug, highlighted examples of when adult-child relationships were distorted by the need for CRB checks already being required by schools and other organisations.

In one example, a woman could not kiss her daughter goodbye on a school trip because she had not been vetted.

In another, a mother was surprised to be told by another parent that she and her husband were “CRB checked” when their children played together.

In a third example, a father was given “filthy looks” by a group of mothers when he took his child swimming on his own in “a scene from a Western when the room goes silent and tumbleweed blows across the foreground”.

Prof Furedi, the author of a book called “Paranoid Parenting”, said there was a trend to treat parenthood as a “professional endeavour that demanded increasing regulation and monitoring”.

Prof Furedi said that CRB checks did not “provide anything like a cast-iron guarantee that children will be safe with a particular adult”.

“All it tells us is that the person has not been convicted of an offence in the past,” he said.

Figures show that volunteering is on the decline with 13 per cent of men saying they would not volunteer because they were worried people would think they were child abusers, according to a survey last year.

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