ABSTRACT
This chapter offers an introduction to key issues around touching behaviours that are encountered by professionals working with young people. The research initiative began with small-scale pilot research projects in 2000-2 that helped to identify the nature of the problem. Typically a primary school teacher had remarked: ‘Physical contact could be misconstrued by a child, parent/carer, or observer . . . it is unwise to attribute touching to the style of work or way of relating to pupils’ (Piper 2002). In practice, getting it right involved guesswork: ‘I was afraid to ask for guidance and was trying to gauge “correct” touch behaviour from observation’ (Smith 2000). Repeated injunctions in education and other settings included always having a second adult to witness intimate care routines, minimising the cuddling of young children, and even requiring particular ways of doing this, such as a sideways cuddle so as to avoid any full-frontal contact. These concerns were not confined to the UK and had also been discussed in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand in terms of a moral panic (Tobin 1997), a product of risk society (McWilliam and Jones 2005), and as a consequence of a litigious culture (Furedi 2002a). As a result, many child-orientated arenas were rapidly becoming ‘no touch’ zones (see Johnson 2000, for example).1
