A quarter of adults to face 'anti-paedophile' tests to have contact with their children

He said: "When parents feel in need of official reassurance that other parents have passed the paedophile test before they even start on the pleasantries, something has gone badly wrong in our communities.

"We should question whether there is anything healthy in a response where communities look at children's own fathers with suspicion, but would balk at helping a lost child find their way home."

Prof Furedi, the author of a book called "Paranoid Parenting", said there was a trend to treat parenthood as a "professional endeavour that demanded increasing regulation and monitoring".

Prof Furedi said that CRB checks did not "provide anything like a cast-iron guarantee that children will be safe with a particular adult".

"All it tells us is that the person has not been convicted of an offence in the past," he said.

He called for a national review to demonstrate the need to "improve and clarify adult authority".

Prof Furedi said: "The adult qualities of spontaneous compassion and commitment are far more effective safeguarding methods than pieces of paper that promote the messages 'Keep Out' and 'Watch Your Back'."

Figures show that volunteering is on the decline with 13 per cent of men saying they would not volunteer because they were worried people would think they were child abusers, according to a survey last year.

The report comes after Children's Commissioner, Sir Al Aynsley Green, said 50,000 girls were waiting to join the Guides because of a shortage of adult volunteers, partly caused by the red tape of the CRB process.

Martin Narey, chief executive of children's charity Barnardo's, said his behaviour had been affected by the suspicions around adult-child relationships.

Writing in The New Statesman, he says: "I am likely to usher my wife forward if a child falls over in the street, lest my picking up the child could be misinterpreted. We need to address that. Adults - particularly men - should not routinely be seen as potential child abusers.

"And we need urgently to expose the nonsense of 'stranger danger' and convince parents that, although the risk of a child of theirs being abused at all is small, that risk comes not from lurking strangers, but from people known by their children - often relatives - who are able to exploit a child's trust."

However, he stressed that not to run any checks on past behaviour that could point to potential abuse would be "scandalously reckless" and he supported plans for the new Independent Safeguarding Authority whose work he said "will restore parental confidence" in adults who volunteer to help groups like the Scouts.

The CRB said yesterday that it will process 3.6million checks this year - up from 3.4million last year - of which 20 per cent were for volunteers.

Vince Gaskell, the bureau's chief executive, said he did not believe that CRB checks were poisoning the relationship between adults and children.

This is fearmongering taken way too far. Parents are now pretty much guilty until proven innocent of snoodling their own kids. That's not only ridiculous, but outrageous.

Let's turn off Law and Order SVU for a minute and check ourselves. The illusive 'They' are now interfering with our right to bear and raise our own children. We're encouraged to turn on one another out of fear that our neighbors, family, and friends could be potential child abusers, sans one ouce of justification or proof. This is insane.

I agree with rage.

Fucking ridiculous.

A mother or father has a right to kiss their child good-bye in public.
Yes we need to be aware of welfare of all children, but guilty before innocent, does no one good.

This is insanity!

Are those responsible for promoting this extremist approach, suffering from some kind of guilty conscious syndrome..? Who ever heard of parents not being allowed to show their children affection, especially at greeting or parting..? If this concept continues, then pretty soon we'll have a society of cold hearted bloodless bores, insensitive to pain or joy, thriving on the seduction of snobery...who will be running things then..and what will the hypocrits be doing behind closed doors..?

This practice of vetting borders on some kind of new age witch hunt...that is neither logical nor reasonable...

Madness gone mad

I cannot even imagine what I'd do if someone tried to bar me from seeing my daughter.

Positively outrageous.

Another bad idea promoted to make money from government and make yet another list to track people. A list that can be completely in correct and what then. So, a mother or father, wrongly accused, not only loose their rights to their children, they are publicly ridiculed, most likely also professionally destroyed, will need to pay legal fees to get it all squared away and not until then will they be able to be rejoined with their now very confused if not dangerously mentally impacted children. It will take a suit by such destroyed lives against the government and this insane listing process to make it go way and in the meantime the producers of the lists take their governmental profits and walk.