Crime checks foster suspicion and wreck child-adult relations

However, when community activities – school discos, parent-teacher councils, local sports clubs – require a higher level of security clearance than the selling of explosives or firearms, surely it is time to call a halt to the ever-expanding culture of vetting.

Criminal records vetting was once for a relatively small group of professionals with particular responsibilities, including teachers, lawyers and bankers. Now millions of fathers and mothers need the all-clear before they can go on school trips, become school governors, or volunteer with the local boys' football team.

There has been more than a 100 per cent rise in the annual number of criminal checks issued by the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) since 2002. The Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act, enacted this July, will mean that some nine million adults – one-third of the adult working population – will be registered on a database and subject to ongoing criminal checks.

As head of the civil liberties group the Manifesto Club, I have been running a campaign against the vetting database for the past three years. Over this period, I have noticed a growing public recognition about how the massive expansion of child protection bureaucratic procedures is eroding relationships of trust between adults and children.

Vetting has damaged community relations and activities. Sports clubs have been shut down, foreign exchange trips cancelled, and many would-be volunteers have been put-off from starting new initiatives.

The requirement for state clearance means that events that do go ahead are akin to police operations, with official "safe adults" checking other people's passes at the door.

Rebellions against this child protection bureaucracy are growing. Children's authors including Philip Pullman have said that they will give up talks in schools rather than submit to "insulting" criminal records vetting under the UK's new Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA).

For many adult volunteers, 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 result of mass vetting is to turn good people away from helping children: it breeds suspicion and erodes the informal relationships that are key to children's happiness (and indeed, their protection). As Mr 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 adults will these children become?

These new laws come in under the banner of child protection but they can only cause harm. Child protection depends on the majority of adults looking out for children and being sensitive to their needs.

CRB checks are expensive and ineffective: the money spent on checking mothers and grandmothers would be better spent on pursuing the individuals who actually could be a danger. It is time that we relied more on our own judgments, and halted this poisoning of relationships between the generations.

Josie Appleton is director of the Manifesto Club, and will be talking about vetting at 1pm on 19 March at Dundee University (e-mail N.M.Barton@dundee. ac.uk to book a place).