By way of a diverting passtime, the popular press likes, every year or so, to play a game called "work the lower orders into a lynch-mob frenzy over paedophiles." It's not a difficult game - in fact, they have never yet lost - but it keeps the editorial staff amused. Thus, we have the usual mobs roaming the worse type of housing estates, daubing paint on the doors of paediatricians and generally making an argument for water cannon and tasers. Now, if the red-top papers are to believed, our schools are currently nothing better than dating agencies for kiddy-fiddlers, with hardly a classroom not occupied by a malicious deviant in a cordouroy jacket with patched elbows scheming to make G.G.Simmons in 2b his personal love-toy. A bit like Belgium in miniature, then.
It's an easy sell: since most of us have more than a few moral blots on our character, we welcome the chance to throw stones at someone "unarguably" worse than ourselves. You may beat your wife after a drink, but at least you ain't a nonce. You might be claiming unemployment benefit from three addresses, or have beaten some bloke unconscious outside the Rat and Parrot at the weekend, or make your living selling pills out back of the Venue, but you ain't no beast.
I am amazed that the British government has, for thirty-odd years, been sensible enough to have a policy where a conviction for sexual offences does not automatically mean a ban for life on teaching. I mean that: amazed. It shows a liberality (stop it, Americans, your version of "liberal" is different from everyone else) of mind and a foolish willingness to touch the third rail that might run to bravery if I thought they ever really considered the consequences of making the call on individual cases themselves. Obviously, no civil servant ever said to them "what a courageous decision, minister."
Clearly, the policy has been a success, too. If any teachers had gone on to abuse those in their care after such a ministerial decision to allow them to work in schools, then you can bet we'd know about it: the papers will have been hunting through their archives for any sniff of recidivism.
I'm not saying those with convictions for child abuse should be allowed to work in schools. But what about someone who has been convicted for, say, the Gillian Taylforth offence of being caught dispensing favours to her boyfriend in a car. These days, you'd be on the sex offenders' register. But is such a woman a danger to kids? Hardly. Similarly, a man caught in a public toilets having sex with another man - I gather it is a popular passtime in some areas - may be in less trouble than a decade ago, but he's still going to get a conviction for a sexual offence and go on the register. Does this mean that his tastes suddenly extend from closeted, middle-aged salesmen called Kevin to little Jennings of the lower third?
And even an offence for having sex with someone under age is not a rock-solid predictor. When I was fifteen, most of the girls in my class seemed to be going out with seventeen or eighteen year-old blokes. No wonder, given the maturity of the average fifteen-year-old boy. Many of those girls had sex, although not as many as would do these days. That would be enough to get the seventeen-year-olds in question, if caught, hauled off to chokey and landed with - at the very least - a caution for sex with a minor. End of teaching career? Even if, as is sometimes the case (and not a million miles away from one of the current tabloid cause celebres), they go on to get married, grow old and have kids together?
Hard cases make bad law. The irresponsibility of the tabloids is understandable: they are malignant gossip-pimps for stupid people. But the Conservatives and Liberals should, if the first had principles and the second a sober leader, be standing alongside Ruth Kelly and supporting her on the general principle, if not on specific cases. But nobody ever won an election by honesty, let alone by taking a complicated position. In fact, merely suggesting that the issue might not be quite such a manichean one is enough to put a dent in your career. So the Daily Star- next to the Daily mail, the worst of all the hate-mongering rags - can continue printing condemnations of intelligent discussion of the topic alongside pictures of a fifteen-year-old singer's breasts.