QotD: Trust

We grown-ups, however public-spirited, are all now assumed guilty until proved innocent.

As a result, adults are being deterred from offering to help with children. The Girl Guides and Scouts are chronically short of volunteers: the Guides have a waiting list of 50,000, the Scouts 30,000, and some parents have resorted to signing their children up at birth. These checks will reveal not just convictions, but also offences of which people were accused but not convicted. This could wreck the lives of adults who have been falsely accused. [. . .]

One of the nicer aspects of being a child used to be the random acts of kindness offered by adults outside the family: the friendly shopkeeper who ruffled your hair and gave you a sweet; the enthusiastic PE coach who gave up time after school to help with your gymnastics and was constantly — and wholly innocently — adjusting your body position to get the moves right. These adults were generous with their time and their affection. We knew who the pervs were and took pains to avoid them.

Now all adults are deemed to be perverts unless they can prove that they are not. Most will now avoid contact with other people's children and will refrain from touching them for fear of the action being misconstrued.

Mary Ann Sieghart, "The Bill that will kill trust between the generations", TimesOnline, 2006-10-19