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Paranoia is labelling every man a pervert
• I am a man of 62 with grown-up children, (but no grandchildren), and the other day I was standing overlooking a supervised children’s playground and enjoying very much watching them at play, which I hadn’t done for years, when, after about 10 minutes or so, a playground attendant came out of the school, and when she saw me she came over and asked: “Are you the father of one of these kids?” when I said “No” she told me to leave.
I said I wouldn’t go, so she called the headmaster who came to me and said, quite pleasantly, that they were under instructions from the police to eject people, and that they were obliged to call the police if I didn’t leave.
I left. If I had stayed, and the police were called, my name then could be on a register of “possible pervert suspects” at the best, or maybe worse.
Now I have a tainted feeling; it’s as though I cannot look at children innocently because I have the ‘thought police’ implanted in my head, and if I do it again I will become a ‘serial offender’.
This is not right surely? My friends and peers who have grandchildren tell me that it is one of the greatest satisfactions of their lives to enjoy the innocence of youth now that they are older, so much more than when they were the parents of youngsters, with all its attendant responsibilities.
This raises two questions for me. One is the traditional right of an individual being judged innocent until shown to be guilty, and the other is the right of children to be protected.
Under the present climate of political paranoia it is deemed acceptable by some people to label others as ‘subversive’ and then incarcerate them without trial, or to have ‘trial by media’ and then convict them by hysteria.
In Portsmouth a few years ago a paediatrician was hounded by an ignorant mob who thought that it meant the same as paedophile.
Children most definitely need protecting from abuse and, as is generally known, most abuse comes from the ‘carers’; parents, relatives, friends of the family and officials in locum parentis, not ‘dirty old men’.
Does that mean you should suspect every parent who stands at the school gate, or every teacher and playground attendant? The Soham murderer was a school caretaker.
I accept that there are a few real paedophiles around, and I’m sure that if they returned to the playground they would be recognised quite easily and then dealt with, but this is no reason to assume that any person who stands watching children is one, just because he is male and over 60.
David Chambers
Cleve Road, NW6
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