In the Independent, Claire argues that whistleblower hotlines risk creating a paranoid, fragmented workforce
Some 500 authors have this week spoken out about the capacity of the intelligence agencies to spy on millions of people’s digital communications. They have a point when they argue that this is “turning everyone into potential suspects”. Yet maybe the authors should look more widely than the obvious spying of state surveillance. More worrying is the tendency for the authorities to recruit us all to become spies of each other – to view every innocent interaction through the prism of distrust and suspicion.
Remember how Othello, who “thinks men honest”, is driven to distraction and ultimately murder by listening to unfounded rumours planted by Iago. Tragically today we have a whole army of people encouraging us to be suspicious.
Look at what they have been up to in recent weeks. No longer satisfied that society now routinely suspects that any adult being nice to children might be Jimmy Savile in disguise, Sue Berelowitz, the Deputy Children’s Commissioner for England, wants us to be suspicious of children’s treatment of each other, claiming that child-on-child rape is part of everyday life. Irresponsible hyperbole about “chilling” levels of sexual “sadism”, rife not just in inner-city gangs but “affluent middle class areas” and “church schools”, can only lead to paranoid parents becoming destructively suspicious of every innocent teen romance. Mums everywhere will worry that while Henry might look like the nice boy next door, who knows what he’s subjecting Sophie to on a date. Dads could be forgiven for locking up their daughters to protect them from the rape and pillage allegedly occurring at every school disco.
Or there’s Clare’s Law, which allows us all to apply to the police for information on a partner’s history of domestic violence. Of course domestic abuse is vile, but do we really want a society in which before we embark on a relationship, we rush off to check whether our loved one is really a secret wife-beater? And then there’s the supposed hidden epidemic of modern slavery. Based on one high-profile but distinctly odd episode, the Home Secretary Theresa May declared that slaves are “cowering behind the curtains in an ordinary street…”, working in our local “factories or nail bars”.
Read the full article here.