Nanny knows best

Oh dear: everybody is upset these days. It seems that nanny has been very busy indeed '“ perhaps it is something to do with the end of the holidays and going back to school. You know the sort of thing: time for bed now that there is school tomorrow instead of an evening running around the garden or staying up late to watch Celebrity Come Dancing Strictly Get Me Out of Here etc. No, nanny is calling us in from the garden and the television set and making us eat our greens before washing behind the ears and having an early night.

Well, that is the impression given by quite a lot of the media at the moment. The big fusses concern children. We have serious umbrage taken at the temerity of the government to consider it a good idea that those who are put in charge of children should be routinely screened by way of a CRB check. We have the '“ admittedly odd '“ scenario of the two policewomen castigated by Ofsted for not being registered child minders as they took it in turns to look after each other's children. This is all great stuff to an intolerant and myopic media.

The very same media of course who lambasted Haringey children's services over Baby P, and the very same media that now is asking questions of the police force and council over the tragic suicide and death of the bullied mother and her daughter. Somebody must be to blame; somebody should have spotted it; SOMETHING SHOULD HAVE BEEN DONE.

Always right

It must be great being the media '“ always right, never wrong, and blessed with 20/20 vision and the gift of reading the future. I wonder if there are any other impending disasters that it could warn us of before they happen '“ shame it kept quiet about the credit crunch and the global financial crash (as it was all so obvious) perhaps they were just busy or a bit distracted by something more important.

The fact is that anybody who leads a life of crime (in a professional sense) knows all too well that paedophiles and their like are extremely cunning and adept at getting into positions where they gain sufficient trust that they then gain unsupervised access to children. Obviously 99.99 per cent of all those who help out at brownies or church or football are socially minded, not criminally minded. But the odd one can get through. A simple CRB check will not catch all, but it may well act as a filter that will stop some. Surely any parent would agree that risk reduction is important '“ and therefore when your child is picked up on a Saturday morning and driven off in a group of children by somebody you have never clapped eyes on before, and is not a personal friend known to you for years, it is nice to know that they have been cleared for the task. The inconvenience of filling out a form is negligible compared to damage that '“ exceptionally '“ may be visited upon a child.

And we can all imagine the outrage if it was the other way round. Imagine that the trusted football driver was discovered not only to have indecently touched a child, but that in fact he had previous convictions for similar things. The media would pour down all the scorn and vitriol it has at its disposal '“ why was this not checked? How was this man allowed to get so close to children? SOMETHING MUST BE DONE. Well, I think it is a good, simple idea, and one that hopefully will mean just a few less dreadful crimes against children over the years: it seems a pretty cheap and obvious solution to me.

But what about those bods at Ofsted? Well, they have said that they will look into their rules again and have a think about the meaning of the tests they deploy. One can't help but think that Ofsted did not really mean to catch such arrangements. The trouble is that life in all its myriad permutations has simply thrown up a set of circumstances that makes the law look silly. And that is something that we all know about too.

Imperfect justice

In whichever area of the law we practise, we can recall situations that have made the law look as daft as Oscar Wilde described it. Some confiscation hearings have bordered on the Kafkaesque until the Court of Appeal got involved and provided the necessary steer. Other situations can be difficult '“ anomalies can arise in sentencing, in driving cases, even in drugs cases '“ passing a joint from smoker to smoker is technically supplying. But the law is not so stupid '“ not in a genuinely ignorant sense. It is often a blunt instrument; it often lacks finesse and can sometimes be unbendingly cruel. It can provoke great frustration and bewilderment '“ try explaining hearsay or self-serving statements to some defendants '“ but it does try to get it right, however imperfectly. That is what is going on with the Ofsted mothers: the rules are trying to get it right but have tripped up in an unforeseen situation. Now it will be looked at again.

We do not, therefore, practise in a profession that is highly crafted. We cannot turn out beautifully exquisite justice all of the time because our raw material is not wood, clay, paint or cloth '“ but people. We shall always fail and go on failing because life will always surprise the most deftly drafted piece of legislation. So, however much the commentators hoot in derision at its failings, we know that it does at least try to get it right; and if it fails to do so we can try to correct it. Law is not always pretty, not always fair, not always as generous as it should be '“ but on the whole it works, because we make it work, even if it means that somebody who would never dream of hurting a child for their own pleasure has to spend ten minutes filling in a form.