When an old man watching his six-year-old granddaughter play on Balmoral Beach gets the cops called on him, you've got to ask: has our society's caution reached levels of hysteria?

Once upon a time in a fairytale, the big bad wolf was the only predator we needed to protect our children from. This predator was easily spotted, and easily avoided (if you’re smart, anyway): a different species to the rest of us; a strange, wild animal, prowling the woods alone and mostly after dark. A foreigner to society. A monster. We only needed to teach our little ones to stick to familiar paths, never stopping to talk to unscrupulous strangers, and we could be confident they would make it to grandma’s house unharmed.

The stranger danger fairytale was much easier for us to come to terms with, and act upon, than the reality we now understand: that most of the wolves in our society are not just dressed in grandma’s clothing, they are grandma — or grandpa, auntie, uncle, mum, dad, sibling, neighbour, teacher, doctor, priest, or a friend we thought we could trust.

Knowing this – that the abuse of children is probably far more rampant in our society than we’d care to imagine, and that the people most likely to abuse are those we trust, people in our families and friendship circles – it’s understandable that anxiety and paranoia about how adults (especially men) and children interact has become regulation. But is it right?

On Dog-Whistling, Scapegoating And The Hunt

Last Sunday, as hearings were poised to begin for the Catholic Church abuse inquiry, a grandfather made the Sun Herald front page after letting his six-year-old granddaughter take a dip at Balmoral beach without her swimmers. Yesterday, stories of countless other fathers and grandfathers who’d felt singled out and harassed — detained by supermarket staff because of a child’s tantrum; subjected to an inquiry after a bit of roughhouse play caused a bruise on the bottom; cornered by police with tasers after an innocent day at the beach; forced to produce paperwork proving a parental relationship — were aired in response.

It was against this backdrop that I saw the new and acclaimed Danish film, The Hunt. The film explores how dealing with abuse allegations within a culture of paranoia and suspicion can wreak destruction on communities. How easily a completely innocent, quite minor incident – when combined with miscommunication, misunderstanding and misjudgement – can explode into a full-blown witch hunt that tears a town apart, making victims of everyone involved.

The Hunt’s storyline unfolds beautifully, horribly, like a slow-motion multi-car pile-up that just keeps exploding long after the vehicles have crumbled to a halt. The trouble begins when some older boys messing about with an iPad at home show the much younger Klara a picture of an erect penis from the internet. Later at kindy, she tries to kiss Lucas — the teacher who also happens to be her dad’s best friend — during a game with other kids. He tells her that’s not allowed, she becomes angry, and later that day tells another teacher that she hates Lucas and his “rod”.

Despite initial attempts to address the situation with a sense of calm, the head teacher quickly reaches the conclusion that Lucas had indecently assaulted Klara. In an effort to avoid stirring up further trauma, the child is not questioned again, but the police are informed along with the rest of the parents. The process of ostracising Lucas is set; even after Klara withdraws her initial remark, the rest of the adults in the town refuse to believe her. Rather than listen to her, and admit she may have made it up, her parents and teachers convince her that she must have forgotten what “really” happened.

Once the wheels were set in motion, it was easier for the village to eliminate the perceived threat — to paint Lucas as the monster he needed to be in order to seek revenge on him — than to hit the brakes and try to get to the truth. But the consequences did not just hurt Lucas. They hurt Marcus, his son, ostracised by association; and they hurt Klara, who lost a friend and father-figure and, without understanding what exactly was happening, understood that she had started it and could do nothing to stop it.

Stay Out Of School, And Don’t Do Hugs

After watching a film like The Hunt, it’s easy to see why there are fewer men prepared to work in primary school teaching, not to mention in earlier childhood care where children need more hands-on attention. That Lucas had been alone with the Klara, having sometimes walked her to and from kindergarten, sealed his guilt in the minds of many. His charming hands-on, rough-and-tumble approach to play in hindsight seems foolish, but it was also his job to help some of the children use the toilet, which included removing clothes.

The alternative to placing himself in that situation would be to work in a different industry, or at least leave the bathroom stuff to the women — but such a move makes a sexist assumption that men cannot be trusted with children. While statistics tell us child sex abusers are overwhelmingly male, that doesn’t mean women never abuse (they made up about 5% of aggravated child sex assault convictions in 2009-10) — and it certainly doesn’t mean all men should be treated with suspicion as a rule, while women, by definition of gender, are AOK.

While we seem to be turning a corner in regards to gender roles, with more men happy to wear the stay-at-home-dad badge, at the same time we seem increasingly okay with making the assumption that there’s something unnatural about a man spending time with a child — especially if it’s an older, single man. It’s a sad irony that two of contemporary society’s major anxieties effectively perpetuate each other: we’re anxious that kids, especially boys, lack father figures — but we’re so quick to judge those men who might otherwise fill the role that, in the interests of self-preservation, many will simply avoid it.

Child abuse is a very real and terrible threat, but discouraging men from playing an active role in the raising of kids is surely the last thing we should be doing — unless of course we actually want to make child raising women-only work.

WWPD (What Would a Paedophile Do)?

Given the prospect of child abuse and our anxieties about proper conduct, society is increasingly inviting us adults to think like child abusers — to begin to see children as potential sexual prey rather than just kids. Disturbingly, this mindset asks us to see ourselves as potential abusers, if only in the eyes of judgemental strangers.

We live in an era of constant reminders of child abuse that not only restrict everyday interactions between families and communities, but can also cause perfectly well-meaning adults to question their behaviour and read potential abuse into hugs, kisses, tickles, holding hands, physical play and bathtime. We have rules prohibiting parents from photographing their own children at a school swimming carnival; teens being warned that texting a photo of their boobs to a friend is technically child pornography; teachers being told never to hug a student or allow themselves to be alone in a room with less than two at a time; dads who won’t let other people’s children stay the night unless their female partner is home; people calling the police because a six-year-old being supervised by her grandfather is swimming nude at a public beach; and media beat-ups about clothes and toys that apparently ‘sexualise children’.