The scrapping of the vetting for people who work with children in the UK is a tragic mistake, Eyewear feels. While authors, like Phillip Pullman, claimed lofty indignation, the Soham murders established that the person next door can be - and sometimes is - a dangerous, even murderous, predator. To deny otherwise is not very literary - writers and poets, of all people, should be aware of the depths of human behaviour, and especially sensitive to the risks of child abuse. Many poets and writers I know have had such abuse experiences themselves. What would have been a cautious, but sensible, tracking of all those who sought to work closely with children in positions of trust has now been removed - and while civil libertarians can rejoice, sadly, and ominously, so will those with more sinister interests. The recent history of priests, and boy scout leaders, established, I think, that society needs to guard against institutional laziness around child abuse and predation. This government just erred on the wrong side of being Liberal.
When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se. What do I mean by smart?
Comments
And love the picture of Sara at the top! It looks great.
Well.. only if by "alone" you mean "alone with a class of 30 kids". Bit difficult to start anything in those circumstances! I've always been too busy looking out for my own personal safety. And I would never allow myself to be left alone with one child, for fear of false accusations.
There's a balance to be struck between safety and paranoia. It isn't great for children to think of all adults as dangerous; neither is it desirable for many men to opt out of working with children lest people question their motives (or, again, for fear of being falsely accused). And they do opt out; it is particularly hard now to get any man to coach children in sport.
As for "Pullman is naive or mischievous to claim that people wanting to be near children always or usually have proper intentions", of course adults wanting to be near children don't "always" have proper intentions, but it surely isn't naive to think they "usually" do? In fact it strikes me as paranoid to suppose they "usually" do not. No wonder men are embarrassed to teach in primary schools if people really think they "usually" have evil intentions!
I don't agree with everything in this article
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jun/16/children-protection-vetting-folly-exploitation but she's right about "the dishonest, unworkable idea of telling children that all adults are bad unless they've been certified good". Also about "It's all based on the fear of damage, without considering the damage of fear."