"It's just common sense ..."

Mark Smith

Third in a series on Child Protection services ...

A couple of months ago, I decided to use this column to highlight concerns over the impact of the child protection agenda on child care. My intention at that time was to develop a critique that had at least a loose structure to it. However, in the frenzied world of child protection, the media keeps throwing up new stories on which to hang my reflections. This month, things have gone into overdrive in that respect.

The main news item in the UK over the past month has been the trial of a school caretaker accused of the murder of two nine-year old girls in the English town of Soham. In the wake of a guilty verdict, it transpired that he had been investigated on several occasions in the past for criminal or inappropriate behaviour with young girls. Police intelligence systems had failed to register or pass on this information when he applied for the caretaker's post in another part of the country. Of course, the media had a field day with this information. Legitimate (and in a democratic society, essential) arguments over the appropriate balance between civil liberties and the need to know, became reduced to a witch-hunt over who was to blame for this tragedy.

On the back of this media uproar, one of the more responsible newspapers in Scotland ran a story about new child protection procedures to be introduced in respect of boys' football. As one who hangs about public parks on Saturday and Sunday mornings, kit bag and whistle to hand, this hits pretty close to home. So close in fact that I realise that I too am suspect. The new guidelines allegedly prohibit horseplay or physical touch between adults and boys. They also caution against giving boys a lift in your car. I would have to plead guilty to both of these offences.

My first misdemeanour was a couple of weeks ago. I manage the local primary school team “the B team. They haven't won a game all season but are steadily improving. In our last game, we took the lead, only to immediately concede a silly goal (a scenario with which, as a Hibs supporter, I'm well acquainted and reasonably philosophical about). Our goalkeeper, a sparky kid at the best of times, wasn't at all philosophical and ran up the pitch intent on disputing it forcefully with the goal scorer, the referee or anyone else within striking distance. I had to pull him aside. As he paced the goal area, I realised he was close to tears. Instinctively, I pulled him in towards me and ruffled his hair, uttering words of encouragement about how good it was that he took the game so seriously.

The previous week, I had dropped the same kid off at home, following the match. (He's the kid whose mum or dad doesn't come to watch him play or collect him afterwards). Both these actions of mine felt right, but according to the new guidelines they'd be prohibited. But the guidelines must be OK, because, according to the powers that be, they are “just common sense".

Recourse to 'common-sense' seems these days to be the stock in trade of policy makers attempting to justify a whole range of infringements of liberties and relationships. When I hear the term I think back to an old boss of mine who used to say that common sense was neither common, nor was it generally sense. I've been suspicious of the term ever since. It's all too often a front for intellectual and moral laziness “an attempt to make the complex simple.

Anyone who has a feel for football will know that it's not an area that lends itself to normative notions of common sense. One has to experience it to know the irrationality, the intensity of the emotions and the petty animosities that emerge on the touchline between the coaches and parents at boys' football games. And whether or not we like some of what goes on, it is by and large self-regulating and is sorted out by a shouting match, an apology and a shake of the hand. The idiots who want to shout and bawl at kids are generally kept in tow by those who run the clubs and the schools. What I've seen over a few years now from the other dads and volunteers around me has never been abusive, but is often incredibly insightful, skilful and character building if that's not too old-fashioned a notion. It's perhaps one of the few arenas where men can still assume a legitimate role in working with kids (and boys in particular). Why on earth are we trying to regulate it at the behest of an increasingly powerful but largely unaccountable child protection industry? I'm not even aware that such regulation is in response to any particular incident or spate of incidents. Those of us who get out of our beds of a weekend morning to run up and down muddy pitches might foresee a future, where instead of falling out in the heat of the moment, opposing factions or personalities resort to accusations of a child protection nature. And the whole business will end in a dither of indecision and acrimony. And the army of men who give freely of their time and energies will gradually diminish as individuals decide it's not worth the risk. That (and leaving kids standing at bus-stops as you drive by) is common sense for you!

At its most extreme, the application of 'common sense' can result in outrageous miscarriages of justice. This month also saw the successful appeal against the conviction of a mother jailed for killing three of her children. This is the third such successful appeal this year. All three women had been convicted on the evidence of an eminent doctor, who alleged, essentially, that one child death was unfortunate, two suspicious and three murder. Here is common sense masquerading as science. Of course, simplistic equations like this fail to take into account factors such as genetic disposition.

What cases like this ought to suggest is that legal and medical discourses of child protection don't really hold much water. Legal discourses can perhaps only work at the expense of a fundamental erosion of civil liberties, and even then are subject to human error. And when it comes to medical discourses, the fact of the matter is that we don't know enough. Despite what we might like to think about scientism, there are few objective realities. For every expert who attests to shaken baby syndrome in the death of a child, another will equally vociferously point to an innocent fall. In these circumstances, child protection has become the plaything of lawyers, doctors and social workers, each of which groups claim an expertise that can't really be justified.

And in this there is an opportunity for Child and Youth Care workers and for those social workers prepared to assert an independent voice to reclaim child protection as a moral endeavour that doesn't have easy answers, rather than a procedural one. It won't be easy though, for we've become slaves to common sense – to attempts to impose rationality where it doesn't exist.