ABSTRACT
Our concluding chapter ends with a call for a more ethical practice, one that encourages professionals not to slavishly follow ‘no touch’ guidelines, but to put touch back into context (i.e. relationships) and take account of trust and friendships. It is argued that we need to think through notions of ‘free touch’ just as much as we would ‘free speech’. This is no call for licence, but it is a call for recognition that any system that prioritises bureaucratic constraint over ‘freedom’ introduces a regime of unfreedoms that then develop – through a series of ‘ratchet effects’ – a kind of creeping totalitarianism, not to mention a galloping fatuity.1 However, arguably such appeals are more easily made than translated into action in the social contexts which have already fostered the moral panic evident in practice. We have sought to trouble the isolation of touch as a discrete phenomenon, and questioned the use of such metonymic philosophising (and practice). Simultaneously, and perhaps somewhat paradoxically, we pointed to an under-theorisation of touch compared with other senses (and behaviours), most specifically ‘sight’ (which we attempted to begin to rectify in Chapter 5). Through the practice of taking touch as a discrete phenomenon and out of context, it has become fetishised and therefore very much part of any problem which it seeks to redress.
