Protecting children

Protecting children

Lifer Ben Gunn looks at the highly emotive issue of child
protection and calls for more honesty and clarity, along with a national debate free of intervention from the terrible tabloids

A sex offender couldn't write this article without having an accusation levelled against him of being self-serving. As a common-or-garden murderer, without any personal stake, these jottings may just prompt a little more thought.

There are many things that society appears to have a consensus around, and that we should protect our children is quite naturally one of them. You don't see anybody arguing that we shouldn't protect children. So we all agree, and start from the same place on this.

It's at this point that the defining characteristics of what it means to be human go out the window. Reason, coherent thinking, understanding consequences, are all trashed in the rush to shout ‘protect the kids’. The problem is, in the cause of protecting kids a fair number of people talk utter crap, and in their mindless banner-waving they actually put children at risk. Mindless hatred makes a terrible basis for public debate and an even worse basis for making law.

Honesty and clarity should be the call of the day. Identify the problem, measure it, define it, and then address it. This isn't rocket science. But we are all too ready to support morons who burn out paediatricians - it’s a lot easier than looking at uncomfortable truths. Finding a bogeyman and kicking him is great popular entertainment, true, but lets not substitute it for a little brain power and honesty.

Just an aside - people seem to take a lot of children on anti-paedo marches, even dressing them up with sloganising t-shirts. This strikes me as being in extremely poor taste at best - if the kids don't yet know about paedophiles then leave them that innocence. Don't sit them down and explain the horrors, or expose them to mass hatred. It just strikes me as being rather a funny way of protecting kids.

Now some unfortunate truths. The group of people most at risk of being killed are those under the age of one. Not the
pensioners. Not even the dreaded hoodie generation. No, out of all, it’s the little rug-rat who is far more likely to be murdered. Here's the important point - about 5 kids a year are killed by strangers; the figure has been constant for decades. All the rest - scores of them - are killed by their parents or others known to them. Forget walking home from school down dark alleys as being risky; the really dangerous bit is when you go through your own front door.

Now, if we are going to put child protection at the top of the list, instead of just shouting about it we would have to recognise that the mad crowd who went on the rampage through Portsmouth, goaded on by the News of the World, contained far more child killers than they were looking for.

Uncomfortable business this child protection isn't it? The reality is a lot more difficult than the popular bogeyman. If we were to pass laws based on this reality, we would save a lot more kids if people were banned from having children unless they were passed as being acceptable parents. If we get that risk assessment right, then we would save the lives of dozens of kids a year.
But we don't even consider the option. Not even the loudest, maddest protestor would suffer being assessed to see if he was a risk to his own kids. It is much easier to see the danger ‘out there’, the bush-lurker, the playground loiterer. It is easier to look at the News of the World than it is to look in the mirror, to look at the people you work and drink with. People just don't like the truth; no matter how much they shout about child protection, they don't want it to affect themselves, no matter how many kids it saves.

Now, sex offenders. The popular mind (such as it is) has it that these people are incurable and unstoppable, short of castration or death. An awful lot of laws are now based on this collective delusion - because it just isn't true. Worse, the perpetual hyping-up of ‘stranger danger’ is to take attention away from the real dangers. Another aside - why does the attention always focus on the school playground? It conjures up visions of perverts sweeping through the school gates, grabbing a young child under each arm and making off like a rugby international. I have never heard of anything remotely like it happening. Ever.

If anything, kids are safest in the school yard. Because over 90 per cent of abusers are known to the victim, being either family or friends of the family. Again, the danger comes from entering your own front door, not playing in the streets unsupervised.

As for their rates of reoffending, hold onto your hats. Sex offenders have the second lowest rate of reoffending, after lifers: about 14 per cent, with only one in five of those being related to kids. Whilst the popular conception has it that as soon as the prison gates are open they are off to buy a ski-mask and a bag of sweets, the reality is chronically different.

And I still can't get my head around the fact that of new sex offences committed by ex-prisoners, the overwhelming majority are committed by those not previously convicted of a sex crime.

This tends to make you question the whole ‘lock them up for life’ bit. The burglars and blaggers on the landing are more likely to engage in ‘noncing’ on release than the nonces are. If we were to take child protection seriously, then it is the nonces who should get parole and the blaggers kept in forever.

Weird, isn't it, how some solid truths can undermine so many of our dearly held conceptions around our efforts in child protection. As I started off pointing out that we all agree child protection is a good thing, I want to end by wondering how many people now think the current efforts are misplaced and silly, and do more harm to kids than good. We really do need to have a national debate, but not one whose terms are dictated by the terrible tabloids. Child protection is a good thing - so when are we going to get it?

• Ben Gunn is currently resident in HMP Shepton Mallet