More reflections on Salem

The discussion on sex-offenders in school has made me reflect upon my school experiences some considerable number of years ago in my secondary school - a highly selective boys direct-grant school, a now defunct category balancing between grammar and public schools.

I remember well one schoolmaster (that's what they were, not teachers), a science master who was also, if I remember right, responsible for, what we would now call, pastoral care of the boys in the first two years. This master had an unhealthy interest in the genitalia of the boys in his charge and would often invite boys back to his house, which was next to the school, for tea. He was a gifted and enthusiastic teacher, who gave many of his pupils a deep, and I suspect, lifelong interest in science. He even managed to give my brother, who was adrift outside the arts and humanities, a passing interest which was a far more difficult accomplishment. I do not remember myself - and I was in his charge for a three week school trip round Europe - nor any other boy coming to harm from him. I think it likely that if he were around now he would not have resisted downloading child pornography from the internet. I do not think that would have made him a worse teacher or a greater danger to children - he would, however, have been caught in the net of Operation Orr and under Kelly's law and the Daily Mail's urging, have been automatically and, without further thought, been barred forever from teaching.

This is perhaps unfair to the Daily Mail as almost the entire press has been baying for the blood of these paedophiles and even the Guardian has welcomed automatic exclusion. Also Operation Orr is important in trying to slow the demand for child pornography and thus, hopefully, it's supply and the exploitation of children required to produce it. But, unless exclusion from teaching is seen as part of a deterrent strategy and some way is found of justifying this continuing punishment, conviction should not lead to automatic exclusion. It should however be an urgent prompt to seek out evidence of more threatening and dangerous behaviour, while keeping open the possibility there may be none. However the easy access to child pornography that the internet provides has created many more offenders without demonstrably increasing the risks to children in our schools and youth centres. The joint occurrence of the words sex, children and internet produces a stream of saliva that Pavlov could only have dreamed of. Replay this over-excitement from press to parliament to television and back to the press and we have a feed-back loop spiralling out of control, proscribing any rational action.

Going back to my school, although I'd rather not, I came to far more harm from uncaring, spiteful and sarcastic teachers than I did from this science teacher. These were the people who made some, but far from all, of my school days unhappy. Child sexual abuse must be a horrifying thing to experience, but it is only one, if one of the most extreme, way that a child can be made unhappy in school. The over-concentration on sex is prurient, moralistic and self-serving - it is easily identified as something most of us do not do. It is safer to engage with than behaviours like sarcasm and verbal aggression that most of us must admit we do perpetrate to some extent. These are dangerous not just to our children, but to our sense of self as a good person as we cannot so easily define an us and a them.