Guilty until proven Guilty

Hi Clueless, some intelligent points raised there.
My husband is a chauffeur, as I said before he only once had a youngster without his parents but sometimes he carries families as passengers. This week he had the French president and the security guards.
His vehicle is a top of the range Chrysler, it has to be serviced at a named garage where any repairs if necessary are carried out.
He is also an advanced driver, has had to pass a first aid course and be CRB checked.
I think that's about as safe as it could get. However his service comes at a price which the people he carries are well able to afford but as with most things where will the money come from to pay for these extra checks etc? I'm sure a lot of people cut corners so to speak.

Our children deserve the best care we can give them and anybody working with children should be thoroughly checked out and if you have a criminal record then no chance!
Things will always go wrong in life but we all need to do the best we can.

 

You're right of course, but my point is that while I'm sure your husband is in good health and drives a good quality motor, there are lots of clubs that use beat up old Ford Transit minbuses, and are driven by people who may be good people, but may not be the safest of drivers. When I was 17 (ok not exactly young enough to be a kid that needed to be protected) I was on a training scheme. Our training place had an old minibus for ferrying us about. On one occassion I very nearly fell out the back of it because the back doors just bust open randomly as we were going up a hill. I quite literally had to grab for the hinge side of the door, and cling on for dear life as I was literally hanging out the back. On a seperate occassion we were in that very same bus, stationary on a steep hill as we waited for the traffic lights to change, when the handbrake cable randomly snapped and just for a moment we were off down the hill, until the driver jumped on the foot brake. That minibus had an MOT and it would have been perfectly legal for someone to ferry young kids in it, but it was a death trap. What I'd be worried about is with all the attention being focuses on prevent weirdos from being near our kids, other risks may be overlooked. In the case of our old minibus saga, I'd be happy to have let our driver ferry my son about, but never in a million years would I let him use that clapped out old bus that was, in my opinion, a major accident waiting to happen.

 

Hi Clueless, I see your point entirely. I was just trying to say that some organizations DO require their members to meet high standards to ensure the safety of their passengers however I remember when my son would go away to scout camp they would go off in a mini van driven by one of the leaders.
At the time I didn't think too much of it but today I would certainly question things and do more checking myself.

Unfortunately people who do want to harm our children often get themselves into employment that gives them close approximity to children as in the case of Ian Huntley - if all his past offences had been collated and put into one file maybe that tragedy could have been avoided?
What a minefield it is. :(

 

A good poinmt well made Jazmine, not to detract from anyone else's points in any way. Paedophiles do seek employment or activities where they can specifically work with or be near kids. It is very very hard ( thankfully) to try to understand the mind of a paedophile if you are a normal decent human being but we have to try to in order to protect our children. We just can't allow even a shadow of a doubt.


I think they do already check on things like mini-buses and stuff. I know they didn't when I was at school-I am about your age Clueless, and I was taken to the cross country races in a beat up old Land rover whose seats were screwed down boxes in the back with a rope hoop tied to each end to hold on to-no belts or anything. They didn't check when we were young, but I think they have to now.

 

It certainly is a mine field.

Years ago, when I very nearly joined the army, they did background checks not only on me, but the also wanted to know all about my parents and close associates. They were quite open about the fact that they were going to check if I had any direct or indirect links with anyone associated with the IRA or other republican groups. They also wanted to check if I had a criminal record or any history of mental health problems. I don't know if they made me fill in the paperwork just to pressure me into confessing anything, or if they did actually check (I didn't midn either way as I had nothing to hide). I withdrew my application in at the last minute for reasons nothing to do with any background checks (news broke of UN peacekeepers being ordered to stand and watch while a village in the Balkans somewhere was raided, and women were raped and men and kids were executed in cold blood - I'd wanted to join to help stop that kind of thing).

If background checks looked at an applicants associates, it would be much safer, but much less politically palatable. I read somewhere once that statistically, a significant percentage of abusers were themselves abused as kids. Following that logic what do you do, do you victimise the victims on the off chance they follow the trend, or do you ignore their abuse on the off chance that they are not part of that statistic?

Its a tough one. I guess the safest way might be to befriend your kids in the hope that they'll always talk openly to you, but I guess that in itself is probably not as easy as it sounds, because kids don't always talk openly to their parents.