Bark, don’t bite

Modern life is full of terror. We quake at global warming, Arab terrorists, gene-tinkered foods and rogue vaccines. New plagues from the East, our mobile phones and our railways all have the ability to induce panic. These are all new fears of new things. And all, to a greater or lesser extent, are irrational.

But there is another, and I would argue even greater and more insidious, fear that has crept up on us in the past 20 years or so. The object of this fear is not new; but the fear itself is. And it is making life for a significant number of us quite miserable. What is it that we are frightened of? Children – especially other people’s.

It is an extraordinary fact, but it seems to be the case that across much of Britain, particularly urban Britain, adults have become scared of the young. There are, so far as I know, no statistics to measure this particular fear, but anecdotally it seems pretty clear that the sight of a few scruffy and noisy ten-year-olds approaching down the street is enough to engender a cold-sweat panic in a surprising number of otherwise sane, sensible and able-bodied grown-ups.