Comments on: Ruth Kelly and the plague of pervs

By: MatGB

MatGB — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 22:55:47 +0000

Brian, Haloscan won’t let me trackback, but essentially, thanks for pretty much summarising this, the hype and mess around the whole thing is damaging and obfuscating the real problems and scaring people for the wrong reasons.Overall, Bichard is better than the current situation, and the Govt is going to mess that up as well. I wonder, truly, if they ever worry about more than the focus group and the headline anymore. I’m sure there was substance to them at first, but now?Children at risk, and everyone plays politics with it. It’s not the known offenders who are watched and observed that are the danger, it’s the uncautioned, unconvicted. But we can’t do anything about them, so let’s transpose worries elsewhere. In the meantime, CRB, the bureacratic monstrosity, is seen as a cure all. Great.

By: Not Little England

Not Little England — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 22:26:57 +0000

Child Protection link dump and follow up Paul's pretty much already covered what I was going to, I thought I'd put the links I was going to use up ... child protection is part of my job. The thing about this that really gets to me? It's the unknown, unconvicted that are the danger.

Note by Brian: This is a trackback to NLE's useful and link-rich post on his own blog in which he rounds up various comments on these issues.

By: Tony Hatfield's Retired Ramblings

Tony Hatfield's Retired Ramblings — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 17:01:26 +0000

A CAUTION-ary Tale The use of cautioning for adults, reprimands and final warnings administered to those under 16, have come into the public...

Brian comments: Tony Hatfield's post, an extremely well-informed and experience-based essay on the implications of the police caution and its potential defects, ought to be compulsory reading for everyone commenting in the current debate about the sex offenders register and the suitability of persons who have received a police caution in relation to a relevant alleged offence to be allowed to teach. It powerfully reinforces, with concrete examples, the doubts expressed in my own post above about the fairness of equating a caution with a conviction in court. I hope Tony will consider condensing his post into a shorter letter and submitting it to a national newspaper for publication: it deserves, in my view, the widest possible dissemination.

I have also posted some further thoughts on the wider issues on Peter Harvey's stimulating blog.

By: Ronnie

Ronnie — Sun, 15 Jan 2006 19:54:21 +0000

Bravo, Brian. Bravo, Simon Jenkins. I share, among everything else, your concern about police cautions. And if Ms Kelly comes up this week with a "solution" which combines every apparently relevant conviction with automatic loss of employment rights, without further consideration, I suspect that we could have a series of cases for judicial review and for the European Court. I think however that the time may have come for her for a principled resignation, a la Robin C.