New Labour control freakery endangers children more?

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.