When did a game of Doctors and Nurses become a sex crime?

What is a five-year-old sex crime? Not a sex crime committed five years ago. We all know what one of those is. I’m talking here about a sexual “offence” by a child still in Reception class.

According to official figures, the number of “sex crimes” reported at school in the UK has nearly trebled in four years, from 719 in 2011-12 to 1,955 in 2014-15. The statistics include a five-year-old girl accused of sexual assault on a boy under 13 and a five-year-old boy said to have engaged in sexual activity involving a girl also under 13.

The mind boggles. We all know that porn culture has turned the internet into an open sewer. But five-year-old rapists – whatever next? I guess kiss chase is still permitted, but only between consenting mixed infants with signed affidavits confirming that Sophie is “comfortable” for Harry to run after her? And does a St John's Ambulance crew need to be present? No exchange of spittle, mind you, or the authorities will be informed and DNA samples taken.

I must have been seven or eight when Robert Phillips complained in the playground of St Athan Primary School that my chaste peck on the cheek wasn’t good enough and suggested we do it “like in the films”. He put his tongue in my mouth, the filthy bugger. “Achafi!” as we say in Welsh (yuck in English).

Would lovely Robert’s name now be added to the list of junior sex criminals? Would my first snog feature in the mirthless annals of “inappropriate behaviour”? I fear it would. And where does that leave Doctors and Nurses? Presumably, that most innocently inquisitive and biologically helpful of games – “You show me your bits, I’ll show you mine” – now counts as sexual harassment.

Of the 4,643 sexual offences committed in schools over the past four years – a startling average of 10 per day – in 94 per cent of cases the “accused” was male. The figures come from 34 of the 45 police forces in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Crimes include rape, child prostitution and sexual grooming. In Wales, the youngest victim was four, and Welsh police also investigated claims that a boy aged five had sexual activity with a girl of the same age.

OK, let’s hold it right there. Setting aside the question of what kind of sexual activity two five-year-olds could get up to, it cannot possibly be a crime,  so why on earth are the police involved? The age of criminal responsibility is 10 years old. Young children who display prematurely sexualised behaviour need psychiatric help, not blame. Are infant schools really dialling 999 because one five-year-old girl “sexually assaulted” a boy? And are coppers solemnly logging such babyish fumblings as offences?

In a society where, as police admitted this week, there are too many paedophiles to keep tabs on, it would be naive to ignore signs that predatory sexual behaviour is starting earlier. Young girls should not have to suffer harassment. Kids must be protected. Still, suspicions are growing that what would once have been seen as childish exploration is falling foul of an ever-expanding definition of sexual misconduct.

In one case I know of, a French couple was summoned urgently to their child’s primary school in north London for a meeting with the headmistress. The parents were alarmed. What could their daughter have possibly done wrong? The Head explained that Isabel had been kissing and hugging other pupils. This was “inappropriate touching”. Parents of children from more modest cultures, who did not want their kids to be touched, had complained.

Isabel’s father almost exploded. His daughter, he told the Head coldly, had been born in France where six-year-olds (and every other age group come to that) are encouraged to kiss and cuddle. He wasn’t going to tell her that physical affection was a bad thing just because other parents didn’t share Western liberal attitudes.

One person’s pleasure is another’s offence. In an age where political correctness has criminalised much of the behaviour and many of the thoughts of previous generations, are schools in 2016 guilty of being “hypersensitive to any contact or comment”? It certainly looks that way.

One mother told me she was seriously thinking of home-schooling her twins after a sweet boy in their class was suspended for using “racist language” (something he’d incorrectly parroted from the cartoon South Park). She is not alone in wondering where all of this is going to end.

Figures out this week show that 20 pupils are excluded every single school day for “racist abuse”. That offence includes derogatory statements, bullying, taunting or swearing. Kids insulting and teasing each other – who knew?

Since 2009, more than 27,000 children have been excluded from school for giving offence with racist characteristics; 4,000 permanently excluded over the past year alone, their lives blighted before they’ve even begun. And for what? Are all of those kids really neo-Nazis or are they just thoughtless and young? Convenient fall-guys for a liberal and legal establishment hellbent on rooting out “hate speech” to prove just how sexist, fattist, racist, homophobic and generally horrid we British are.

Anyone concerned by this malicious trend should read a brilliant and disturbing article in this week’s Spectator by Kevin O’Sullivan, formerly TV critic of the Daily Mirror. Kevin was having a lively chat with a 66-year-old friend on a train when a “strange man” came up and accused him of conducting a sexist and misogynistic conversation which the man found “offensive”. Police took statements and that should have been the end of it, but the accuser (a university lecturer) suddenly decided that Kevin had interrupted his attempt to make a phone call by asking him if he was ringing his gay lover.

None of that happened, and there was CCTV footage to prove it, but for 20 months Kevin stood accused of a hate crime: homophobically motivated common assault. “The British Transport Police pursued my case with extraordinary zeal,” he writes, “so too did the Crown Prosecution Service. I was plunged into a world where common sense withered and died.”

Mercifully, the magistrates had not been indoctrinated in the new creed of Zero Tolerance, which applies to anything anyone at any time might possibly find offensive. Kevin was acquitted, but the case should never have been brought. He is convinced the CPS and the police are “in the grip of some kind of madness” over hate crime.

That madness is now spreading into our schools and we have to fight it before it’s too late. No child or teacher is safe from it. You see, in order for there to be a witch-hunt there have to be witches. Even if the witch is five years old and playing kiss chase.


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/family/when-did-a-game-of-doctors-and-nurses-become-a-sex-crime/

I think it's ridiculous to brand a very young child as being racist or commiting  a sex crime.

If a young child uses racist terms he is either mimicking what he has heard at home, so his parents need to be informed and educated, or he is just repeating what he has heard on TV, which  would probably be better ignored than making a big deal of.

If they are kissing and hugging....that's how many children express themselves, if they are upsetting other kids simply distract them....no big deal.

If they ARE acting out inappropriate sexual moves (some kids do, I have seen it a few times) ignore that and distract them. Iit might be a phase, it may be because they have seen adult content somewhere and are copying ,worse case scenario is that they are being sexually abused themselves, but there will be other signs if that's the case. They need to be watched and other children obviously need to be protected, but most of it is probably just kids being kids.

Everything Syl has said, pretty much!

I was just left stunned when I read the article that this is actually happenning with children. The story of the French girl was just beyonds the extreme of absurd bythe actions of the school.

I agree with Syl as well in regards to the phase aspect of many of this.
You teach the children about mutual respct at school not by demonizing them, when they at that age will simply not understand. I mean how shattering that would have been to that little girl just simply expressing love towards other children. Kids do this all the time. This is what happens when you try to tackle problems and it goes from one extreme to the other, where we now see the demonization of children not much older than infants for things they donot fully understand.