Running late for a mid-morning meeting the other week, I was passing my 4 ½-year-old’s primary school, and, to my delight, a wall of joyful squeals signalled it was playtime.
Realising I might see my boy, Sonny, trotting around, I stopped by the school fence, and being tall, peered over to have a look. Sonny started school last September, and my behaviour didn’t strike me as anything untoward.
But my actions were clearly far from acceptable in the eyes of an angry twenty-something bloke at a nearby bus stop.
“Oi," he snarled, "what the f--- are you doing, mate?”
“Trying to find my boy, Sonny, he’s in reception…” I blustered, as others at the bus stop took interest.
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“Oh yeah, a likely tale,” the man said. “F---in’ do one!”
The look on the faces of the other people at the bus stop said it all. Hovering around a school like that, standing on tip-toe to look at kids: it could only mean one thing, surely. I was some kind of pervert.
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.
Just last week we had front pages devoted the ongoing Harriet Harman hoo-hah, another agonising Madeline McCann lead, DLT’s retrial and yet more Jimmy Savile victims coming forward.
But it isn’t just MPs and DJs who are embroiled. The fear of being branded a paedophile is a cloud that hangs over every man in Britain, to a greater or lesser extent.
Child abduction is, of course, every parent’s worst nightmare, but how common is it really?
The latest crime figures for England and Wales, published by the Office for National Statistics, show 532 cases of attempted child abduction reported to police in 2011/12. That figure is down 3% on the previous year and much lower than the high of 1,035 cases in 2004/05.
Some 56% of all abductions are by strangers, the rest by (22.9%) parents and (21.1%) other family friends/associates.
Overall, there were 72 successful child abductions by strangers over that period.
While even one child abduction is one too many, the stark truth is that the chance of your child being snatched by a stranger has never been lower. The chances of your child encountering a flesh-and-blood paedophile in public (I'm not talking about the internet here, which is another story), is very low indeed.
Yet the fear of this heinous crime has never been higher – and it is ordinary men and fathers who are copping it, for tragically, this toxic cloud of fear now permeates every single corner of the man-child interface.
Who’d be a Cub Scout leader, children’s entertainer, a "manny" or even a Santa Claus these days?
But the most crushing manifestation of this fear is in our primary schools.
Official figures show that a mere 21 per cent of students who wanted to become teachers – around 4,100 – who were accepted into primary school training courses last September were men.
Why is this? Research by Nottingham Trent and Bedfordshire universities found the workforce was still skewed dramatically towards women as a result of deeply ingrained gender stereotypes, combined with fears that men will be falsely labelled as paedophiles.
This unfounded and tragic paranoia is having a real effect at ground level. During my search for a primary school place for Sonny last year, I was struck by a profound absence of male teachers. I spoke with nine head teachers in my area of south London, and all of them said they had a torrid time recruiting men. When they had them, they thankfully defended them as precious commodities.
Heads know youngsters benefit from positive male role models in the classroom, yet men are afraid to step up for fear of being labelled a child molester.
So the next time you see a lone man hovering near a school, don’t automatically fear the worst. While we should rightly be vigilant, that man might just be another busy dad who just wants to snatch a glance of his precious child.
It used to be fashionable among women at the more toxic end of the feminist spectrum to label all men as potential rapists. Now, it seems, we are all being labelled potential paedophiles. It's time men stood up and said that such labels are completely unacceptable.

paedophiles
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^ That's actually one of the better pics of Gerry.

Back before he went bald and put on a lot of weight.

^ are you obsessed with Gerrymanderer2? Do you wuv him?

Gerryloverer Wrote:
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> ^ are you obsessed with Gerrymanderer2? Do you wuv
> him?


I think so. Uncle Gerry said I did.