Paranoia on the Playground

Any adult volunteering to work with Little League, Girl Scouts or any such youth groups in the city of San Mateo soon will have to submit to a fingerprint check. If a criminal record is found, the information will be disclosed to the agency where the prospective volunteer applied. The idea is to scare off child abusers and sex offenders. More likely, fingerprint screening will scare off potential volunteers who have check-bouncing or marijuana arrests in their background.

This new requirement, approved by the City Council last week, is a literal application of the witticism that no good deed goes unpunished. It also tells an important story about how sexual fear is poisoning the atmosphere of child care in the United States and depriving children of warmth and informality in the caregiving settings where they spend many of their waking hours. We are isolating our children in the name of protecting them.

One would think the new ordinance was the result of a volunteer with a sex crime record doing harm to a Cub Scout in San Mateo. Not so. There is no record of a convicted child molester helping out at any child-care institution in San Mateo. The public panic that produced this new law came from the discovery that Polly Klass’ killer had spent time in a San Mateo homeless shelter.

But there is no indication that further screening for convicted sex offenders is necessary. They already must register with local police, and a law that allows their identity to be advertised has just taken effect.

The citizens who support this new incursion are not fools. They know that scrutinizing Little League leaders is an almost comically inefficient way of ferreting out child molesters. But, they argue, you can’t be too careful. If only one case of sexual abuse is prevented, won’t that be well worth it? Anyway, they say, no sincere friend of children should mind being fingerprinted. And besides, no harm will come to children from the fingerprinting effort.

This argument is as wrong as it is sincere. Why assume that fingerprinting soccer moms and dads will prevent one episode of sexual molestation in San Mateo? Why assume that only convicted sexual predators will be scared away from volunteer work?

In fact, this sort of screening does compromise the interests of kids in both obvious and not so obvious ways. What if Little League or scouting has to fold for lack of volunteers? Won’t 11-year-olds be more likely to run into molesters hanging out at the mall?

There are less obvious ways in which youth-serving institutions fixated with sexual fear can hurt children. We see it all around us. Give your first baseman a congratulatory pat on the rump when he hits a home run? You must be kidding. It now takes two teachers to escort a 3-year-old to the toilet in preschool, thanks to the McMartin case. The people who take care of small children for a living spend more time worried about lawsuits than consulting Dr. Spock. That is the ultimate triumph of the liability lawyers--the No. 1 nursery school workplace rule: No Hugging.

How did it come to pass in the United States of the 1980s and ‘90s that hugging a 4-year-old is dangerous? Is there a sudden epidemic of sexual violence that demands new constraints? Or has something else changed?

The sexual use of young children is loathsome, and the incidence of it is a terrible problem, but not a new problem. While exploitation of children has received more attention in recent years, there are few indications that the number of children abused has risen dramatically. And the largest hazards of sexual abuse are, as always, adults and siblings in the household of the child at risk.

Why, then, the huge concern in recent years? The fixation with child molestation has many characteristics of what sociologists call a moral panic. Two trends have contributed to this reaction. First, the exploitation of children has been more visible in our society, whether or not it is also more frequent. The amount of media attention heightens anxiety, and the public’s fear generates the kind of interest that creates even more media attention.

The second factor is the transfer of child-care responsibility from mothers to others in conjunction with the fuller participation of women in the work force. Could it be that we are anxious about leaving our children in the care of others because we are guilty about not being home with them full-time?

If we cannot hug our children, then nobody can. But if we make caretakers distance themselves from kids, the possibilities of growth and connectedness are diminished. Wouldn’t it be ironic if the current wave of sexual paranoia created more inhibitions in the expression of affection than did the rigidities of our puritan past?