Volunteering & Volunteer Students

Julia Neugerger was on the radio telling us that we are short of volunteers for charity work because of the beauracratic hoops we all have to jump through to do anything these days.

I have been arguing this for years. We make it harder and harder for good people (and that is meant in the sense that they are well intentioned, not that they are inherently good or better than you or me) to intervene in situations where they could have a positive impact on the outcome.

The police have to walk on egg shells in situations where their training and their gut instinct (this is the thing that makes them want to become bobbies in the first place) could more easily prevail in favour of a victim or a potential victim.

Teachers can't take their kids out on field trips for fear of losing one or two of them or, worse still for the school, be accused of molesting them in the Blue John Mines (that is a real place in Derbyshire, btw, not a euphemism).

Men won't work with children because if they do they are paedophiles.

What does all this do? It distorts society in such a way that it becomes unworkable.

In the same way the news distorts our view of kids on the street, or muslims, or imigrant plummers. We have an opinion of groups of people that bears little resemblance to the majority of that group.

And we know from history where that leads, Nazi Germany, Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur.