Noted without comment
Marcel Berlins argues that an over-emphasis on child protection can mean that more is loss than gained. Speaking of the safeguarding vulnerable groups bill, he writes:
Its aim, with which I cannot quibble, is to prevent children being abused by adults who have temporary care of them - for example, volunteers who run weekend sports activities, babysitters, or even parents who help out at school functions. Employees who work with children - teachers, for instance - already have to be vetted and have their pasts investigated. The new bill extends vetting to volunteers.
I'm coming on to the nub of my criticism in a moment, but what the woman from the NSPCC said that so disturbed me was that the law was needed "even if it stops one child from being abused or hurt". That shows an attitude of staggering disproportion and tunnel vision. My belief is that, if the bill becomes law, it will hurt many thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of children - though not by way of sexual or physical abuse, which seems to be the only kind of harm the NSPCC considers important. There are others. The law will diminish the lives of children because so many of the adults who were making them happy and enhancing their lives will no longer be there to do so. The trend was already apparent even before the bill. Large numbers of enthusiastic, well-intentioned non-paedophilic adults are no longer prepared to provide their generous volunteer services to run or contribute to children's activities, for fear that some totally innocent gesture or inadvertent contact will be misunderstood and result in appalling personal, social and legal consequences.
[...]
It is the children - many, perhaps most, from deprived areas and communities - who will suffer. Some of them will respond by turning to the very evils that the work of the volunteer adults was steering them away from - drugs, crime, drink. Others may not go that far, but their lives will have become impoverished. And against all that, the woman from the NSPCC asserts that saving just one child from possible abuse (we can never know if it would have happened) is more important.
