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Then if it's kids as friends or the friends of offspring, then it's OK?
It doesn't affect me much except that I have under-aged relatives (we all do lol), and I've got a couple of under-aged on my Deviantart buddy list. Then I play World of Warcraft and about half of the people I talk to on there are underaged!
:yes:
In a way, I don't get this:
I imagine there are many people who abuse others who haven't been caught, so basically they're going to have to register on this database and still be able to work with children.
I think he is drawing parallels between Labour and Zanu PF, Robert Mugabe's despotic regime.
No, that's no what it means either.
People working with children even on a voluntary basis WILL need to be vetted, the exemption is for casual, social arrangements, so parents asking other parents to give lifts, kids going round to play at each others houses etc.
What really really worries me is the attitude that this system will make everything ok and perfectly safe. What keeps children safe is best practise, an open sharing atmosphere when neglect and abuse has a chance to be identified and children have someone they can talk to about any concerns.
Not an attitude that distrusts any adult without a vetting certificate and thinks all those who do must be saints.
Maybe not, but it doesn't hurt. If an enhanced CRB check had been done on Huntley for instance, it would have revealed that the police force where he had come from had grave concerns about him being around women and children.
It wasn't though because at the time it wasn't a requirement as he was only a caretaker, so he went through the standard check, which doesn't include intelligence held about a person.
If its for people who arent alone with children then I think is OTT. Im not sure who it covers
it's just building up a databse really, that's what it's there for - i work in a school and have an enhanced CRB check done regulary anyway so this don't affect me really - this is just a stupid money maker which will collect people's information
and it's well known legally that hard cases make bad law anyway, ian huntly got a chance to do it because the police never really followed up on the multiple complaints about him i believe, correct me if you want
tbh if they cared that much about the kids they'd just make the checking system free
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaUkt59vY1Q
Won't be long before they start banning having photographs of children in clothes catalogues either, if they ever catch someone masturbating to one.
There have already been too many instances of perfectly innocent men being hounded out of parks- or attacked- for simply being near children and having the 'wrong' look about them. Things can only get worse in the current climate.
Never mind that a child is hundreds of times more likely to be killed by a car than he is to be molested by a paedo. Let the hysteria continue.
Generally when someone is killed by a car it's an accident. Unless you're suggesting there are thousands of car drivers out there just itching for the chance to run a kid over.......
It would make a good Daily Fail story anyway.
Seeing as many more children die from car accidents, we should really be doing something drastic to stop that, like make them wear crash helmets and kevlar protection at all times. If not children could dieeeeeeeee!
No sane person would advocate that. Because there has to be a balance between safety and common sense. With the issue of paedophilia, that balance has shifted to nonsensical hysteria in this country. Time we redressed it.
Maybe that's the relationship you have with your employers, but it's not one I'm planning on replicating. If I'm qualified to do a job that not enough people are, then I think I'm in a position to negotiate whatever terms I feel are fair, as are any private company. That generally includes any administrative costs that are involved in working for them (which they already routinely pay), which this would clearly come under. And if they say "we are paying it" what the hell can the government do to stop them?
Having said that, in this particular industry, a common response would be "yeah, we'll sort it out" followed by no action whatsoever, and people working with children with absolutely no checks because they make it such a nightmare to carry them out.
My other issue with this is the number of adults it's going to put off working with children, or having anything to do with helping out with kids activities, which starts to follow on with there being less stuff for kids to do, and parents not taking their kids along because they get asked to help occasionally, which means they have to get checked, which they find too daunting and it's just easier for them to drift away.
Tell me how that's good for children?
Huntley met the two primary school children through his partner, not through work. The vetting procedure might have prevented him getting the job as a caretaker but he was exposed to those two children well away from any formal or informal care process. His partner wouldn't have been picked up by the vetting procedure because she was guilty of nothing other than naivete.
You should also remember that Huntley used a false name in Soham and the police lost track of him because of this. Cambridgeshire police didn't know him from Adam. What makes you think that some bureaucrat on peanuts is going to do a better job of joining the dots together?
I agree in principle, but I don't have any faith that this is the way to solve it. I have no faith in some badly-paid monkey in Darlington to do their jobs properly- both searching and maintaining anonymity- when better-qualified staff in the police and social services can't get their heads around the difficulties either.
Given that the Child Support Agency was getting 40% of claims wrong when it was set up, and Student Finance England (also in Darlington) are doing the same, I think this will be a disaster. I can see this lot giving Gary Glitter a clean bill of health yet some innocent kind old man will be labelled a predatory paedophile and have his face kicked in by the local retards.
The vetting process also conveniently ignores the fact that a lot of attackers are not known to the authorities anyway- look at the paedophile ring operating in that nursery in Plymouth.
The other concern I have is that it completely targets the wrong people. People will insist on this vetting for school or charity staff- who rarely have unsupervised contact with kids- and then go and introduce a new partner to their kids without any background checks at all. The simple fact is that the person most likely to abuse a child is its father or grandfather, or its mother's partner.
Most charitable sector employers are saying the same thing. They don't get the funding to pay £64 per employee for this check so they can't pay £64 per employee for this check.
Exactly.
My in-laws (one of whom's a solicitor) have had German exchange students staying with them for years. Excellent references have always been passed to the company and so they keep getting exchange students. Because of these checks they now refuse to have anything to do with the system. The company is now struggling to find enough families to place the exchange students with.
Anyway, just a quick question. If you have more than one job, do you need more than one check? Because under the old system, I believe that each employer had to carry out a check every time they hired someone.
well I think thats weird. Why be so worried about getting checked, when youve already gone out of your way to get references.
Im actually surprised that there wasnt proper vetting of exchange hosts before
It's like everything in this country- at first sight its fair and reasonable, but when you dig beneath the surface its very sinister. The vetting bureau can take into account 'intelligence' from 'other sources', including anonymous tip-offs from members of the public. They're already advertising for people to send in their tip-offs.
The Pedo Stasi can decide that you are 'unsuitable'- thus making you unemployable- without supplying details of the evidence against you. Without any knowledge of what they're basing their decisions on, you can't challenge their decisions. Given the track record of Government bureaucracy (the CSA had a 40% fuck up rate at one point) I can see a lot of innocent people being destroyed and a lot of guilty people being given a passport to abuse.
I suppose the Pedo Stasi will be useful if someone fancies fucking up someone else's life for good, but I can't think of any other use for it.
IWS, my point went right over your head didn't it? Employers can choose to pay it if they so wish, but most employers won't because the law says registration and payment rests with the employee. I can't see anyone in the charitable sector paying it (no money) and private nurseries and care homes are notorious for providing abject terms and conditions to their employees. You only need to register once, unlike with CRB, but you can have your status revoked at any time and without warning.
I can see good and bad sides to it. it obviously still needs some tweaking, and of course its of absolutely no use if people think that it means there is no risk of abuse.
I can see the positives, definitely, but I don't think for one second that the positives outweigh the costs and negatives.
A company or charity checking references properly will pick up all the same things that the ISA will pick up. The same problems- name changes, absconding sex offenders, etc- that cause problems with diligent referencing will not be picked up by the ISA either. The ISA simply holds all the police and social services information in one place, with a good helping of public tipoffs to keep everyone on their toes, and they arer only as good as the information that goes in.
And given that Huntley did what he did because of incompetent police officers in the Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire forces, I don't see how the ISA can be any different.
I suppose what really gets my goat, though, is having to pay £64 to get some monkey in a suit to tell me that I won't rape kids.
I know it's now called Glade Arena, but us kids will always remember it as Forest Glades! Good times.
Different Forest Glades? My daughter went a few weeks ago and it was still forest glades then.
Meh.
I just googled it Katralla, and it looks like it has changed its name back to Forest Glades, so I think we are talking about the same place. Here.
http://www.volunteercentrecamden.org.uk/pages/isa-update.html