Listen to thisScotland's Children's Commissioner, Kathleen Marshall, commissioned a piece of research, published this month, into people’s views of volunteering to work with children. Not surprisingly the research discovered that there is a reluctance to volunteer, especially amongst men, due to the fear of being subject to an allegation of abusing a child.
One of the things that annoys me is that many of those who are beginning to recognise that there might be a problem in this area are those very moral entrepreneurs, the children's charities and advocacy groups who have been instrumental in creating the culture of fear that governs current relationships between children and adults.
Casting the veil of suspicion over those who give of their time to work with kids is one of the most distasteful manifestations of the small minded misanthropy of our current political climate.
Despite that veil of suspicion it never ceases to amaze me just how many people still do volunteer to work with kids. My own kids' upbringing would have been so less rich had it not been for drama groups, football clubs, athletics clubs and organisations such as The Scouts. The founder member and Director of my daughter’s children's theatre group died over the summer. Around 600 turned up at his funeral, many of them adults who as kids were given the chance to strut their stuff on stage in the groups' biannual productions. Attendance was free and inclusive. Many of those kids lacked confidence and a number more lacked structure in their lives. The theatre group gave them both. Peter, the Director, was a big man, a man of substance, who looked and laughed at the petty regulations of the child protection lobby – and who, in so doing made a tremendous difference to the lives of hundred's of kids.
I know too the time that can be taken up taking boys' football teams – in many cases this can be the equivalent of a part-time job. The time commitment is compounded by the petty bureaucracy and regulation that has crept in over recent years. We need paperwork for everything – would be coaches even need job descriptions these days. And they wonder why people are put off.
Some of my academic work begins to identify a significant philosophical problem in attempts to regulate volunteering to the extent it now has been. It is summed up in the work of the social theorist Zygmunt Bauman who says, essentially, that once we surround ideas of care and of reaching out to the other with procedures and regulations we begin to erode the moral essence of care.
For my part I have a couple of suggestions: firstly that those who would seek to impose their will on those who wish to volunteer or work with kids should only achieve voting rights to do so only when they can claim to have hung around dingy and draughty church halls of an evening or spent their Sunday mornings on cold, windswept sports fields. They might really earn their spurs by removing the dog dirt from the pitches in advance of the game.
My second proposal is that we put half of the money currently put into child protection and regulation into providing good quality playing fields and premises for youth groups. I suspect it would be a far more effective use of money.
I can but dream; my fear is that in the name of protecting children the policy wonks who currently control the agenda won’t be stopped until they've eroded people’s goodwill and trust altogether.
