Article here. Excerpt:
'Red-faced and rendered speechless, I hurried away. Minutes later, I became enraged by what had just happened. I’d basically been accused of being some kind of sweet-bag-rattling nonce, drooling through the fence with a blacked out van parked round the corner. It seemingly hadn't occured to any of those observers that I did simply want to see my own son; their instinct was to view me as a sex offender.
I don't think this is an isolated incident either. Many dads I know think twice before using family changing rooms or viewing areas at swimming pools, before going to play groups, or even, like me, before waving to their own child through the school fence.
One local swimming pool backs onto its reception area, and if anyone (any men, no doubt) are seen “behaving inappropriately”, i.e. looking at children (their own or anyone else's), the receptionist presses a button which immediately blacks out the glass.
"Sorry son, I didn't see you do your first ever backstroke width because the pool staff suspected I might be another Gary Glitter."
A dad friend of mine told me recently that he was asked by a mum to stop taking photos of his son in a playground, because her daughter was on the next swing. She told him she felt it “wasn’t appropriate”.
He, like me, was consumed by an unfounded shame, as if the default position is "guilty until proven innocent".
The unsavoury truth is that these days we cannot escape paedophilia – or, more to the point, the fear of paedophilia. The wall-to-wall media coverage of child abuse scandals ensures that this fear-fuelled fire never goes out.
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