Penny Booth: Hands on or off?

Two items struck me this week - child protection and surrogacy. Disparate? No linked.

The first issue is perhaps one of those virtually insoluble issues in family and child law which only seems to have increased its visibility in recent years. The issue of ‘don't touch' was in the Sunday Times this week with a short report on an Economic and Social Research Council funded piece of research on issues in sports coaching children and child protection.

The Manchester Metropolitan University research highlights the problems among sports bodies on the problem of (not) touching children and how the current anxiety and child protection concerns may lead to the opposite - child endangerment. That though serious is not the only thing being lost here. The report seems to indicate that many sports coaches and others involved in teaching children about sporting activities are worried. This presumably includes those other activities that may involve physically...

Read the full article here.