Archive for the 'Emotional and Sexual Boundaries' Category

Yet another post on men, suspicion, youth ministry, and cheerfully proving one’s innocence

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 19, 2008
in Emotional and Sexual Boundaries, Men's Movement, Sexual harassment, Youth and Youth ministry
. 29 Comments

A reader, responding to the thread below this reprint, writes:

…talking about false allegations keeping men out of these fields (working with kids) and referencing things like To Catch a Predator and the McMartin / Buckey case to make out like the fear of abuse is totally overblown really hurts, you know? I try not to let things bother me. I’ve had to stop reading certain blogs because of the prominence of thinking that downplays the reality of child sex abuse… For someone to portray what concern that exists now as hysteria makes me feel invisible. For almost every woman I’ve known well enough to have a personal conversation with and almost every female family member, this is a big part of their reality, part of their life story.

I wasn’t able to do much moderating while I was in New York, and perhaps I ought to have weighed in a bit. Whenever I’ve posted about working with youth, and particularly about working with underage teens (see this category archive), men’s rights activists tend to show up in the comment threads. They often show up to give me a “friendly” warning that I risk being hit with a false accusation, or to lament what they see as a broader cultural climate that is deeply distrustful of men who work with young folks. As I said in this post and many others, the collective bad behavior of a great many men (not just a few “bad apples”) has led to a justifiable degree of suspicion on the part not only of the survivors of abuse but on the part of parents, communities, and the broader culture. My two-fold point has always been the same:

a. I welcome the opportunity to “prove myself safe” through a repeated willingness to submit to scrutiny, a scrupulous willingness not to be entirely alone with a minor, and a cheerful and undefensive willingness to answer questions about my actions and my pedagogy from any stakeholder in the community.

b. At the same time, I’m going to be fearless about being warm, loving, and where appropriate (and sometimes, it is very appropriate) physically affectionate with young people of both sexes. Good youth ministry with any group of teens is impossible without an environment in which non-sexual, affirming, touch is available. Continue reading ‘Yet another post on men, suspicion, youth ministry, and cheerfully proving one’s innocence’

“I’m not a creep”: on male-female mentoring and the wisdom of openly disavowing sexual interest: UPDATED

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 2, 2008
in Emotional and Sexual Boundaries, Favorite Posts 2008, Mentoring, Teaching, WAM 2008 and Youth
. 28 Comments

Another issue that came up in Saturday’s WAM session on “breaking the hold of the Old Boys Club” was that of mentoring. Ann Friedman brought up the often-problematic, often-rewarding experience of being mentored by older men. In her field, journalism, the majority of senior writers and editors are male; it simply wouldn’t be possible for her to seek out only women as mentors, as there aren’t enough of them around yet. Though the topic came up only briefly, several of the women on the panel talked about being hit on by “creepy” older men, but also about having had very kind, safe, nurturing older fellows play a welcome and vital role in their professional growth.

One of the things Ann said, before we moved on to other subjects, was something like “It’s difficult for a man, as a mentor, to send the right signal about his willingness to mentor a younger woman. Should he come right out and say ‘I’m not hitting on you, but I am interested in working with you’, or should he leave it alone? That’s a hard one.” Everyone else agreed, and since the topic of the workshop was not “how can older men safely mentor younger women”, we moved on to other things. After all, I was the only man over 25 in the whole auditorium.

I divide my mentoring work into multiple categories. In various church settings, I’ve worked with teens and young adults as a volunteer youth pastor. Here at the college, I’ve mentored students and, increasingly, junior colleagues. The mentoring with students is both academic and personal. Because I teach gender studies, and offer courses on emotionally charged, sensitive subjects like sexuality, GLBTQ history, and “the body”, I have an obligation to be present for students as they work through the various issues that these classes can bring up inside of them. Any given semester, I would guess that I’m actively mentoring around a dozen current students, as well as current and former youth group kids. Some come to my office hours, I meet others — when I can — for coffee and lunch.

Off the top of my head, I’d say two-thirds of the people I mentor are women. Pasadena City College is already 56% female, and my gender studies courses — from whose ranks most of my mentees come — are 70-90% female. Add in the cultural forces that make it more likely for women to ask for help when they need it, and it makes good sense that the majority of my mentees would be female. Most of my mentees are, these days, young enough to be my children. The students I am working closest with this year were born between 1986-89, the years in which I was a college student. Continue reading ‘“I’m not a creep”: on male-female mentoring and the wisdom of openly disavowing sexual interest: UPDATED’

Jack and Jill again: a response to Father Figure about mentoring and attraction

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 28, 2007
in Emotional and Sexual Boundaries, Favorite posts 2007, Mentoring, Older Men & Younger Women, Teaching, Youth and Youth ministry
. 3 Comments

It’s genuinely flattering that I get several e-mails a week from people who have read my posts and are asking me for input on issues ranging from chinchilla care to student crushes to youth ministry to older men/younger women relationships. I want to make it clear to those who do write me, however, that I assume all unsolicited email is “bloggable”. I am not able to offer replies or advice outside of the format of this blog. I will, of course, change names and details in order to protect the writer’s anonymity. That seems a fair policy.

Got an email last week from a fellow who calls himself Father Figure. Father Figure is married, and though he doesn’t specify his age, seems to be forty-something (I take great delight in calling myself a forty-something these days). He writes:

You seem to be very perceptive on the area of
crushes developing on mentor/father figures.

How does the mentor/father
figure disengage from such a relationship as he sees
himself being attracted to the young woman [half his
age!] who’s paying so much attention to him?

The last three years have been among the worst of
my life, mainly from being unable to forget about the
attention that this young woman gave to me for a few
months, but also from incredible guilt for the way
that I totally broke off contact with her. Even now I
tend to feel that if I see a mutual friend, I should
casually inquire about her, not so much because I want
to know, but out of concern that if the conversation
gets relayed back to her, it will hurt her that I
didn’t even ask about her. Her own father died or
left the home when she was a young girl, and it seems
that in some ways she related to me as a sort of
“safe” father-type figure. The problem was that I
fell for her, and so I found the only way to deal with
my feelings was to stop contact. But my breaking off
contact [when we had been fairly close friends] must
have come across to her as rejection of her as a
person. Hence, my profound feeling of guilt.

It’s a painful situation for Father Figure, and clearly equally painful (if not more so) for the young woman whom he has pushed out of his life.

My first thought is that those of us who do enjoy mentoring young people have an obligation to set strong boundaries with ourselves. I meet with and mentor a small group of young people; some are former students and some are former “youth groupers.” I mentor both men and women. One of my chief jobs as a mentor is to never, ever forget that my relationship with my mentees is one of mutual respect, but not one of mutual support. I am there for them in a way that they cannot and should not be there for me. In my relationships with my mentees, I make very little mention of my private life (less, in most cases, than I do on this blog). When I do talk about myself, it is usually only in order to share an anecdote from my past that may prove helpful to the mentee.

The mentor/mentee boundary is not as rigid as that between therapist and patient. No one is on a couch, and there’s no strict psychological protocol to observe. But I always remember that this young man or this young woman with whom I am sitting in my office or drinking coffee under a tree here on campus is there as an opportunity for me to be of service. My mentees are not potential “best friends forever”. That doesn’t mean I don’t like them, and heck, it doesn’t preclude me from starting to care very deeply for some of them. I love working with young people; it gives me a great sense of purpose and satisfaction to do so. But my students are not my dearest friends, and I don’t confide in my mentees as they confide in me. That’s not about power, that’s about respect for boundaries.

I wrote a long time ago about the story of Michael Gee, an adjunct professor and journalist who was fired from his teaching position after posting to a website his feeling that one of his female students was “incredibly hot.” As part of that post, I wrote about how we as teachers and mentors can respond to students whose bodies might be distracting to us. I wrote about an old student of mine named “Jack”, whose cigarette stench and body odor made our office hours together difficult; I wrote about “Jill”, whose unusually revealing clothing posed a different challenge. Jack and Jill were wonderful students, solid “A” students, both interested in having me mentor them. Jack’s smell was burdensome; Jill’s state of near-perpetual underdressedness posed a similar problem. With both students, my job was the same: to not allow their bodies to become my focus. I made a conscious effort to be there for Jack in all of his malodorousness, and to keep my eyes on Jill’s face. I’m not an instructor in grooming, fashion, or deportment; if I am only able to be present for those who are bathed and reasonably covered up, then I am a piss-poor mentor and teacher and ought not to be in this job. I learned a lot from Jack and Jill.

Perhaps it’s because I’m happily married, perhaps it’s because I’ve worked so hard to establish excellent boundaries, perhaps it’s because I’m in my forties now — but for whatever reason, I don’t any longer have the trouble “Father Figure” has had with this woman he mentored. That’s the result of some hard work on my part, and also the result of being willing to ask for grace to come into my life and guide my mentoring relationships.

With the Jacks and Jills of this world, there’s a prayer I use. It was one I learned many years ago, and it has served me in good stead. I use the same prayer with the potentially attractive as with the potentially hostile:

“God, show me this person not as I see them but as you see them. Help me to be for them what I am called by you to be. Remove from me my fears and my selfish desires, and show me how to love them as you love them”.

Yeah, we have a problem with singulars and plurals here, but you get the point. I really do use that prayer, though much less often than I used to. God has been faithful to me, and I can say that when I have prayed that prayer sincerely, it has always been answered. I have never had to break off a relationship with a mentee because I was worried about my own growing feelings of attraction towards him or her.

Does that make me better than “Father Figure”, who did choose to break off his mentoring relationship with a younger woman to whom he was increasingly drawn? No, not really. It was far better for him to abrogate their relationship than to act on his feelings. But while seducing her would have been a profound betrayal of his commitment to her (and, of course, to his marriage), breaking off their contact (which had become important to her) without telling her why is a serious form of abandonment. There’s a general rule in working with much younger people, even when they are in their twenties: if you as a mentor cut off contact or withdraw from them, they will almost always assume that it was something they did. They will very rarely conclude that the problem was with the mentor; they will assume that they did something to drive him or her away. They may feel ashamed or guilty without quite knowing what they’ve done. It’s a serious wound, and I’ve seen it inflicted many a time.

Father Figure inquires as to what he should do. In the best case scenario, he would be able to resume his mentoring relationship with this young woman, taking responsibility for keeping his own feelings and desires strictly in check (and asking for spiritual help in order to do so.) Given that the young woman is an adult, his next best option — but not the best — is to be candid with her about his reasons for terminating their time together. He’ll have to be very emphatic that the responsibility is his and his alone, and that she did nothing wrong. It’ll be hurtful, but she’ll at least have (oh, overused word) the beginnings of some closure. The worst thing to do would be to continue to be distant and unvailable without giving a reason why.

I am absolutely certain that I will not cross a line with my students and youth groupers, either in act or in fantasy. I am confident that my intent will remain clear and my goals pure. Is this hubris? No, because I don’t rest this certainty on my own will alone. I’m a mortal human being, and I know all too well how quickly my own unchecked desires can run riot. My confidence lies in my faith in a faithful God, a God who will not give me any challenge I cannot handle if I ask for His help. I also have faith in my peers who hold me accountable, who ask me questions about my motives, who watch me. If I seem to be crossing a line, they’ll gently inquire and remind me of where it is that my priorities lie, what my obligations are.

If I can only mentor the unattractive, the well-groomed, the polite and unchallenging, I’m not doing my job. (Of course, the reverse is true: if I seek out only the beautiful and the brilliant to work with, something else is amiss!) If I were to find my own feelings getting in the way of my work with a mentee, I am confident that I would be given the strength to overcome those feelings. And by overcoming, I don’t just mean the strength to not act upon them. I mean the strength to eradicate them altogether. My wife is the human being in whose company I am happiest. If I were to be more excited about spending time with a friend or a mentee than with my wife, that would be a colossal red flag. And I am prayerfully, quietly confident that God would give me the strength to redirect my desires and my thoughts themselves if I asked Him to. But if for some reason that sustenance didn’t come, then I would have to terminate the mentoring relationship.

Students, teachers, friendship

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 27, 2005
in Emotional and Sexual Boundaries, Mentoring, Relationships and Teaching
. 5 Comments

Jonathan Dresner alerts me to this very interesting post by New Kid on the Hallway:  How Close is Too Close?  It’s a commentary on this story in the Chronicle of Higher Education about UVA professor James Sofka, who has been disciplined for "inappropriate behavior" with his students.   Do read both pieces.

New Kid has some valuable points on the thin line between mentoring and friendship between undergrads and their professors:

When you’re teaching students who are your own age, that’s one thing. But if you’re teaching students who are 18-21 (as I am), and you’re in your 30s (Sofka is 37; most Ph.D.s I know have been at least 30 when they’ve started full-time jobs), that’s a big difference (or it should be!). I like the vast majority of my students; I care about many of them; I care deeply about a number of them. I would even say that I have loved some of my students (except that "love" is such an ambiguous word in English and even saying that can raise eyebrows if you use the wrong sort of tone; we need all the nuances of the different ancient Greek terms for love, I guess).

But I’m pretty loath to say that I am friends with any of my students. I can be friendly with many of them, and enjoy spending time with them, but to me, friendship requires a certain degree of equality, or parity, that doesn’t exist between students and professors.

Bold emphasis is mine, and I’m in complete agreement with New Kid.   I’ve come, over the years, to have a considerable appreciation for the value of good and healthy boundaries between professors and students. I’d like to think I’m a good mentor, at least to those who actively seek out mentoring. 

I’d like to add a point that New Kid only addresses obliquely.  When I grade and evaluate my students, they need to trust that I am giving them a genuinely honest assessment of their work.  When I write a glowing letter of recommendation for a student transferring to a four-year college, he or she needs to know that what I wrote reflects my real feelings about their work, not my own desire to flatter them or to maintain our personal friendship.  Inappropriate closeness between a teacher and a student makes it far more difficult for a young person to believe in the accuracy and the validity of the feedback they receive.

When I first started teaching full-time at the college, at age 26, I found it quite difficult to draw the distinction between mentor and friend.  My youth and inexperience meant that I didn’t really believe I could mentor those, who, in many cases were only a couple of years younger than I was.  In addition to being insecure about what I had to offer professionally, I was eager to be liked.  When I was tenure-track, I was anxious to have strong student evaluations, knowing the vital role they play in getting tenure.  As I’ve aged in the past dozen years, I’ve also (I hope) matured.  The gap between me and the average age of my students has gone from five years to more than fifteen.  I’ve finished a Ph.D, gotten tenure, and learned infinitely more about what it means to be a teacher. 

I’m less interested in being liked and more interested in being of service to the young people with whom I work.  As my own confidence and maturity have increased, my own need for their validation has diminished correspondingly.  I am much more able to focus on their intellectual, emotional, and spiritual needs when I am not in need of their approval.  Most of them have plenty of friends.  They don’t need another one.  They need a teacher who will be honest with them, and a few of them, those who choose to seek me out, need a mentor whom they can trust to put their growth first.  After years of trial and error and mistakes, I’d like to think I’ve become that sort of professional.

I hope that Professor Sofka has a similar opportunity.

More on touch, hugs, and boundaries

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 16, 2004
in Emotional and Sexual Boundaries, Teaching, Youth and Youth ministry
. 6 Comments

I’ve had some great comments on yesterday’s post about hugs; I’m very grateful. Jenell responded with an interesting post of her own. (And for the umpteenth time, let me say that I envy her graceful writing style — dang, she’s good!) Here’s a lengthy excerpt:

Hugo writes about touch between males and between adult males and young females at his church. He’s also a professor…what are the boundaries at school? Or in a special-ed classroom? Or on a playground? Or with other peoples’ kids? Or other places?

I started touching students more this year, in part because of all the healing touch and affection I received this year. I use public and private space as an important boundary. I touch students on the arm, head, or shoulder in class or in the hallway. I use touch to emphasize my words - to be affirming, encouraging, or in greeting. I don’t touch without words. I hug female students in the hallway frequently. I don’t hug men, except at graduation (in front of their families and other profs). Hugging male students seems way too risky - I’ve had flirting and sexually-related manipulative behavior coming from men from time to time and I don’t want to inadvertently encourage it. I don’t touch women or men in private settings - if I go for a walk with a student, if my office door is closed, etc. I also don’t ever close my office door when talking with male students - I close it for women if they’re crying or if they ask for it to be shut. If men ask for it to be shut, I still leave it open a crack.

It is sad that touch is oversexualized. In our culture, any person represents a potential sexual encounter - youth, children, male, female, married… anyone. It’s hard to form relationships when you must first ascertain the other persons’ sexual intentions. And it’s obviously tragic that we have to teach our children to be wary of whether or not they are being viewed sexually by others.

I like that bit about using touch to emphasize words. In any event, Jenell raises some excellent questions. Let me see if I can tackle a few of the practical ones:

In terms of my boundaries as a professor, they are obviously very different from my boundaries as a youth leader. Those are two very different areas of my life, and I am trying to meet two very different sets of needs. I don’t generally hug my students at the college. I do so only when it is initiated by the student, usually at the end of the semester as a “goodbye” ritual. In my capacity as a professor, my first job is to teach, not to provide emotional support. That doesn’t mean that I can’t form friendships with my students, and it doesn’t rule out serving as a nurturing mentor — but it is different than caring for high schoolers. I have had students (usually female) cry in my office,and I have kept the door shut (my office opens directly on to a very busy hallway). I know it’s taking a risk, but I have to weigh that risk against the importance of respecting the needs of an individual student. Fortunately, I share my office with another professor, and he is usually around when students are visiting.

I agree with Jenell that in our culture, any person represents a potential sexual encounter - youth, children, male, female, married… anyone. I agree with her as well that this is “sad… obviously tragic”. With that in mind, I have come to believe that the key thing that those of us who work with young people need to do is commit ourselves to being deliberately counter-cultural when it comes to touch. This doesn’t mean ignoring the power of sexuality. It means not allowing our fear of sexuality to hold us back from reaching out to those who need it. We have to find non-exploitative ways to hold each other — and hold each other across lines of sex, age, and status. Obviously, that’s risky stuff.

(On a related note, several of our volunteers who work with youth at our church are openly gay or lesbian. We have regularly sent gay male adult volunteers on overnight trips with our youth, and they sleep in the same bunk house as the boys and I do. I can think of a lesbian couple who have done marvelous work with our junior high-schoolers. Our kids don’t bat a single eyelash, because they have been raised in an intensely inclusive culture. Heck, many of them have a gay or lesbian parent! To my knowledge, in the five years I’ve been working with the youth program, no parent has ever complained. But if we were to set up rigid gender-based boundaries, who on earth should our gay men be told to hug? Boys? Girls? Neither? Which bunkhouse should we put the lesbian youth leader in? This gets pretty ridiculous pretty quickly.)

The way to mitigate risk is to set boundaries, and to have touch happen publicly. In my youth group, just about everyone hugs everyone at the end of the Wednesday night meeting. These aren’t those ridiculous “side hugs” either, they are full-on embraces. Now, not everyone is required to hug, and some kids do shy away — at first. But once trust has been developed, we have to kick them out of the meeting room because otherwise they’d be hugging us and each other all night! I work under the supervision of a woman priest who heads our youth program at All Saints. When I’m hugging a girl, that priest is generally in the room. That’s common sense. I have hugged boys when we’ve been alone. I have wiped away countless tears, had my shirts soaked with snot, and I’ve kissed a whole bunch of ‘em (boys and girls) on their foreheads. I’ve done it, I’ve done it publicly, and I absolutely trust both my own motives and the motives of those whom I embrace. More to the point, I know all of the parents of my youth — and they’ve seen me with their kids. I’m not trying to say that I’m unique or special! I’m trying to say that I’ve earned the trust of those around me, I have accountability to the staff and to the parents of our high schoolers, and it’s only because that trust and that accountability is in place that I have the privilege of being able to express love through physical touch.

I am not blind to the reality of sexual abuse. I am not blind to the reality that most of that sexual abuse has been perpetrated by men in positions of trust and authority. I am not blind to the fact that so many young women have stories of inappropriately sexual contact with adult men whom they were supposed to be able to trust. And I’m not blind to the reality of human frailty — including my own. But the way I see it, I’ve got three choices:

1. Get out of youth work altogether;
2. Continue in youth work, but set rigid boundaries that only reinforce the notion that touch is dangerous and something to be feared;
3. Continue in youth work, and with prayer and mentoring and with the support of others to hold me accountable, touch and hug and hold and wipe away tears and snot.

Trusting in God and grace and the wisdom of those around me, I’m taking option three.