Frank Furedi

Why supermarkets are off their trolleys
Over-zealous retailers won’t let parents buy booze — or sometimes even cheese — any more. Why is mistrust our default? By Carol Midgley.

Squatting at the foot of a giant, plastic slide, waiting for my daughter to descend I heard a sudden, unpleasant noise in my ear. “No photographs! No photographs allowed!” shrieked a voice. I looked up to see a security person wearing a facial expression that could have curdled chip fat.

“But this is my own child and there’s no one else around,” I stuttered. It was no use. “Please turn off your camera phone — now,” she replied in the tone a policeman might use to talk down a hijacker. “And tell your kid that running up slides isn’t permitted either.”

Ah, yes — another magical day in a children’s “fun” centre. Where every child is a possible liability case, every adult a potential kiddie-fiddler. Whoopee. Treasure the memories, folks.

Still, it could have been worse. I could have been Gill Power-Forward, 56, doing my weekly shop at Asda in Poole, Dorset and being made to feel like a character from Shameless. Mrs Power, upon packing her carrier bags, found that they were a bit heavy so asked her 14-year-old son, Andrew, to carry one out to the car.

Big mistake. The cashier stepped in and refused to let the teenager touch it. Why? Because the bag contained a bottle of wine and Andrew is “under-age”. Yes, allowing a minor to lift a bottle of Piat d’Or is now apparently tantamount to chopping him or her a line of coke. Well, you can’t be too careful: one minute your kid is carrying your shopping, the next he’s sucking on a crack pipe and shoving turds through OAPs’ letterboxes. Asda later said that its staff had been “overly cautious”.

If you thought that incident was a farcical one-off, you’d be wrong. Ask Jackie Slater, a management consultant from Leeds who popped into her local Morrisons last week for some groceries. When the checkout assistant came to scan two bottles of wine, she demanded to see some ID. Slater said this was all very flattering but actually she was the wrong side of 50. Incorrect answer. The cashier pointed to her daughter, 17 and niece, 18, who were standing nearby. “You could be buying the wine for them,” she said. “I have to see everyone’s ID to make sure they are all over 18.”

After an embarrassing scene in which the manager was called, a queue formed and Slater was still refused her alcohol, she left empty-handed. “We take our responsibility with regard to selling alcohol very seriously,” said a Morrison’s spokesman.

Right. We’ll gloss over the obvious fact that it would have been perfectly legal for both these mothers to go home and pour their teenagers a glass of wine, and focus on the bigger question. Why are these companies making grand public gestures concerning under-age drinking when they’ll be as effectual as a one-legged man in an arse-kicking contest?

Of course big supermarkets are worried about protecting their licences but if they really want to help to stop minors binge-drinking, how about, say, they stop selling own-brand lager at £2.20 for 20 bottles (Asda website), less than it costs to buy a packet of crisps, or put four bottles of cider on offer at £2 (Morrisons website)?

Why not go a step farther and stop adults buying newspapers, lest their kids catch a glimpse of the racing pages? Or protect unborn babies by refusing to sell pregnant women cheese. Oh, hold on — that’s already happened. Last week a deli-counter assistant at Sainsbury’s told Janet Lehain, who is pregnant with her third child, that she shouldn’t eat Canadian cheddar (the assistant was wrong). Lehain called it “the most patronising encounter I have had the misfortune of experiencing”.

A children’s play centre may congratulate itself that it is being vigilant by monstering parents who take photos of kids at play, but can someone answer me this — what possible harm can come of photographing fully clothed children in a ball pool? Or even swimming in a local baths? Any pervert could get far more “revealing” pictures on a public beach or municipal park on a long lens. Every year schools offer class photos in which every child is clearly pictured. But none of this logic seems to matter. Being seen to do something is seemingly all that counts.

The sociologist Frank Furedi says that by criminalising the photographing of children we reveal a culture that regards virtually every childhood experience from the standpoint of a paedophile. In a roundabout way, he says, we normalise paedophilia: the default position is always to expect the worst.

As we approach the run-up to Christmas, the season of school concerts, sweet nativity plays, parties and visits to Santa’s grotto, we can expect paranoia to escalate. Some schools and organisations already ban parents from taking pictures of their children on stage; party volunteers must be CRB-checked; the idea of a child sitting atop Father Christmas’s knee in a glittery cavern is now largely unthinkable and in many department stores has been replaced with a wary-looking Santa handing out presents in a strip-lit room.

This year we have seen the ultimate taboo — the case of Vanessa George, the blubber-faced nursery worker who took pictures of babies and toddlers in her care being sexually abused by her on her mobile phone — so things are likely to deteriorate still further. If the relationship between the generations was already damaged, George’s vile crimes — if you can’t trust a female nursery worker, who can you trust? — will poison them like strychnine. And yet, let’s not forget, Vanessa George had passed CRB checks. In the end, that safeguard did nothing to protect those poor victims.

So, if that measure proved impotent you have to ask what possible use humiliating adults in supermarkets and banning them from photographing their own toddler on a swing will be in making the world a nicer place. It is so tangential as to be laughable — like trying to cure the national obesity problem by banning chilli sauce from doner kebabs. The only kind of world it creates is one completely devoid of common sense.

Now, if you’ll excuse me I must hurry. Me and the five-year-old are off to Booze Buster.

First published by The Times (London), 15 October 2009