The combination of…

1. The frankly demented ‘twisted knicker’ PC brigade
2. The government ‘big nanny’ penchant for rash and clumsy legislation against us all when one person crosses the line
3. Big Nanny’s eager beaver police force
4. A rotten to the core tabloid media that accuses and asks questions later

has got us all so worked up and suspicious of other people’s motives that, when around children, we no longer act like responsible adults.

I recently drove my wife to an appointment and said I’d sit in the car and read and wait. The house she visited was directly opposite a children’s playground in a small park and I wondered how long I could sit there before a police car would roll up behind me having been told that a paedophile was ‘watching the little kiddies’. Paranoia perhaps, but I still recall a neighbour being dragged into a police car in handcuffs after a niece, maliciously as it turned out, accused him of ‘touching her’.

Dr Heather Piper has recently completed a research project for the Economic and Social Research Council. Looking at six case-study schools, Piper and her colleagues conducted interviews with teachers, parents and children on the rights and wrongs of touch. You can find a detailed review of this study at Sp!ked.

The report covers such cases as:

the teacher who avoided putting a plaster on a child’s scraped leg; nursery staff calling a child’s mother every time he needed to go to the toilet; a male gym teacher leaving a girl injured in the hall while he waited for a female colleague.

She certainly unearthed a number of mad stories. Nursery workers wearing plastic gloves for changing nappies, even though the gloves tore on the nappies’ sticky tabs. A school sending a set of ‘touching guidelines’ to parents for consultation, including the specification that teachers wouldn’t put a plaster on a child without parents’ permission. Staff at one school keeping an account of every ‘touching incident’ (‘We write down a short account and date it and put which staff were present and at what time, we then explain it to the parent and ask them to read and sign it’), more as if they were keeping police logs than teaching children.

Piper’s work gets inside the mentality of today’s risk culture, and captures the crazy contortions that sensible people are ending up in. She says that the anxiety about touching children is now ‘mainstream’. ‘Even schools that said, “this isn’t a problem, we’re touchy feely” – we found that they were panicking.

The normal, everyday interactions between adults and children are being viewed as poisonous. Decent and competent child professionals end up watching each other and themselves for signs of suspicious behaviour, a situation that Piper describes as a ‘perfect panopticon’.

Piper is concerned, that this adult behaviour is actually depriving children of the emotional tools they will need as they grow. She is absolutely right. Children need adult contact. They sometimes need cuddles. Many of them, sadly, don’t even get this at home any more.

And it begs the question that is the title of this item. What kind of damaged adults are we raising?