it is to easy for all of us to fall into trusting, believing and following our ingrained mental templates, beliefs and be overly swayed by our own experience. i struggle everyday at work with trying to completely listen to each person i work with and hear them honestly, not through my own world view,likes, dislikes, irritations,etc.

using your instincts and caution is a sensible thing to do to protect yourself. I’ve certainly tried to teach that to many young folk.

Does your condemnation of “collective guilt” lessen at all if it’s not an assumption that men in certain positions are secret abusers, but more a refusal to assume that he isn’t?

For example, I don’t actively suspect all men of being rapists, but I’m very well aware that some are and that it’s simply not safe or sensible for me to assume that I’m safe in the presence of a man who hasn’t proven himself trustworthy. That doesn’t mean that I twitch if a man so much as looks at me, but I will trust my instictive reactions to what he says and does and not stiffle them because he’s “probably a nice guy.”

I’m all for fair scrutiny (background checks, doubling up) for both men and women working with children. But it’s been my experience that the men who scream loudest about how afraid they are of being “falsely accused” of sexual harassment are the same men who behave, or would dearly like to behave, in a harassing manner.

The collective guilt issue is the one on which we agree, and thus I put “Predator” in line with crime reporting. When that sort of behavior is the type most shown of interaction between adult men and youths, without much in the way to counterbalance it outside of maybe Tyler Perry movies, it serves the same role of created a distorted public perception as does local news that shows most of its black and brown faces in mug shots.

Yes women were rounded up in the McMartin case. I cited that one as one of the earliest and most locally prominent (in Southern California) cases. No one, however, has gone from that or other cases of women involved in abusive or improper behavior to generally question and the motives of women involved with children.

I just wanted to say that the suspicion of men in these positions that Hugo highlighted works in concert with another negative perception, one that I think men often have of themselves, that says that we just might not have that much to contribute to kids. I thought that what Hugo said, about “being as Christ” to children, was a powerful statement, all hubris notwithstanding. That’s pretty confident about the positive role one can have.

I guess that I can only speak to my own experience. I’d considered Teach for America between undergrad and law school. One of the things that kept me from doing it I think, aside from feasibility with being married and geography and wanting to go ahead and get done with school, was not being sure that I could relate to students that age or offer anything relevant or productive to their experience, or maybe even that I would provide a poor example. I wasted my high school years badly, spent much of them in a haze drunk or loaded, and dropped out of high school my senior year. I only got back on the school wagon in my mid-20s, starting over at a JC. Add in that it meant teaching underprivileged kids in bad schools, who had problems of their own as it were, I wasn’t sure what good I could do with all that.

To “prove innocence” was a bad way to put what I meant to say. You’re exactly right about not being able to prove a negative and I spoke incorrectly. When I think of the only thing men with good intentions can do to engender trust, I think of what Hugo is talking about: living openly, accepting the apprehensions of some and being dedicated to doing good work anyway because you know your motives are good. Children need good men in their lives as much as they need good women.

I’m particularly sensitive about abusive men being in positions of power over children. The man that raped me when I was 14 has a degree in social work, is now going to school for a degree in psychiatric nursing and works as an RN in the child and adolescent ward of a mental hospital. When I came forward to the police, nothing came of it, so of course he doesn’t have a criminal record. Most of the people I’ve known personally who have abused children and women don’t have a criminal record and probably never will.

There was certainly a hysteria in the 80’s resulting from the big mcmartin style abuse cases, which almost certainly were modern witch hunts.however in at some of those case (i’m to lazy to do the research now) many women were also caught and falsely convicted.

False allegations, mass hysteria’s, highly questionable cases do harm to the movement to stop child abuse. Advocates who fight against abuse should be up front about swatting down the bad cases so that they don’t get in the way of the large majority of true reports.

Jenny-It’s impossible to prove innocence. you cant’ prove a negative. that is a scary concept.

Full disclosure- i was a child therapist of three years in a majority female agency. i never sensed a general suspicion or collective guilt applied to any of the men there. we were happy to have anybody come to work for us given the crappy wages most people who work with mentally ill children get paid. and of course we did back ground checks. in fact in 20 years or so in mental health/social services i have never had anybody with a sex offense try to get a job let alone be caught by a back ground check. the only person who did ever, i think, do anything hinky with a kid was a catholic pastoral minister.

As regards the quote as to reasonable and rational behavior, we have to take that thinking full-circle. It is fully rational and reasonable as well for men to avoid positions around children when the culture is flashing, in big-bright-red-flashing-neon: “BEWARE! POTENTIAL ABUSER!” That’s the reason that I mentioned “To Catch a Predator”. It serves the same role that sensationalist news coverage of crime, which covers actual crimes committed with actual victims, tends to lead to racial profiling and suspicion of people who are in no way involved with criminal behavior. More men could “accept the burden of proving their innocence”, but not many will. Indeed, that would be an irrational and unreasonable response, with few rewards, much effort invested in the course of constantly accepting that burden and potentially much bitterness resulting, and very, very much at risk in the case, likely or not, of a false accusation. Everyone is acting very rationally, society by being suspicious of men working with children, and men by avoiding those positions. In game theory terms, what we have here is a Nash equilibrium: no one has any incentive to change their position, and so the current solution persists.

I hate all the steam about “false accusations”. People really over-blow men having their “lives ruined” by communities throwing their support behind people who made stuff up. You know how hard it is for communities to resist standing up for a victim abused by a trusted member of the town/church/family. Victims of abuse just have their doors being broken down with support. Seriously, though, it has probably happened, real innocent men put through the ringer. But what’s the much bigger problem is people ignoring abuse or refusing to believe a victim when they come forward. That’s what I’ve seen, communities and families who just want a complaint to go away and cops that tell you how hopeless a case is before they’re even done taking a statement. Then the cycle continues and more children’s lives are destroyed, the silence or not being believed sometimes hurting more than the abuse.

People joke about To Catch a Predator. These people, coming to meet 12/13/14yo girls over the internet, those ARE predators. I’ve known people that do that and they’re dangerous. Hugo is right that the constant suspicion of people toward men working with kids is a totally rational response to the way things are:

“But the reason we don’t have that world is not because the world is unreasonable; it’s because the world is very reasonably responding to the sad reality of bad male sexual behavior.”

Maybe if more men accepted the burden of proving their innocence by an open, honest life and not accepting abusive behavior toward others from other men, people would become less suspicious over time.

That being said though, all of those cultural messages that you cited that proclaim male weakness, perfidy, and menace have created a chilling environment as regards men who would consider working or volunteering in positions around young people. Those messages, the “Catch a Predator” theme in the culture today, has everyone primed and alert for any appearance of abuse. Despite all the background checks and investigations, all it takes is one false accusation to put a man’s entire reputation, his career, and potentially his freedom on the line. We’ve known this since the McMartin / Buckey case in the 1980s, that there really isn’t any way to “prove yourself innocent” once things start. It’s a game of Russian roulette, and one false move means it’s all over.

So while I applaud your courage, I really think that we need to understand why so few men do volunteer for these positions. It’s a rational response to the cultural environment we face.