Thankfully, with or without state attempts to prevent it, horrors such as the Soham murders and mercifully very few and far between. Strangers remain a much smaller source of abuse than people who are known to their victims - usually within families or extended family groups. The more recent case of "Baby P" in Haringey just goes to show how, even with the intense scrutiny of the state child protection apparatus, the worst cannot always be prevented.

But the idea of bureaucratically vetting virtually everyone, even in informal arrangements, who will assist in keeping kids activities going through volunteering to drive their own and their friends' kids to clubs and events and so on seems to me to threaten what must, or at least ought, to be the first line of child protection - friends and local communities.

A quick check on a database is not going to get to the source of abuse, it's just going to make people more suspicious of others. It is the mother who, taking their own child to school or the football match calls in to pick up one of their friends who will notice first a child that is showing signs of stress at home - upset when they leave the house, or upset when it's time to go home. Small character changes over time - maybe more sullen or moody or nervous or tired. All that sort of thing. They may pick up on a bit of yelling. Their own child may be more reluctant to travel with someone else's parent because they're always shouting at the kids and so on.

So, if you are at all nervous about something in your past (whether child related or not - a quarter of the adult population are not going to understand the nuances of what appears on a CRB check and may not want to take the risk), perhaps you decide that if you cannot be part of the match-day lift rota the best thing would be to withdraw your kid from that activity. So fewer and fewer people are in your informal support network, your child gets even more under your feet stuck at home all the time or making particular calls on your time because you're not sharing the burden with anyone else. Well, that's when a short temper might tip over into abuse where it would not have done previously.

You see the problem for me is that we have, over time, put far too much trust in the state to carry the responsibilities that we all, as families and communities, should really bear, and, in fact only can bear - for 200 staff at some government agency (even when augmented by stretched and harassed police or social services departments) cannot possibly build that sort of incidental and pervasive knowledge of all the families in informal community networks.

The fact is, that harassed by the state for the best part of half our labour, harassed by the state's protection of landed interests and the banking cartel making the big ticket items in life so much more expensive than they would be otherwise, we are more and more forced to work so long and so hard that we do not have as much time as we once did for these sort of community networking activities. Yet another example of the state taking away with one hand and then having to go to extraordinary, disproportionate, and I predict ineffectual lengths to try to make up for the consequences of their predation on ordinary people.

This pandering to the "something must be done" culture, is not necessarily about child protection as much as about getting more and more information about people and their networks into central databases. That is how the state, especially the "transformational state" works. And it must be resisted. What "must be done" instead then...

How about instead of all this futile bureaucracy, a "Good Samaritan" law that places a duty on people to act when they see or hear indications that a problem may be developing. Not as snitches necessarily, nor accusatory, but as someone who asks questions when they see a child in distress or behaving unusually, who can offer some support and, if problems don't resolve themselves, then an early intervention from more experienced assistance.

Put a bit of responsibility back onto friends, connections and communities, instead of trying to absolve them of all responsibility - and taking more of their money to do so. They are the only ones who really can logistically do the job.

With the recent wintry weather, the stories have come thick and fast again about how you could be sued if you try and clear a pavement outside your property and someone slips. In Oxfordshire we had the bizarre case of a farmer who, needing to clear the snow to let milk tankers in and so on decided to go the "extra half mile" and snow plough the roads in his local village that were completely neglected by the county forced to focus on "big routes" who was then castigated for not being "qualified" to clear snow.

And yet, we also know that in many other countries it is seen as a civic duty, even on occasions a legal duty, to do what you can to clear snow from the public area around your private property. Between the Health and Safety nazis and insurance companies here we are destroying community self-sufficiency and good neighbourliness in fear of legal repercussions.

And a friend pointed out that in the US (not sure which state or whether it is a federal thing) they have a law they call the "Good Samaritan Law" which effectively pre-emptively removes liability from those who "do the right thing" and help out where they can. In fact it's the same sort of law that makes it a crime in France not to stop and give first aid to someone in need and so on - something else here that is now so circumscribed by health and safety and liability issues that you wouldn't dare touch someone dying in the street without professional indemnity insurance in case you did something wrong an insurance company could get you for.

These Good Samaritan Laws don't excuse people from stupidity - I think if you used hot water to clear snow from the pavement outside your house and it froze into black ice, your stupidity could still be rewarded with liability - but it would remove this paralyzing fear of not helping out "just in case".

Perhaps someone could answer this point of law though - assuming you weren't actually clearing the snow when someone slipped and damaged themselves, presumably their insurance company could not actually definitively say that it was you who cleared the snow. Their first target would presumably be the owner - ie the local authority. It would then be up to the local authority to petition to add you as a co-defendant or similar, no? Does anyone imagine that a council who tried to pass the blame for their own failure to do what they were supposed to be obliged to do - clear their own pavements - would survive terribly long passing that buck to genuine people doing their bit in their neighbourhood?