Child Protection Minister Justifies ISA With Propaganda

Baroness Morgan, Britain’s Child Protection Minister, when interviewed on Channel 4 News, fails to put forward a single argument about why the Independent Safeguarding Authority is necessary:

When pushed by Krishnan Guru-Murthy that the ISA isn’t needed because most abuse does not happen with total strangers, she agrees with him, before returning on-Home-Office-message with the crack that ‘you need to know’ that people in positions of trust ‘have been properly vetted’. If most abuse takes place in private, invariably by people who would not be on a ‘barring’ list old or new anyway, then I fail to understand where the need for vetting comes at all. Morgan then resorts to the familiar Home Office tactic of presenting the ISA as a solution to a serious problem (even though there isn’t one), and hammers home her rationale for the ISA (even though there isn’t one), in the hope that her relentless propaganda will gain public support for it. But the rationale for this £170 million scheme simply isn’t evidence-based: she insists that it’s a step on from the simple ‘snapshot’ of a CRB check, but conveniently again fails to admit that it really does provide no additional, meaningful information. The extra intelligence the ISA uses to bar people from working with children and/or ‘vulnerable adults’ is heresay – evidence which would not be admissible in a court of law, and is used in the most meaningless and arbitrary way in order to come up with barring decisions.

With its presumption that everyone is a paedophile unless they prove otherwise (at their cost), the ISA undermines the rule of law, will have the most pernicious effects on adult and adult-child relationships and won’t provide any meaningful protection for children or ‘vulnerable adults’. Sir Michael Bichard, the man whose report into the Soham murders led to the formation of the ISA, has expressed surprise and dismay at the scale of the ISA’s remit, but essentially writes that and the rest of its collateral damage off as ‘irrelevant’ as long as children were protected; in other words the ends justify the means – that damaging the lives of adults is worth it if it succeeds in safeguarding children or ‘vulnerable adults’ (which can’t be proven). And Morgan implicitly says exactly the same thing when in response to Guru-Murthy’s statement that most abuse happens in the home she says, ‘we must take all steps that we can’ (in protecting children). In other words, even though there’s no need for it and it will have disastrous repercussions, we’re going to do it anyway. Well when the ISA fails in its remit, and ends up causing significant social damage, I hope those words come back to bite them both.

The Independent Safeguarding Authority must be abolished.

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