Our government has no monopoly on stupid:
In a stunningly misguided program implemented by the British government, all children’s book authors who visit schools must register with a national database intended to protect children from pedophiles, and they must pay a fee to do so. Beginning October 12, 2009, the Vetting and Barring Scheme (VBS) will require that all adults who work with children, including authors such as J.K. Rowling and Philip Pullman if they make special visits to schools, will be required to register with the database for a fee of £64 ($105).
The Independent reports that as a result, several well-known authors will boycott schools in protest of the requirement. Philip Pullman, Anne Fine, Anthony Horowitz, Michael Morpurgo, and Quentin Blake have all publicly stated that they object to having their names listed in the database. Pullman, author of the popular fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials, called the policy “corrosive and poisonous to every kind of healthy social interaction.” He eloquently adds, “This reinforces the culture of suspicion, fear and mistrust that underlies a great deal of present-day society. It teaches children that they should regard every adult as a potential murderer or rapist.”
They should fix that with an amendment. It’s profoundly insulting to ask the authors of children’s books to pay to have their names listed in a potential pedophile database.
It’s pretty insulting to teachers and administrators, too. The whole law seems dumb to me.
and why would it be necessary? Don’t students have teachers to protect them? Speakers aren’t usually allowed unsupervised interaction with children. Ridiculous.
Excellent point!
But wait! Shouldn’t teachers be required to register? I mean, who has more contact with more students than the teachers do?!
They should have started by banning children from visiting the House of Lords.
At least it will keep the clerics out. So I guess we don’t have to worry about it here.
Wow, this is the kind of thing I expect here, not across the pond.
Actually, this strikes me as a pretty typical British moral panic. I started reading The Guardian in the wake of 9/11 — it was the only way I could get English-language news that wasn’t filtered by BushCo — and my general impression since then is that the only western democracy with a government worse than ours and a general public more paranoid than ours is the United Kingdom.
I think Americans tend to think of Britain in outdated terms of Winston Churchill and Alistair Cooke instead of Tony Blair and Jade Goody. Britain’s not all bad, any more than America is, but it’s not all that great, either.
Wow, this sounds like it has all the makings of a primo cause celebre for the next wing-nut freak out on this side of the pond. After all, it has sex, involves the creative class (which is almost always, of course, full of nutty liberals) and feeds off of fear, suspicion and presumptions of guilt without charge. These are all of the things which are central to right wing outrage.
Maybe Palin will use an issue such as this as a platform to launch her 2012 campaign.
“Save us from all the evil, liberal, pedophile authors of children’s books!!”
You betcha!! (wink, wink).
Ignoring, of course, that statistically, the REAL danger of sexual abuse directed towards children is far more likely to come from members of their own family, or trusted family friends (which sadly, sometimes includes clergy), people with whom the child has some kind of relationship and whose authority the child is not in a position to ignore or avoid — NOT from casual contacts like guest speakers at school.
But that’s a topic No One Talks About — either here or in Britain. It’s very hard to break through the wall of family sovereignty — the personal rights of a family to handle internal dynamics and child-rearing as the parents see fit.
It’s much easier to impose rules and database listings on employees and visitors to schools.
Check out the books of Alice Miller (Swiss psychoanalyst) who eloquently makes the same points you do. She deserves a Nobel Peace prize for her courageous and wonderful work.
The panic is much worse than that: Parents banned from sports day over paedophile fears. Originally from Free Range Kids.