Vetting: Josie Appleton speech

This is a speech given by Josie Appleton, convenor of the Manifesto Club, at the Manifesto Club event, 'Checkmate: Has vetting gone too far?'.

People often say that we need mass CRB checks of adults working with children because ‘you wouldn’t want a child abuser teaching your child football, would you?’. They say that the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act – which will put 10 million adults on a database, and subject them to continuous criminal records monitoring – is necessary.

Of course you wouldn’t want a paedophile teaching your kids football; and you wouldn’t want a lawyer who was a crook, or dangerous murderers roaming the streets. Pedophilia is both a psychological disorder and a crime, and as with every crime, there should be a set of social policies geared towards keeping dangerous individuals away from those they could harm.

But that is not what vetting is. Vetting – as with all child protection policy now - as a policy does not target problem individuals, or abnormal problem behaviour. Instead, vetting is about the regulation and monitoring of ordinary, everyday interactions between adults and kids.

A targeted approach to paedophilia would be based on things such as offender management – ensuring that known paedophiles do not work in particular jobs, for example, or improving diagnosis and treatment of paedophilia. Or it might involve improving the reporting of abnormal behaviour - for example, saying to children, ‘if somebody behaves in this way, tell an adult’.

But in the case of vetting, the thing that determines whether somebody is a potential risk to children, and whether they should be monitored and put on a database, is the simple fact that they have a relationship with children. The question asked is, do they have ‘Access to children’?; have they built up a ‘relationship of trust’ with a child? Here we see how the very fact that an adult has a relationship with children triggers the government bureaucracy into action. It is the fact that children are in your care, repeatedly, that flags you up as somebody needing monitoring.

Your level of potential risk depends on the degree of your relationship. So the more often you meet with children, and the more they are in your care, the more you need to be on the database. You have to be on the database by law if you work or volunteer with children more regularly than once a month, or for more than three days in a row. In terms of paedophile management, these are arbitrary measures – there is no reason why a twisted individual couldn’t attack kids he was seeing once every two months, for example. These measures only make sense as an index of a relationship: they identify a ‘relationship of trust’ with the potential to abuse.

The figure of the paedophile exists at the back of our minds now. These are less real problem individuals, who need to be dealt with by social policy, but are instead are largely figures of our imaginations. The paedophile that we talk about all the time is really a metaphor, which expresses the way in which our everyday actions and relationships have become contaminated. The figure of the paeodphile starts to exist at the back of everybody’s mind, as an expression of bad faith.

We know this because of the way that ordinary behaviour has become unacceptable. Taking photos at a nativity play. Looking at a children’s playground. Touching a child’s shoulder. These are normal things for adults to do. It is normal for adults to like children, to find them endearing and to enjoy their company – yet these normal acts of caring have themselves become suspicious. As the part of child protection policy now, we don’t take photos, we don’t touch children, we look away when we walk past a playground.

The self-justification is interesting here. A violin teacher explained to me why he no longer touched a child arm to improve their bow-hold: it was, he said, because somebody else could take advantage of the opportunity of touching child’s arm. His concern was that somebody else could act in the same way as him, but do so with ill intent. He could not see that this was not about that person, but about him; he was expressing an attitude towards own actions, and seeing them as potentially sordid and malevolent.

There is a sense that all adults are a bit contaminated, something like an original sin. And official monitoring is the form that absolution takes, the way in which we are absolved of potential bad faith, and declared safe.

This explains the irrational degree of faith loaded on to CRB checks. People say, ‘have you been checked?’, or, proudly, ‘I have been checked’. The simple and dull act of going through police files is invested with all kinds of meaning. If you are checked, you are declared a good and pure individual. When people say, ‘I am checked’, they mean, ‘I am clean’.

This new government database is a step on from old CRB checks. Because the CRB check is only good on the day it is done. So you need repeat checks to reassure; some organisations declare a check invalid if it was done three weeks ago.

Under the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act, you will be on the database and will be checked all the time. This is akin to continual absolution, perhaps something like joining a church. In fact, ministers describe someone who is on the database as being ‘part of the scheme’. The only safe adult is one who has submitted to monitoring; the only safe relationship is one mediated through the authorities and officialdom.

People start to reach for official sanction, to declare themselves okay, or to declare their relationships okay. You see examples of this everywhere. One photographer for a local newspaper told me that he always went out now with a reflective vest and official card. Not that these performed any function – he brought the reflective vest himself - but they seemed to give him permission to be there. The safe adult is the adult with official permission.

If you look at the CRB check ‘scandals’, these are not normally about dodgy behaviour: they involve unmoderated, spontaneous social contact. The press makes a big fuss about ‘CRB loopholes’, reporting stories such as, ‘50 teachers in Wales have been teaching for a year and they are not checked!’ Other stories feature undercover reporters walking through a school unchecked, and the scandal is that they are not checked and can walk through a school. They did not write a story saying, ‘I abducted a child, and nobody noticed’; what they say is, ‘I walked through a school, and nobody checked me out. I had “access to children”, and nobody asked for my pass’.

Policies such as vetting can go along with less attention being paid to the monitoring of problem individuals. There have been a number of cases of information about recently released paeodphiles not being entered on to the correct database. These tasks would have taken somebody a few hours to carry out. When vetting is rolled out even more, it is quite possible that there will be less effective offender management of those who are actually a risk.

If a fraction of the money invested in mass vetting were put into targeted social policy, children would probably be a lot safer. And, equally importantly, they would enjoy freer and richer relationships with the adults around them; adults who have so much to offer and teach them.