Recently my partner, a teacher in training, had to go through the process of getting a Working With Children check. This is a card that the Victorian government now requires all people working with children to have. The official difference between this and a police check is that it involves constant monitoring of your criminal record. The other differences are that it costs more (both for the applicant and the government), it requires you to turn over a range of forms of ID (which, amusingly, means you’ll find it easier to work with kids if you have a car, a gun, or a passport), and they’re apparently very strict about what forms of ID are acceptable - something which can add further expense to the process.

According to the post office employees i’ve spoken to (who are responsible for taking the forms and sending them in to be processed), there’s currently about a four-month-long waiting list for the cards, as tens of thousands of Victorians will soon be required to have them just to keep their jobs and volunteer positions.

Personally, i don’t think this will do anything much at all to the rates of child abuse in Victoria. Nor do i think the people who devised the plan had any intention of doing so. Like witchcraft in the 1600s, communists in the 1950s, and the ‘obesity epidemic’ today, the threat of paedophilia is a classic example of a mass hysteria, or “moral panic”.

Read any local newspaper frequently enough and you’ll find that there is an undue level of obsession with paedophilia in Australia today. The possibility of being molested by a stranger is often described as a huge risk for Australian children, even though the actual rate of child sexual abuse by strangers is quite low (it’s higher for family members, but that’s not often pushed by media coverage, and belied by the attention paid to teachers and child-care workers). Added to that, the word paedophilia is used to describe individuals who are not actually paedophiles by any psychiatric definition. Paedophilia is a fetish for prepubescent children. The media equates paedophiles, those with the fetish, with paedophilic rapists, those who act upon the fetish. And it goes further, to class all “statutory rape” as paedophilic. For example, there have been a couple of famous cases of teachers having consensual affairs with students who are just below, or just above the legal age of consent - but who are certainly not “prepubescent”. The obvious issue here is that the teachers are in a position of authority - like a boss in a workplace - but is that how the media portrays such cases? Of course not. Despite the fact that these latter uses of the word are out-of-step both with psychiatry and with Australian law, that doesn’t stop there from being a huge amount of hot-air produced around such cases. It almost reminds one of the ever-expanding definition of “terrorist” to mean “anyone we don’t like”. And the police and government spend a fairly decent amount of time telling us what they’re doing about “kiddie porn” and internet predators - two things that have never been much of an issue, statistically, but which get a hell of a lot of coverage on the rare occasions they do occur.

This is the climate in which the Working With Children checks have been introduced. And, i would argue, this is the sole reason for the checks. The checks look flashy, they look expensive, they make society feel as if child-workers are under intense scrutiny, they treat teachers like criminals who must be monitered, and they don’t do much that couldn’t be accomplished with a simple, routine police check. But all the average person will know is that their kid’s teacher has an official-looking card with their picture on it.

When you consider that the biggest problems around child abuse have nothing to do with child workers (who generally are required to get police checks anyway), but revolve around the fact that abuse usually involves trusted family members (usually parents), that abused kids are taught to feel like shit by being constantly told that their lives have been tainted forever by their experience, that abused kids are often unlikely to even report abuse in the first place, this entire effort starts to look like a meaningless political stunt.

But hey, who’s going to complain? What, are you in favour of paedophiles or something? */me peers at you suspiciously…*

Related posts:

1. The abuse of the elderly
2. Donate to the Royal Children Hospital
3. persistent rumours
4. Victorian Police Showband at Federation Square
5. Launch of the Victorian Relationship Register Declaration