Dominic Lawson: This child protection hysteria deflects attention from a real, and growing, danger

Sometimes mothers can be so embarrassing. How about Gail Jordan, who asked her local Asda to transfer a photographic print of her son as a five-month-old baby on to a cake for his 21st birthday party?

Asda, however, did not just think this was embarrassing. They thought it was positively sinister, because – shock!horror! – the print revealed the naked bottom of the infant David Jordan. That, of course, was the point of mum's little joke – but it was no laughing matter for the cake censors of the Asda branch in Liscard, Wirral. Ms Jordan was reported in yesterday's newspapers as saying that the supermarket had refused her request, on the grounds that the photo "could be anyone's child, so it could be deemed pornographic".

Ms Jordan further reported that: "In the end they would only do it with a star over his bottom, which to be honest, only made the whole thing even more hilarious." Hilarious, possibly, but it's also very sad that an apparently sensible supermarket should have become so affected by the moral panic over paedophilia that it has lost not just its sense of humour, but all common sense. Asda, for its part, insists that "many other retailers" would have behaved in exactly the same way. That may very well be the case – which only makes it sadder.

Serendipitously, the think-tank Civitas yesterday published Licensed to Hug, by Frank Furedi and Jennie Bristow. If you think Ms Jordan's experience is depressing, be prepared to shed tears over Furedi and Bristow. This is a profoundly depressing account of how – in their words – "child protection policies are poisoning the relationship between the generations and damaging the voluntary sector".

Their report dates the worst of it from 2002, when in the aftermath of the murder of two schoolgirls in Soham by the local school caretaker, it was decided that anyone who works with children in any capacity (even as a volunteer) should have to be vetted through the Criminal Records Bureau. Essentially, every volunteer school tea lady is deemed a potentially murderous paedophile until she has been put through this grinding bureaucratic machinery.

By January 2008, the CRB had issued its 15 millionth "disclosure", at a cost the authors estimate – they say conservatively – of half a billion pounds: this does not even take into account the registration fees which must be paid by the schools, other employers, or the volunteers themselves.

According to the Children's Commissioner, Sir Al Aynsley Green, nearly 50,000 girls are waiting to join the Guides because of a shortage of adult volunteers, which he claims is in part a direct effect of the CRB process. This infernal merry-go-round of paperwork is soon to be expanded still further by the newly-created Independent Safeguarding Authority, which, according to Furedi and Bristow, will require checks covering "over one quarter of the adult population".

Leaving aside the ruinous expense and sheer time involved, this Brobdingnagian vetting process fails on its own terms: it will not – cannot – offer the absolute security which it purports to guarantee. I don't want to add to the already hyperventilated public agitation over paedophilia – far from it – but it's obvious that these checks, even assuming they are perfectly efficient, can neither anticipate future acts of abuse, nor reveal any incident which is not already known to the authorities through a past criminal conviction.

Yet they have increasingly become a sort of badge of reliability and even respectability, taking over from the normal human processes of judgement, intuition and common sense. One parent reported the following incident to Furedi and Bristow, the sort of thing we once might have associated with Romania under Ceausescu: "My daughter is allowed to play out in the streets with kids from the neighbourhood. She said she was going to Semih's house and I said OK. Ten minutes later Semih's mum knocked at the door and said, 'I must introduce myself as we haven't met.' I thought she was going to tell me her name, have a chat, but she said she was CRB checked and her husband was CRB checked and then went away. I still don't know her name!"

As Frank Furedi observes, when parents feel in need of official reassurance that other parents have passed an official paedophile clearance test before they even start on pleasantries, it suggests that something has gone very badly wrong.

I might have found some of the anecdotes in Licensed to Hug incredible – except that, like many parents, I have had experiences which tally all too well with these weird accounts of modern British child-adult relationships, as intermediated by the state.

Until recently my younger daughter attended the local village state primary school. It was a delightful little place in every way, but it felt obliged to follow the rules laid down by the local education authority, designed – I suppose – to remove even the faintest chance that the teachers should be accused of paedophilia.

What this meant was that if my daughter – who is handicapped and then needed help with certain basic requirements – wanted to go to the loo, not one but two teachers had to accompany her. The second, presumably, was to act as witness for the defence should my daughter subsequently declare that she had been molested by teacher number one, while being helped to take down her pants: meanwhile, a class (or two) would go without a teacher.

For similar reasons, on sunny days, we were asked to put on our daughter's anti-sunburn lotion before she left for school in the morning: no teacher could risk putting the lotion on during the heat of the day, lest it seem as though this little girl was being touched "inappropriately".

Ministers and local authorities will claim that their child protection policies are based on the need to reassure the public in the wake of one or two isolated horrors, such as at Soham, which have gripped the popular imagination; but I wonder if there isn't a completely different reason.

In general – and to a large extent due to the breakdown in traditional family structures – the lives of many of our children have become completely chaotic. Some of that chaos is manifested in underage sex among the children themselves; but it is also true that a stepfather is at least 10 times more likely than the biological father to abuse a child in the home.

This disaster is scarcely acknowledged by politicians – although David Cameron has touched on it – because they can't face up to the need to unpick 40 years of misguided social welfare policies. So instead, in a gigantic and bureaucratic form of displacement activity, they put the entire nation's child-adult relationships on paedophile alert.

Naturally, this displacement activity has worked its way down the policy-making food chain – ending up in Asda's bakery section, where the humorous image of a five-month-old baby's bottom becomes the emblem of an entire society's fear of its own rottenness.

d.lawson@independent.co.uk

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