Why have we become such a horribly dirty-minded society when it comes to children? Like the salacious weirdos who pervert religion and use it as a tool to see filth and evil where there is none, we have come to view childhood not as a joyful and innocent state, but as one that constantly needs protecting from depraved attacks and abuses.

It’s not just galloping paranoia about every stranger being a paedophile: our anxieties now encompass people known to us. It’s got to the point where a crying child can’t be comforted or hugged by an adult they don’t know, in case that adult actually secretly wants to rape them.

See what I mean about dirty-minded-ness? It’s off the scale. We none of us asked to become familiar with such demented suspicions and yet they’ve become second nature for some. As school and nursery terms end this week and there are parties and get-togethers, parents everywhere will anxiously ask each other whether it is okay to take photographs of fully clothed children running around eating cake.

It’s absolutely mad, but the climate when it comes to “child protection” is such that we are all forced to address distressing questions – ones that wouldn’t ever occur to us naturally. I don’t know about you, but I feel polluted by even having to consider asking myself, “is X’s really nice daddy a secret perv, who is going to use these photographs of the class picnic unsuitably?”, particularly when I know that the answer is “not in a million years”.

But “trust no one” has become many people’s mantra – and that of many institutions. Last week in south Wales, Jayne Jones, 41, mother of 14-year-old Alex, who has cerebral palsy and is severely epileptic, was barred by her local council from accompanying Alex to school in the taxi that the council provides. Alex, she was told, must travel alone until his mother has passed a Criminal Records Bureau check.

The problem is that Alex is not well. He has a vagus nerve stimulation system fitted under his skin, which works like a pace-maker to control seizures. Taxi drivers can’t use it, only Alex’s mother and father. But, no dice: no CRB check, no seat in the taxi.

Even more absurdly, if Alex’s mother could drive – which she can’t – the council would allow her to chauffeur him and pay her expenses. If she were a violent nutcase, of course, she would be free to be a violent nutcase at home in charge of her son – just not for the time it takes to travel by cab, because that would be getting the council into trouble and we wouldn’t want that.

It used to be that calling someone “paranoid” was a rare and rather hilarious insult, usually lobbed at someone who had smoked too much weed in their youth. But we’re all paranoid now. We live in a society that encourages us at every turn to trust no one – not even ourselves.

Instead, mistrust rules: children are brought up in a spirit-sapping climate of fear and not allowed to go to the park in case they get abducted, parents view other parents with suspicion and alarm and strangers – the old man on the bench who chats to the toddlers every morning – with something approaching panic.

We don’t even trust ourselves to raise our own children: we need books written by childcare “professionals” and television programmes featuring advice from child-less “experts”. In actual fact we know a great deal more than these charlatans, but since we don’t any longer trust instinct we genuinely believe that our vast repository of knowledge (and that of our mothers, sisters, aunts, grannies, friends) is worthless and that a newborn baby is better off with a strict routine dreamt up by someone with a financial motive.

In a report co-authored with Jennie Bristow a few weeks ago, the sociologist Frank Furedi, lamenting the demise of trust, mentioned as an example a mother whose child was invited over to play at a new friend’s house. The parents reassured the mother that they were “cool” – they’d passed a CRB check. I find this chilling.

Does this artificially induced climate of fear actually benefit anyone? As far as I can see, known sex offenders are still being caught working in schools and children are still being abused – mostly in their own homes, by persons known to them, rather than out and about by utter strangers sunning themselves in the park or by nice ladies who dare not give a lost, weeping child a cuddle.

Obviously it goes without saying that we all want to live in a safer society and to have measures in place that protect the vulnerable. But really: making people frightened to leave their own house doesn’t protect anyone. It creates more vulnerability, not less. Encouraging mistrust and suspicion doesn’t make anyone happier or safer – it creates anxiety and isolation.

David Cameron’s speech in Glasgow East last week, in which he told the fat and the poor that it might perhaps be an idea to take a teeny-weeny bit of responsibility for their circumstances, was considered a bit Old Tory. But the general gist of his speech applies to our disturbed attitudes to childhood: both centre around the notion that we are all helpless victims and there is nothing much we can do about it.

Except, we can. Most of us know how to look after our children and don’t need a police check to be left in charge of them or to accompany a school trip. Most of us knowa dangerous situation and, being bipeds, know how to walk away from it.

We have, over centuries of evolution, acquired a highly developed instinct, even if we’re constantly trying to hush it down. I know who it feels safe to leave my children with and who it doesn’t and I expect you do, too; I can tell who’s kind and who’s mean; and, without wanting to sound too much like an old hippie, I find most people to be very kind indeed.

That is what we need to remember: people are broadly good and those that aren’t may not be terribly nice, but that doesn’t mean they are of a criminal bent. If we want to affect a societal change when it comes to childhood and quality of life in general, having faith in people’s goodness, trusting them to be kind and trusting ourselves to recognise kindness when we see it would constitute far more of a sea-change than any number of CRB checks.

Speaking of children . . .

A vicar in Staffordshire last week ordered a toddler out of his church for being too noisy. He was marrying the toddler’s parents at the time.

Should children be banned from weddings? Couples have certainly got braver about putting “no children” on their invitations, which really outrages some people (not me: any excuse for an adults-only day out, plus I don’t see how weddings are fun for children, unless there is child-specific entertainment laid on).

But of course I don’t think children should be banned from weddings as though they were leprous. The problem, I have observed over the years, is never with the child and always with the parents.

Only recently I sat through a wedding that was ruined by a baby howling throughout the exchange of the vows. This wasn’t the baby’s fault, obviously, but God knows what the mother thought she was doing not removing him. This scenario has played itself out dozens of times: child cries or misbehaves, parents look on fondly and do nothing about it, even if half the congregation has turned around and fixed them with basilisk stares.

Take your children to weddings, by all means, but learn some manners first.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/india_knight/article4322574.ece?openComment=true