Statistics mean sod all, which is a fact in itself. Anyone can assemble some numbers, make them sound threatening, and anyone will believe it.

I have just found an ad for nationalregistry.com to do a Free Registered Sex Offenders Search in my area. Just insert Zip code. The line they’re pushing for you to type in where you live: ‘The chance that your child will become a victim of a sexual offender is 1 in 3 for girls & 1 in 6 for boys’.

Now, I understand that in this extreme PC nanny world that is developing that the term ’sexual offender’ can now mean a very broad variety of things, but seriously…

For example, Santa’s grotto at Christmas in the shopping centre? Ah, that’s thigh-to-minor-buttock contact. He’s a sex offender. If it’s a woman in drag, then it’s a sex offender who’s trying very hard. Your kid’s photo been taken in the extreme left of a picture of a mum playing with her two daughters on a public beach? Dad’s a paedophile and no doubt he’ll be jerking off to the blurry and half-missing image of your child in the left of his family photo.

I did a few weeks work in a secondary school last year, with kids ranging from 11 to 16. During my training, I was told in no uncertain terms that I was never to be alone with any child in a room, ever, and that that was for my protection as much as theirs. I could see their point, as if the kid did decide to make something up, whose word are they going to take? I was also told that if a child fell or cut themself, I was not permitted to make any physical contact and if a plaster was required, I couldn’t put it on. Even if they wanted me to. I could give them the (packaged) plaster and supervise them applying it and then fetch another adult so we could supervise each other in escorting the injured child to the office. That was all.

It’s no stretch of the imagination to think that this has all gone too far. The scenario will no doubt come up (if it hasn’t already) of a child barely escaping being snatched and running to a stranger’s door, pleading to be let in, and the adult turning them away because if they were seen taking a strange child into their house they had a fair chance of being put on the sex offender’s list. If that wasn’t the result, sex offenders frequently have their names and addresses made public during the court case (victims do not) so even if they come out proving their innocence, there is guaranteed to be a few people wondering if the outcome was right and giving them the cold shoulder afterwards.

This is what happens when the media fear-mongers. Ultimately, very little good comes of it, and children are growing up frightened because they have it embedded that the world is a dangerous place and that if they are alone outside for even a moment, they’re going to get attacked.

Once when I was working in a cinema, a boy and a girl came out of a screen and went off to the girl’s toilets. She went in and he waited outside. They were both about eight years old and all the screens were in, so I went over and asked the lad if he was looking for the boys toilets. He told me that he was just waiting for his sister to come out ’so she won’t get raped’. Nothing has put the blood straight into my feet faster than hearing these words of matter-of-fact fear from an eight year old child.

This is not a world I want to bring children into if this is what’s on offer.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 28th, 2008 at 1:24 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.