Mass vetting

Josie Appleton on why it is important Philip Pullman's and other children's authors refusal to submit to the exhaustive vetting of their criminal records to give talks to schools in the UK:

For these adult volunteers, as for Pullman and fellow children’s authors – including Anne Fine and Michael Morpurgo – the demand that they be police-checked to have contact with children is intrusive and insulting. The vetting database is an instrument of bad faith: it assumes that everybody is tainted as a paedophile, unless proven otherwise. Only by being on a state database are we deemed purified; that is, authorised as ‘safe adults’.
The main result of mass vetting is to turn good people away from helping children: it breeds suspicion and erodes the informal relationships that are so key to children’s happiness (and indeed, their protection). As Pullman says, mass vetting ‘corrupts a child’s view of the world’, making children think that ‘the basic mode is not of trust but suspicion… It assumes that the default position of one human being to another is predatory rather than kindness.’ What kind of adultDisplay Optionss will these children become?

Unfortunately, I think it is going to be increasingly impossible for Appleton's points to be heard (I agree with her) because we live in times where suspicion is a prized skill and where trust is considered naïve. We live in a age where paranoia is reassuring and even heart-warming because it gives us the sense that we have safe-proofed our environment and prepared for every possible threat.