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Wall
Street Journal...
Eek! A Male!
Treating all men as potential predators doesn’t make our kids safer.
By Lenore Skenazy
Graphic from Corbis
Last week, the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, Timothy Murray,
noticed smoke coming out of a minivan in his hometown of Worcester. He
raced over and pulled out two small children, moments before the van’s
tire exploded into flames. At which point, according to the AP account,
the kids’ grandmother, who had been driving, nearly punched our hero in
the face.
Why?
Mr. Murray said she told him she thought he might be a kidnapper.
And so it goes these days, when almost any man who has anything to do
with a child can find himself suspected of being a creep. I call it
“Worst-First” thinking: Gripped by pedophile panic, we jump to the very
worst, even least likely, conclusion first. Then we congratulate
ourselves for being so vigilant.
Consider the Iowa daycare center where Nichole Adkins works. The one
male aide employed there, she told me in an interview, is not allowed
to change diapers. “In fact,” Ms. Adkins said, “he has been asked to
leave the classroom when diapering was happening.”
Now, a guy turned on by diaper changes has got to be even rarer than a
guy turned on by Sponge Bob. But “Worst-First” thinking means
suspecting the motives of any man who chooses to work around kids.
Maybe the daycare center felt it had to be extra cautious, to avoid
lawsuits. But regular folk are suspicious, too. Last February, a woman
followed a man around at a store berating him for clutching a pile of
girls’ panties. “I can’t believe this! You’re disgusting. This is a
public place, you pervert!” she said—until the guy, who posted about
the episode on a website, fished out his ID. He was a clerk restocking
the underwear department.
Given the level of distrust, is it any wonder that, as the London
Telegraph reported last month, the British Musicians’ Union warned its
members they are no longer to touch a child’s fingers, even to position
them correctly on the keys? Or that a public pool in Sydney, Australia
last fall prohibited boys from changing in the same locker room as the
men? (According to the Daily Telegraph in Sydney, the men demanded
this, fearing false accusations.)
What’s really ironic about all this emphasis on perverts is that it’s
making us think like them. Remember the story that broke right before
Christmas? The FBI warned law-enforcement agencies that the new Video
Barbie could be used to make kiddie porn. The warning was not intended
for the public but it leaked out. TV news celebrated the joy of the
season by telling parents that any man nice enough to play dolls with
their daughters could really be videotaping “under their little
skirts!” as one Fox News reporter said.
This queasy climate is making men think twice about things they used to
do unselfconsciously. A friend of mine, Eric Kozak, was working for a
while as a courier. Driving around an unfamiliar neighborhood, he says,
“I got lost. I saw a couple kids by the side of the road and rolled
down my window to ask, ‘Where is such-and-such road?’ They ran off
screaming.”
Another dad told me about taking his three-year-old to play football in
the local park, where he’d help organize the slightly older kids into a
game. Over time, one of the kids started to look up to him. “He wanted
to stand close to me, wanted approval, Dad stuff, I guess. And because
of this whole ‘stranger danger’ mentality, I could sense this sort of
wary disapproval from the few other parents at the playground. So I
just stopped going.”
And that’s not the worst. In England in 2006, BBC News reported the
story of a bricklayer who spotted a toddler at the side of the road. As
he later testified at a hearing, he didn’t stop to help for fear he’d
be accused of trying to abduct her. You know: A man driving around with
a little girl in his car? She ended up at a pond and drowned.
We think we’re protecting our kids by treating all men as potential
predators. But that’s not a society that’s safe. Just sick.
Ms. Skenazy is a public
speaker and author of the blog and book, “Free-Range Kids” (Wiley,
2010).
Read it at the Wall Street Journal
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