Saturday 6 August 2011

Taken to task

Well its been an interesting week over on Facebook where I pasted a similar post to the one below about CRB checks and ended up being accused of using base language, going against Methodist Church policy and being the devil incarnate.

All I did was raise the questions I had raised here and then entered into a discussion on their with a number of people. I was accused of undermining the safeguarding process and ended up feeling insulted so after allowing time for an apology from the person (it didn’t come) I pulled the post to avoid the possibility of me slipping into the kind of language I had been accused of using.

I was and still am at a loss to understand how people can so badly misunderstand and misrepresent what one has said. I am not opposed to safeguarding and recognise the need for some sort of process to enable us to ensure vulnerable people are protected but what I have and will continue to argue against is the blind faith that some people place in the CRB system as the be all and end all of safeguarding. It is one tool with in my opinion lots of issues that I detailed in my previous post – when I can be convinced that my worries have no basis in fact then I might too be able to adopt the view that CRB is marvellous, until then I shall try to avoid the people over on Facebook that I got into debate with.

1 comment:

Robert Brenchley said...

When I question it, I tend to get nothing but patronising remarks from those who regard themselves as the Circuit elite. I don't think blind faith in a system, or blind follow-my-leader for that matter, has much of a future; you tend to end up rolling about in the ditch. Look what happened to the banks!

We need to go straight on asking questions, and hopefully we can get some sense out of the mess I feel we're heading for. Not only do we need to be aware that the system isn't infallible - and at some point there's going to be a major abuse case involving someone with a spotless CRB - but the logical end of the road we're on will be checks for every member. We need a meaningful, and consistent, definition of 'contact'.

I've been told a couple of times that I'm 'going to hell', but nobody's yet awarded me the honour of being His Satanic Majesty in person!