Your Petty Grievances Can Ruin Another's Life
"...In other words - exactly as critics have claimed - it is possible for a sex offender check to be raised on the basis of simple curiosity..."
When a government and it's self-serving police force become so consumed by the need to promulgate a climate of fear around child protection (helped in no small measure by the efforts of the ambulance-chasing child protection industry) this is the natural conclusion. Bad laws make for unfair outcomes. Laws based on knee-jerk tabloidisms are spectacularly disproportionate in their vindictiveness and scope for misappropriation/abuse.
In the UK today every adult, male or female, are now regarded as a threat to children unless they have a CRB telling the police otherwise. This is a fact, enshrined in law. We are all potential child molesters, even if we don't know it ourselves.
When policy and ultimately legislation in this area is championed by a grieving parent and various tabloid newspapers, whilst being greased through Parliament by craven politicians, the outcome can only be a dangerously perverse hybrid of 'justice', more akin to mob-rule.
I see no sign that this government or the next in the UK have any appetite to slow down the paedogeddon, no matter how baseless the increasingly hysterical claims of organizations such as CEOP might actually be. It's simply too mesmerizing, too addictive and far too easy to bandwagon for short-term political popularity. Every MP and every senior policeman seems to have something to say on the (alleged) ever-present 'high-level' dangers of 'predators' in our midst online and off. Huge sums of public money continue to be 'ringfenced' to keep up the fear and maintain the structures promoting this propaganda, despite cuts being countenanced across just about every other Government department in the coming years.
In the end, the paedogeddon is too useful to a great number of people and organizations for it to be allowed to slip off the daily news agenda. And for that reason it's here to stay - whether there is any truth in any of it or not - because none of us will ever get know one way or the other.
Thanks to J.O. for keeping on the pressure on this and other stories related to the present paedohysteria. He's one of very few journalists left with the courage to publicly question the perceived wisdom of this opaque phenomenon.