Maybe something more contemporary like, “If you see something, go back to looking at your smartphone like everyone else.”
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Some years ago my workplace sent us on a short child safety course, taken by a local police officer. He showed us graphs of instances of child abuse, both general abuse and sexual abuse, each graph consisting of maybe nine or ten pairs of columns, the first always higher (sometimes much higher) than the second, and the lengths tending downward from high at the left to near-invisibility at the far right of the graph.
These were cases of convictions for child abuse in our local big city, sorted by closeness of relationship to the child and by gender of the offender. So the first column was the father of the child; the second, shorter one was the mother. Next up were siblings, uncles and aunts, step-parents… and so on (with a slight spike near the end for neighbours), with actual strangers at the near-invisible end of the graph.
The police officer was quite honest: “We know that nearly all abuses, both general and sexual, of children are done by a relative - which isn’t that surprising, because these are the people with most opportunity. But we go round the schools warning children of general dangers, including stranger danger, because you can’t go telling children not to trust their own family.”
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I would say this is a case of ‘Men are hurt by the Patriarchy too’ and not an MRA thing.
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I used to work for a kid’s party place, and sometimes the cheap stamps we’d give families would wash off. But I wasn’t supposed to let people leave without checking first. So I’d ask the kid “Does this grownup belong to you?” Everyone thought that was funny, so parents didn’t get mad, and the kid would laugh and say “That’s uncle Steve!”[quote=“Mister44, post:12, topic:75248”]
My ex has instructed my daughter that if she is lost, to find a mommy - a women with a child - to help.
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I told my kids to find someone with a stroller. The odds of getting someone who has just stolen a different kid are probably nil, right?[quote=“anansi133, post:14, topic:75248”]
men should get to ask for equality in childrearing. If women need to point to that disparity in the workplace before it can be acted on, men have the same need to point this one out as well. I hope that doesn’t make me sound like a Men’s Right’s Activist, just because they sometimes also say that.
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No, because this is very firmly a feminist topic. The idea that women are “natural” caregivers is patriarchal. It’s benevolent sexism, but it’s still sexist.
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This. I’ve been on a TTC bus with the cops on the way. While the TTC driver doesn’t have the authority to hold anyone, they typically announced that the police are coming and everyone has to stay. And because this is Canada, most people comply. The only ones who don’t are usually the belligerent drunks who caused the bus to be stopped in the first place (sigh), but hey, at least then they’re not on the bus bothering people anymore.
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His civil rights were not necessarily trampled upon for this one time, isolated incident. But if people start calling the cops on a “better safe than sorry” basis all the freaking time, how often does it have to happen before he’s being harassed?
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Also Sense8 has a lesbian couple, one of whom is a trans woman. In fact, it might be a spoiler, but the only healthy, stable romantic relationships in that show are the gay ones.
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believe what you will about my misanthropy, at least it’s not an ethos.
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To each their own. Just didn’t want to give the mistaken impression that I was agreeing with your whole comment. I do suspect that most people know what an albino is, and that humans can be albinos. Granted most probably don’t know congenital melanin deficiency is the culprit, but that hardly makes them stupid IMO.
Arguing semantics sometimes seems worth it to me. Calling this a feminist issue, makes me wonder if gay men who want to adopt, must use a feminist umbrella to get their issue heard. If they’re men who want little or nothing to do with women, must they become feminists to ask for the right to care for children?
I’m slightly less bothered by the rhetoric about “The Patriarchy”, but not by much. Patriarchy makes me think of stern republican father figures. Growing up without a dad has altered that symbolism for me, and I’m not alone here.
At some point, I think it’s necessary for progressives to worry less about what they’re pushing away from, and to think more about what we’re trying to create. Yes, history is essential. But simply opposing a thing doesn’t automatically mean you are supporting an alternative. (Just look at the tea party!)
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More specifically, I was comparing the risk potential of a specific outcome between two different groups (Mainly the odds of a man or a woman being a child predator, which, as you mentioned, is significant, say a 2:1 ratio), to the overall absolute risk for an entire category of negative outcomes (getting kidnapped by a child predator).
The odds of getting kidnapped by a child predator who is also a stranger (based on Canadian stats, anyway) is so vanishingly small as to render the differences in the gender of the perpetrator irrelevant.
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In light of the danger of teaching kids to be sexist, I agree. However, if there were literally no cost to taking the smallest possible precaution, the insignificant becomes relevant, IMHO. Because all else being equal, why go right when you can shave two centimeters of the same journey going left?
If we’re personally active in supporting these stereotypes, sure. Otherwise we have as many female ancestors as male ones, and we all inherit the world we are born into.
I’ve actually accompanied a kid who wasn’t my son on the bus. I wasn’t as worried as this culture isn’t as suspicious of men, but I did speak extra loudly when I had a call from his mother. He was fine and he knows me well, but he kept asking where she was as it wasn’t normal for her not to pick him up. It felt really awkward and I did have a couple of people looking at me, but oddly enough I never have this issue with my ethnic Chinese son (it may just have been because I was talking fairly loudly on the phone). I do have the kids’ photos on my keychain though, just in case
Where people are arguing from good faith, a lot of MRA issues are valid and addressed by feminism. Unfortunately sometimes they’re cynically raised by MRAs to dismiss feminism, or cynically dismissed by feminists as MRA points.
I think if it were more equal, you would hear more from people who had been abused by women in the past, or where it’s discovered you would see women involved more often. Where you hear of sexual abuse in places like schools, kindergartens or religious centres, it’s still often a man despite the fact that most adults interacting with kids are women. There is a different perception of women and men who have sex with teenagers, but I don’t think you would have any of that effect at a very young age.
On the other hand, there has been a significant increase in stay at home fathers and more equality in caring jobs without a corresponding spike in abuse cases, so gender alone doesn’t seem to be all that significant as a factor.
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As an amusing aside, NASA made a great blog post as to why they “only” use 15 digits of pi for their calculations.
Which is to say, there is a point where being technically correct doesn’t offer a commensurate result to justify the effort.
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I worked as a preschool teacher for three years - I was the only man working in the building for that time - and at least twice, when taking my lunch break outside the school building to get some fresh air, I had a cop come ask me to move along until I showed him my teacher ID.
On the one hand, that was shitty. On the other hand, Men make up a tiny fraction of early childhood workers, yet make up the overwhelming majority of abusers of children, so there are larger systemic problems at play beyond simple stereotyping.
Eh, I figure it’s par for the course. I certainly remember my very young child having a freakout when I had to change him in a public bathroom in a department store. It was messy, there was barely enough room in the handicapped stall and my pre-verbal son made his unhappiness very clear.
I got a knock at the door just as I was finishing to be greeted by 2 security guards and 3 very concerned women. My first thought was “and here I was wondering how this day could get any worse.”
However, I explained the screams and I must have had my underslept father look on high because they didn’t call the police. I also pointed out that it was the new millennium, so perhaps a change table in the men’s washroom wasn’t completely out of the question. Anyway, I thanked them for their concern for my son. Sure it’s a bit inconvenient, but they are doing it out of best interest for my son, so I forgive a lot.
And frankly, I am part of the far more dangerous sex, so I do expect a little profiling. It’s not as if we white males don’t hold almost all the cards in life anyway, so it’s a bit silly to feel the victim.
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I wouldn’t think of myself as a victim If I were profiled, but I do find it a ridiculous idea and I think this attitude is a really ineffective way of dealing with risk. People aren’t uniformly dangerous, and there are big statistical differences between people from one country and another, between people from different ethnic or social backgrounds in one country, or between different generations of the same demographic. Where it’s not legitimate to give people the side eye if they’re from certain ethnic groups, it should be reasonable not to suspect men with children when that’s all they’re doing. Make it easier for men to look after children by placing changing facilities in men’s bathrooms, letting them have family friendly hours or look after the kids at home, welcoming them and their children in public and working to change the culture, and children will actually be safer and happier. Where there is abuse, take it seriously and deal with those people, but profiling people based on their gender or ethnicity isn’t going to help anyone.
Having said that, people are really welcoming where I am. There are a few cases of non-familial abuse, but these have usually either been prevented by other people or got a lot worse than they needed to be because the police failed to take specific warning signs seriously. It hasn’t all been men at all. I feel safer for my kids both because I know I won’t be profiled just because I’m a man with a child who doesn’t look like me, and because I know that if someone does threaten one of my children when I’m not there, there’s a good chance that others will be looking out for them too.
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Interesting to watch every try to fit this story into their world views. I read most of the replies, and no one mentioned what I think was really going on here, which is that this lady finds albinism to be off-putting. This is just stupidity. Nothing more to see here.
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