Kiss goodbye to innocence

India Knight, The Sunday Times, July 16, 2006

[A lone peck on the forehead]

The insane, PC paranoia about "inappropriate" touching of children has gathered such momentum that last week a 58-year-old vicar called Alan Barrett resigned from the board of governors of William MacGregor primary school in Staffordshire because he'd given a 10-year-old girl a lone peck on the forehead during the course of publicly congratulating her for improving at maths.

Barrett, who is married and has three grown-up children, was threatened with charges of common assault after the incident, following a complaint from the child's mother. He was also subjected to an informal investigation by his diocese.

The police and the social services eventually concluded that Barrett had no case to answer. The diocese found his behaviour had been "inappropriate in today's climate" but did not warrant any disciplinary action. Barrett nevertheless resigned as chairman of governors at the school, following advice from his archdeacon.

"I have discussed the issues with my archdeacon and agreed that one cannot be too careful," said Barrett. "Giving a child a kiss of congratulations is inappropriate in this day and age."

The child's mother, meanwhile, declared herself "disappointed" with the decision that Barrett had no case to answer.

"I'd like him to be removed from his position," she said.

[Incredible, depressing]

I find this whole story incredible -- or rather, I would if variants on it weren't so depressingly commonplace. A friend was watching her daughter's end-of-term play last week and was surprised to be told, by a contrite-seeming head, that parents weren't allowed to take photographs of the performance -- not because children might be distracted by flashing lights, but because, though it wasn't spelt out as concisely as this, any paedophiles sitting in the audience might use said photographs for sinister purposes.

All touching, it appears, has become "inappropriate"

Blanket rules apply, and there is no differentiation between a lovely hug and a grotesque grope. Call me old-fashioned, but I like to imagine that people who choose to teach young children do so because they like them, not because they want to have sex with them.

If you like children, being physically demonstrative is second nature -- a pat on the head here, a hug there, taking a sad child onto one's lap to read him or her a story. 

Why ban it, or create a moral climate in schools and nurseries that is so morally unhealthy and fearful that teachers are stopped from offering comfort, and children are brought up in the kind of environment where innocent physical contact with adults is somehow seen as dubious from the start? What kind of warped lesson does that teach them?

[Dirty-minded] 

What is especially unpleasant about all of this is that it is so foully dirty-minded. A sane society does not equate a noble profession such as teaching with paedophilia. We all understand adults have a moral responsibility towards children in their care, and we painstakingly educate our children to be wary of strangers.

I personally think that even this has got completely out of control, and that even very young children are taught to be paranoid about perfectly benign adults waving at them in the park. Because the point, surely, is that the vast majority of people are kind, not predatory. Why reward them for their kindness by making them feel like "inappropriate" freaks?

As a child, I was told never to accept sweeties or lifts from strange men in cars, and to get away from any adult that made me feel uncomfortable. I was told this, if I remember correctly, at least once but no more than three times during my childhood. It was plenty.

Also, what with one thing and another, I went to a dozen or so schools. Some were nicer than others, but I can honestly say there was no question, ever, of any teacher behaving in an inappropriate way. Even at one school, where we had quite a tactile games mistress who liked supervising showers and (unbelievably) had the authority to perform "knicker checks", ie, to ask for physical proof that we were wearing our regulation school underwear.

Today, she'd probably be disgraced and banned from teaching forever, and we'd all be offered counselling because we were victims of "abuse". At the time, she merely struck us as peculiar and mildly annoying. Which is all she was.

[(Im)moral climate]

And if the moral climate had been as it is now during my upbringing, there wouldn't be a single boys' public school or Oxbridge college left standing. Can you imagine? Fagging? "Artistic" young masters encouraging people to read Oscar Wilde? Winsome dons with their little coteries of boys? 

But none of this did anybody any harm. It broadened the mind -- at a time when, frankly, a lot of the minds in question needed broadening -- and conveyed to us that there are all sorts of people in the world with whom coexistence is possible.

One last point: 

Where children have been victims of abuse, the idea that nobody is allowed to touch them ever again seems to me very odd. Surely it would make more sense to teach such children there is such a thing as "good" and safe touching as well as "bad" touching -- instead of banning touching altogether?