Serial Killers Need Not Apply

Apparently, you can't go into a hardware-type store and buy a machete-like gardening implement any more.  Personally, I blame those bloody slasher movies.  Clearly, these High Street outlets are worried at the prospect of Micheal Myers or Jason Vorhees coming in incognito and buying one for their next massacres, resulting in bad publicity for the shop.  (Although they could just implement a policy of not serving anyone wearing a hockey mask or white spray painted William Shatner mask).  Although mentioning either of those slasher icons to a weekend member of staff will undoubtedly elicit blank looks - I don't know what is wrong with the youth of today, don't they watch video nasties any more?  I seem to recall that when I was young, watching this stuff was a rite of passage.  Or rather, trying to watch them, as the most interesting sounding ones always seemed to get banned in the UK.  The trouble these days is that this sort of stuff is too easy to get: most of the so called video nasties have all been released on DVD and even Blu-Ray now.  In fact, you can see a lot of them on streaming services.  Back in the day, we frequently had to be tantalised by reading about them in specialist publications rather than being able to actually see them.  Which brings me, by a very roundabout route, to my main point.  Way back then, in the nineties if I recall correctly, there was a publication called Samhain, which focused on gore movies.  It was really a very sophisticated fanzine put out by one guy.  Unfortunately, it landed him in the middle of a media-inspired moral panic.  His day job involved working with children - the magazine was basically a hobby - and someone in the media found out his real identity and decided to make an issue out of the fact that he wrote about gory horror movies, the implication being that this somehow made him unfit to work with kids.

Now, while it is clearly absurd to make the leap from someone liking a particular genre of film to them being a potential threat to children, in the febrile atmosphere of the early nineties, with all the recent video nasties and satanic child abuse moral panics, (with either or both being blamed for every child murder or instance of peadophilia), this stuff took on a life of its own.  It seems all the more absurd bearing in mind that, even in the nineties, in order to get a job involving working with children you had to undergo some form of vetting, to establish that you weren't some kind of random child molestor or pervert, or had a history of violence.  Of course, such vetting focuses mainly upon criminal records checks, (because, strangely enough, the actively criminal usually have a record of arrest and convictions), rather than what hobbies someone might have, so the fanzine might well have been news to this guy's employers.  But it was, essentially, irrelevant to his job. It was done on his own time and was his private business.  I was put in mind of this incident recently as I was filling in an application form for a teaching agency - aside from all the usual details, it started getting pretty intrusive, wanting details of stuff like social media accounts and questions about past work history that, frankly, I'm not prepared to answer.  (Any problems I had in a non-teaching job more than twenty years ago are, as far as I'm concerned, ancient history that I'm entitled not to want raked up again.  It had nothing to do with any kind of criminal activity and is entirely irrelevant to any present employment - especially after two decades and several further jobs with no similar problems).  

The social media questions once again vindicated my decision never to use my actual name on such accounts.  A simple web search of my real name won't turn up any social media activity.  Likewise, my websites are all under assumed names - you can guarantee that, although they have nothing to do with any job I'm likely to do, there will be prospective employers who would make judgements about me on the basis of my writing satire and/or about exploitation movies.  I've observed before how, increasingly, the web seems to make it impossible for any past misdemeanours and indiscretions to be forgotten, let alone allow us to have any part of our lives separate and private from our working lives, or even the rest of the world.  The whole concept of people learning from their mistakes and moving on seems, consequently, to have been nullified.  But surely we all have the right to be able to leave our pasts behind, (provided, obviously, that it doesn't involve genocide and other crimes against humanity, maybe even Summer Camp massacres), to be given the benefit of the doubt and assumption that we might have learned and changed?  Even convicted murderers are sometimes released on licence and given a second chance, after all.  I know that prospective employers, particularly in the education sector, have to act responsibly and carry out checks on prospective employees, but the fact is that, in the UK, we actually have in place an official system for doing this, which I have no problem being subjected to, (I've been through it several times in the past, both for jobs and teacher training and it never turns up anything because there is nothing to turn up), but this particular application process feels like it is being too intrusive into areas of my life and past that have no relevance to the prospective employment in question.  But it is merely a reflection of the way that our culture has become data obsessed, driven, no doubt, by the examples of Facebook and Google, that seek more and more personal information, usually for no good reason, other than selling to marketers.  But we are, surely, entitled to some privacy, aren't we?