Don’t Touch! The educational story of a panic

Not so long ago, those who sought perversion in the most innocent of actions would be accused of having ‘dirty minds’. Those who found themselves embarrassed, offended or aroused by a picture of a naked baby, or by having a child sit upon their lap, were considered to be abnormal and potentially problematic individuals. The norm was the ability to distinguish between adults and children: not to equate a childish cuddle with a sexual advance, or an image of infant nudity with pornography or erotica.

Piper and Stronach’s excellent critique of the ‘No Touch’ policies ubiquitous in schools and early years settings today reveals how much has changed. Nowadays, the norm – as presented by official policy and institutional practice – is that those working with children should train themselves to be ‘dirty minded’ from the outset. From the practice of nursery nurses wearing gloves to change a baby’s nappy to teachers in secondary schools taking care not to be alone with a pupil at any time, everyday interactions between children and their carers or teachers have become ridden with a sexual subtext. By training adults to view all physical contact with their young charges as something to be avoided, in case it becomes – or might be perceived as – inappropriate, adults are encouraged to apply a conscious check to every spontaneous interaction, as though it is only this formal check on their instinct that prevents them from crossing the supposedly thin line from child protector (teacher) to child abuser (paedophile).

Don’t Touch! is subtitled ‘The educational story of a panic’, and the authors are persuasive in their argument that ‘No Touch’ policies in educational settings have arisen, not because of a major new problem with paedophiles in the teaching profession, or because policies prohibiting touch between pupils and staff would prevent such transgressions, but because of the generalised high-profile anxiety – which some have described as a ‘moral panic’ - about child abuse in society at large. Combined with a risk-averse outlook in modern culture, which often finds expression in the fear of being sued, this, the authors argue, led to an environment in which ‘many child-orientated areas were rapidly becoming “no-touch” zones’. (p1)

Piper and Stronach’s book, which includes material by a number of other contributors, develops the findings of ESRC-funded research. This research, in turn, was prompted by:

‘[T]he impression that the touching of children in professional settings had increasingly stopped being relaxed, or instinctive, or primarily concerned with responding to the needs of the child. It was becoming a self-conscious negative act, requiring a mind-body split for both children and adults, the latter being controlled more by fear than a commitment to caring.’ (pviiii)

The ‘impression’ that something has gone badly wrong in our culture when adults exhibit such awkwardness in interacting with children is widely shared, with extreme examples often reported in the media under headlines such as ‘child protection gone mad’. The power of Piper and Stronach’s work comes from the way that this impression is confirmed through solid research into the practices of educational institutions and the way these are mediated and discussed by teachers and childcare workers, whose quotes run through the book. This enables the authors to untangle the subtleties in the ways that ‘no touch’ policies and practices are implemented. They note, for example, that while many interviewees justified their ‘no touching practices’ in relation to UK legislation, in fact, ‘Nowhere could we locate any formal limitation placed on physical contact and non-family carers’. (p23) Formal child protection policy has played an important role in encouraging the idea that relations between adults and children are fraught with risk, and the authors note that initiatives such as the national vetting scheme, which requires that all those working with children are subject to clearance by the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB), have done much to exacerbate this risk-averse outlook. However, simply to blame policy developments for the speed and extent to which ‘no touching practices’ have become normalised would fail to acknowledge the power of the more generalised cultural confusion about what is, and is not, appropriate interaction between adults and children.

In this respect, one of the most revealing accounts provided by Don’t Touch! is about the difficulties in conducting research into this area. A chapter by Dr Catherine Scott from the University of Wollongong, Australia, describes how her intention to provide comparative data to the UK ESRC study was thwarted by the demands and objections of the ethics committees whose approval was needed before she could put the research into motion. Recounting how, after many months of wrangling, ‘exhausted and demoralised, I gave up’, Scott draws out the consequences of the anxiety into researching such sensitive areas. There is a recognised concern that the heightened anxiety surrounding child abuse is overblown, and that this anxiety itself is having a negative impact upon children by introducing fear and distance into the adult-child relationship; but this very overblown anxiety prevents research into this question, on the grounds that it is ‘considered difficult and professionally dangerous’. (p21) As Scott argues, in consequence:

‘Silencing those most affected by the moral panic over child abuse prevents us from better understanding the state in which we now find ourselves and makes more remote the possibility of injecting a little sense into the debate.’ (p21)

While such research was permitted in the UK, the team encountered a number of barriers, due to institutions’ evident unease in allowing such issues to be discussed: described by one head teacher as ‘opening a can of worms’. (p96) It is possible to argue that such concerns are not altogether unreasonable. If the problem under investigation is the extent to which teachers and childcare workers have been made hyper-conscious of the ways in which they touch children, holding a discussion about such practices arguably exacerbates their consciousness of such interactions, and risks making the problem worse. One field worker recounts how the ‘generalised confusion’ about touching children is quickly internalised, even in the course of research:

‘I become aware that I’m getting an overwhelming urge to touch some of these children on their cheeks, heads, but stop myself – not sure why. Stopping touching is taking much more concentrated effort than touching would.’ (p75)

However, what is remarkable about the research into touching practices presented in this book is the extent to which interview respondents all knew what was being talked about. The ‘mind-body split’, the extreme consciousness of physical interaction, is recognisable to all those working with children as something that is both very real, and quite new. There was only one occasion where researchers felt that they were attempting to discuss a problem that was alien to their respondents, and this is discussed at length in the case of Summerhill School, a ‘child-led’ private residential school which self-consciously exists outside of the norms of mainstream society, and on the touching question provides ‘The exception to the rule’. (pp 120-134) This was the only instance in which the researchers felt that touching ‘felt a bit “pervy” as a subject for conversation, an attempt to unnaturalise what the subjects regarded as absolutely normal’. (p121)

In a strange contradiction, what makes Summerhill School an exception to many of society’s rules is the ‘egalitarian’ relationship it forges between adults and children, in defiance of the hard distinction drawn by mainstream society. Yet when it comes to the issue of touch, according to Piper and Stronach’s account the school is able to draw that distinction effortlessly: physical interaction between adults and children is not suspected to be sexual, and therefore the problematisation of touch is regarded ‘as a fuss about nothing’. (p134) It seems we really do need, as the final chapter suggests, a ‘bonfire of the insanities’ surrounding child protection policy; we can hope that Don’t Touch! will ignite that discussion.