Is the internet turning the nanny state into a police state? Consider this entry posted on a US blogspot. 'McDonalds at Broadway and 70th in NYC. On Monday January 29 I saw: 1) Your nanny at approximately 9.30 AM with your 20-28-month-old boy. Curly, reddish hair, big brown eyes. Denim jacket and blue fleece. The nanny has a two-toned brown thigh-length coat with wool collar. African American, very short, straight hair, big eyes, mascara, attractive but strong features. 2) The nanny spoke by cellphone a number of times to people using street slang and referencing inappropriate topics. I have chosen not to recall what I heard here for fear that by merely recounting such I could offend someone.' The witness reports that the nanny took a call from her employer and claimed to be at the library looking at books, then finishes off, '4) Child did not seem to have any problem either being at McDonalds or with the nanny. He seems happy throughout.'
Such entries form a logbook for isawyournanny.blogspot.com. The website says its main purpose 'is to publish nanny sightings' - treating its subjects not so much like rare birds as like criminals on the run. Under its on-screen logo there's an image of an adult with a toddler on her back running back and forth, and one of a sandpit shovel, presumably digging the dirt. The biggest ads it carries are for nannycam companies.
In an age of bullying, stalking and reality TV, should we be surprised? In fact, this site is just part of a phenomenon known as 'community policing', or 'gang stalking', depending on how you feel about it. There is a growing number of such vigilante blogspots where anyone can report incidents of bad driving, bad parking, littering, dog fouling or talking loudly on a mobile phone in public.
Because this one is about the care of children, there is no limit to how self-righteous the tell-tales, or 'posters', can be. And because a sole nanny appears to be less trusted than a streetful of parking wardens, guilt can be presumed.
The most common crime reported is a carer not giving 100 per cent attention to a child 100 per cent of the time. It's not quite the same as another US web service, HowsMyNanny.com (see Professional Nanny, November 2006), where a registered number is attached to a child's buggy and sightings are reported to the parents confidentially, although that one risks the same pitfalls and misunderstandings. Posters to isawyournanny often can't tell whether the carer in question is a nanny, the child's mother, a friend or a relative, and it doesn't seem to bother them. They are anonymous and unaccountable.
Perhaps, as with most blogs, commenting back is the real attraction, as it opens up a platform for even more self-righteous debate. 'On the Q train in Brooklyn ... the way this nanny/au pair or mother behaved was unsuitable', says one poster, all because a toddler wasn't being allowed to nap in his buggy but being forced on to the train seat - 'I warn my friends about these au pairs, they are cheap but the care they give our children is the worst'. This gets the response: 'Shades of Louise Woodward, the au pair from the UK. If you think bringing au pairs in from the UK at the meagre wages paid and with the dodgy qualifications they provide is dangerous, in the UK they bring au pairs in from Pakistan and other places and these are mainly male as the women in those countries are for the most part stifled from anything remotely worldly. I shudder to think.'
At least it's a two-way street - on the blogspot nannies also defend themselves and their profession, and parents share their feelings. But maybe all it proves is that no childcarer can ever be considered good enough. When a mother describes her 'nanny from hell' experience, a dozen respondents all leap on the mother and condemn her for ever employing such a person. When someone makes a rare positive sighting, reporting good childcare practice, they leap on her too and accuse her of being a nanny writing about herself, so it must not be true ('She left off the description of herself!', 'We just know that all you nannies are the posters on any good nanny sighting! Why would anyone else make a post like that?'). The tell-tales are told off for not intervening in bad incidents.
And is it any different from some of the chat at a nanny circle get-together, which, let's admit it, sometimes descends into a bitchfest? Well, maybe not - but if an anxious mother scans the blogs looking for her own child and carer, and gets put off nannies in general; or if a good-enough nanny becomes identified and the blot on her reputation from spending five minutes on the phone or letting a child eat crisps, becomes an unofficial criminal record that keeps her from getting jobs - then things must have gone too far.
