Students pay the price for a school district’s child abuse paranoia

 

A first grader gives her teacher a hug. The teacher kisses the little girl on the top of her head.  That used to be considered normal behavior for elementary school students and their teachers.  But not in the public schools of Prince George’s County, Md., a suburb of Washington, D.C. Instead, someone decided it might be child abuse. So the teacher was placed on leave and barred from teaching for eight weeks.

According to a very good story by Donna St. George in The Washington Post:  

The teacher said the first-grader’s father protested her removal. “The climate they’ve created is just horrendous,” she said, noting that young children expect physical contact. “Are you not going to hug a 4-year-old who is crying?”

           

It happened during the 2015-2016 school year.  This year, the Post reports, things are much worse.  Nearly 850 school district employees have been put on “administrative leave” because of some kind of allegation of child abuse – a 1,000 percent increase over two years before.  School staff are terrified, and even some members of the Board of Education worry that a “culture of fear” will drive the best teachers to seek employment elsewhere. The sheer volume of absences has disrupted the education of thousands of students.  And, of course, teachers are likely to fear showing any kind of normal affection for students.

           

The child abuse paranoia machine has struck again – and once again, it is harming children in the name of “protecting” them.

While the behavior of school district officials has been awful, at least they might be able to claim they didn’t know better. Notwithstanding their good intentions, there is no excuse for the Washington, D.C. “Children’s Advocacy Center” to encourage this kind of paranoia – but that’s what they’ve done.

It began with a real horror story

What prompted all this was the kind of thing that usually cranks up the paranoia machine – cases of child sexual abuse that were very real and very serious.  In the Prince George’s County case, they involved a school aide, Deonte Carraway. He was arrested in February, 2016. A year later he pled guilty to sexually abusing 12 children. He told children as young as age 9 how to perform sex acts, then he videotaped them.  He also coerced the children into sending him nude pictures. Police believe at least 23 children were victimized.

There had been other cases in recent years, and the school district had come under fire – and at least one lawsuit – for failing to properly detect and investigate sexual abuse by school staff.

Unfortunately, the reaction to these horrors was not to adopt prudent, sensible policies and urge people to report when they had reasonable cause to suspect abuse. No, the reaction was what we have seen so often in the past: Demands that anyone and everyone report anything and everything – and a paranoid response to those demands.

The Post reports that the response led to cases such as these.  According to the story:

● One teacher in Prince George’s County was escorted out of her school this spring after being accused of making an offensive remark in class.  … [She says] she did not make the comment and the job limbo has been tough. She gets paid, like others on leave, but waits at home — reviewing her teaching materials, reading journal articles, trying to keep her mind in the game. “I want to be teaching,” she said.

●A counselor said he was accused of failing to report a physical exchange between a student and staff member in the cafeteria. But he says he had not witnessed the incident or been at school that day. Placed on leave in January, he said he was cleared at an April hearing, but has still not been called back to work. … He said he worries about his students, some of whom he’s heard were suspended or expelled. He said he wants to be back at work.

●A retiree working as a substitute teacher said he was placed on leave last fall for tugging on a third-grader’s hoodie as he sought to keep her in line in the hallway. He has been out more than six months. “I cannot fault them for trying to help children who need protection,” he said. “But they’ve gone overboard in the other direction.”

As for the teacher who dared to kiss a child on the head, apparently she didn’t learn her lesson. She was placed on leave again this year, this time for supposedly “not following proper procedures when she reported seeing another staff member grab a student by the shirt and shove him.”

This time she was kept away from teaching for most of the school year.

And if the harm to students and teachers isn’t enough, consider the expense to taxpayers and the waste of money that could have been used to actually educate students: So far this school year, the district has spent $10 million paying staff it won’t allow to work – up from $650,000 two years ago.  They also have to pay substitutes, of course, but, district officials say, they’ve cut those costs -- by doubling up classes and getting non-teachers to fill in.

The Post notes that of the 840 reports referred to child protective services, 90 percent were so absurd that they did not even meet the minimal standards needed to start an investigation. So the one bit of good news here is this: The deluge of false and trivial reports probably did not wind up overloading child protective services workers – though we don’t know if it caused any delays or other errors at the county’s child abuse hotline.

Enablers of panic and paranoia

Is there anyone who really would encourage this kind of panic and paranoia?  Sadly, yes. They are people who, like so many in child welfare have the best of motives. But they really ought to know better. 

I discussed this in a post I wrote more than a year ago. That post was a response to this essay by the Michelle Booth Cole, director of “Safe Shores” Washington’s “Children’s Advocacy Center.”  The essay begins with the Prince George’s case and two other horror stories from around the nation.

From these horrors Cole leaps to the conclusion that you should report someone to child protective services, or the police, anytime “you just get the feeling that something’s not right.”  Cole wrote that she can’t understand why a student would ever be allowed to be alone with a teacher or how there could possibly still be places in schools “where no one can see what’s going on.”

As I wrote last year, we probably allow such things because

A) When a child needs to confide something personal to the school nurse or guidance counselor, it makes sense that the door would be closed and B) We don’t want to live in an Orwellian surveillance state with cameras poking into every corner.

But that was just the beginning. Cole even advocated the dangerous practice of distracted driving.  She wrote:

Let’s say a school employee needed to give a child a ride home, and only the two of them would be in the car. The adult and/or the child could be on a cell phone the whole time, giving a running description of the drive to the child’s parent or caregiver.

I also took issue with Cole’s approach in general:

[F]rom as early as toddlerhood, Cole is talking about raising children to be constantly wary and fearful. We’ve also trained the adults in their lives to be wary of so much as giving them a hug for fear it will be misinterpreted. All that is emotional abuse on a massive scale.

(And that, of course, was long before the Post wrote about the paranoia in Prince George’s.)

When liberals abandon our principles

Even more alarming, Cole got a lot of support from people who consider themselves liberals.

The same people who are furious when an airline passenger is hauled off a plane because someone “just got the feeling that something’s not right” when she heard the passenger speaking Arabic, have no problem applying the identical “feeling-that-something’s-not-right” standard when the issue is child abuse. The same liberals who are appalled by revelations concerning government spying on individuals see no problem with turning our schools into models of domestic surveillance.

It’s one more example of the extent to which some liberals will abandon everything they claim to believe in – and sound remarkably like Donald Trump or Kellyanne Conway -- when someone whispers the words “child abuse” in their ears.

At one point in her essay Cole writes: “Imagine what the world would look like if we did everything we could to keep kids safe?” [Emphasis added.]

Well, now we don’t have to imagine. It would look like the public schools in Prince George’s County, Md.  So it would look pretty damn ugly.

UPDATED: How to get a liberal to renounce everything he claims to believe in: Whisper the words “child abuse” in his ear

UPDATE, MAY 10: It happened again.  This time the "suspicious" passenger was writing something in what another passenger apparently took to be a secret code.  Actually, he was an Ivy League professor writing equations.

The Professor told The Washington Post's Catherine Rampell that, "It is hard not to recognize in this incident, the ethos of [Donald] Trump’s voting base."

Except, of course, when the issue is child abuse - then it becomes the ethos of too many on the Left as well.

Why is the kind of behavior that got the left rightly upset with Southwest
 Airlines, considered just fine when the fear is about child abuse?

By now, most people have heard about the Muslim student who was kicked off a Southwest Airlines flight after another passenger overheard him speaking Arabic and reported him to the flight crew. Of course. Young male + Arabic = terrorist, right?

My fellow liberals were outraged – and rightly so.  The story made The New York Times, and was the subject of this segment on The Daily Show:

All that is exactly as it should be.

But compare that response to what happens when the same sort of “if you see something, say something” extremism is applied to child abuse:

As I noted in a previous post to this Blog, a post at Medium by Michele Booth Cole, who runs a “Child Advocacy Center” in Washington, urged us to turn in anyone we think might be sexually abusing a child if “you just get the feeling that something’s not right.”  In other words, the author of this post, a so-called child abuse professional, is urging all of us to behave exactly as the passenger on that plane did – report someone based on essentially nothing.

Yet the comments on this post were almost entirely favorable. The column got one endorsement after another – such as this one: “even a 1% risk of a child being at risk is worth saying something, and you can do so anonymously.”

Yes, isn’t it great?  Unlike that airline passenger, who at least had to reveal her own identity to the flight crew, you can accuse someone of child abuse based on absolutely nothing with no accountability at all!

This advice is given even though the consequences of a false report – for the child – are a lot worse than being thrown off an airplane.

As I noted in that previous post, Cole writes that

You may never be sure and you don’t have to be sure. If you report your suspicions, the professionals in law enforcement and child protection will follow up and find out what’s happening. You could literally be saving that child’s life.

Or you could be bringing down a world of misery upon that child.

First of all, referring to the child protective services workers who will respond to the call as “professionals” often is a stretch.  In Washington, D.C., where Cole is located, they’re generally well-qualified.  More typically, however, you’re talking about someone with a bachelor’s degree in anything and a quickie training course.  Law enforcement often isn’t any better.

These total strangers will interrogate the child about the most intimate aspects of her or his life.  That’s what happened in this case, which went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court (with my organization’s Vice President acting as pro-bono counsel for the family).

Often that interrogation will be followed by a medical examination that, if anyone else did it, would be sexual abuse.

All this harm occurs before we even reach the issue of the child protective services worker possibly panicking – depending on whether a high-profile tragedy is in the news at the moment – and consigning a child who was not abused to the chaos of foster care.

Sometimes all this has to be done anyway.  The problem of child sexual abuse, like all child abuse, is serious and real. But starting this process in motion should be based on more than “you just get the feeling that something’s not right…”

Other advice given by Cole is even worse – at one point she actually encourages the dangerous practice of distracted driving.  Seriously.  She writes:

Let’s say a school employee needed to give a child a ride home, and only the two of them would be in the car. The adult and/or the child could be on a cell phone the whole time, giving a running description of the drive to the child’s parent or caregiver.

I've put a great big National Safety Council infographic at the end of this post in the hope that Cole will understand just how dangerous and irresponsible that suggestion really is, and everyone else will see how extremism and paranoia in the war against child abuse can trump research and sound judgment.

  More generally, her ideas would lead to a generation of paranoid adults raising a generation of terrified children. In fact, it’s worth comparing Cole’s column to the comments made by the right-wing Republicans in the Daily Show video.

Odd how easily we on the left understand all this when the issue is terrorism, and how easily many of us forget when the issue is child abuse.

Read more about how the normal due process and civil liberties protections liberals fight for in other fields don’t exist in cases of alleged child abuse.

Provided by The National Safety Council​

Preventing child abuse: Welcome to Child Abuse Paranoia Month

Call CPS:  These children  appear to be
walking somewhere - on their own! 

           Six years ago, I wrote a post about the kind of op-ed column that typically turns up every April during “Child Abuse Prevention/awareness Month.”  There’s also a subset, of sorts.  It’s directed specifically at the issue of child sexual abuse.  Call it the Child Abuse Paranoia Month column. 

       

If we did what the authors of these columns suggest, we’d wind up with a generation of paranoid adults raising a generation of terrified children.  And we’d traumatize tens of thousands of children with needless child abuse investigations and extremely intrusive medical examinations. In fact, we’d be well on our way to recreating the atmosphere of mindless fear that led to the mass molestation hysteria of the 1980s, typified by cases such as the McMartin Preschool.

            This column is a classic example. It starts with the obligatory three bullet points of horror stories and jumps immediately to the claim that “No young child or teenager is inherently safe from sexual abuse.”

            That is, literally, true. Just as no young child or teenager is safe from getting into an auto accident or coming down with a serious illness. But it doesn’t follow that we should never let a child into a car or out of a 100 percent sterile environment. 

            When it comes to “preventing” sexual abuse, however, this column comes close to recommending something similar. The author, Michele Booth Cole, writes: 

So with everything that institutions and people have learned about child sexual abuse, why would a school allow a staff member to be alone with a student behind a closed door? Why are there places on campus where no one can see what’s going on?

             Probably because A) When a child needs to confide something personal to the school nurse or guidance counselor, it makes sense that the door would be closed and B) We don’t want to live in an Orwellian surveillance state with cameras poking into every corner. 

            But nothing better sums up the mentality of the column than one of Cole’s proposed solutions: 

Individually and collectively, we would have to get creative, constantly assessing places and situations to make them as safe as possible for children. Let’s say a school employee needed to give a child a ride home, and only the two of them would be in the car. The adult and/or the child could be on a cell phone the whole time, giving a running description of the drive to the child’s parent or caregiver. 

            Let’s start with the practical problems. Distracted driving, because the driver had to talk on the cell phone the whole time in order to prove he’s not a child molester, is a much greater danger to this child than the exceedingly small likelihood that this school employee will turn out to be the next Jerry Sandusky.  And yes, that also applies to "hands free" cell phone use.  I've put a great big National Safety Council infographic at the end of this post to illustrate just how irresponsible this idea really is. And imagine the panic that would ensue – complete with false alarm calls to 911 - if the signal were dropped.

EMOTIONAL ABUSE

            But the bigger problem is what all this would do to the psyches of our children. 

            Cole says she wants to “inspire adults to create safe, whimsical childhoods for children at all times.”

            But the “solutions” we hear during Child Abuse Paranoia Month don’t put much emphasis on whimsy. On the contrary, from as early as toddlerhood, Cole is talking about raising children to be constantly wary and fearful. We’ve also trained the adults in their lives to be wary of so much as giving them a hug for fear it will be misinterpreted. All that is emotional abuse on a massive scale.

            And it gets worse. Cole writes:

People sometimes ask how to get “bystanders” to report their suspicions of child sexual abuse. Perhaps, as a neighbor or an acquaintance, you just get the feeling that something’s not right, but you’re afraid to raise your concerns.

You may never be sure and you don’t have to be sure. If you report your suspicions, the professionals in law enforcement and child protection will follow up and find out what’s happening. You could literally be saving that child’s life.

            Or you could be bringing down a world of misery upon that child.

            First of all, referring to the child protective services workers who will respond to the call as “professionals” often is a stretch.  In Washington, D.C., where Cole is located, they’re generally well-qualified.  More typically, however, you’re talking about someone with a bachelor’s degree in anything and a quickie training course.  Law enforcement often isn’t any better.

            These total strangers will interrogate the child about the most intimate aspects of her or his life.  That’s what happened in this case, which went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court (with my organization’s Vice President acting as pro-bono counsel for the family). 

Often that interrogation will be followed by a medical examination that, if anyone else did it, would be sexual abuse.

All this harm occurs before we even reach the issue of the child protective services worker possibly panicking – depending on whether a high-profile tragedy is in the news at the moment – and consigning a child who was not abused to the chaos of foster care.

            Cole runs a Child Advocacy Center – where the staff try their best to minimize the trauma (though suggesting, as Cole’s center does in a graphic, that the child is having a wonderful time through it all is somewhat misleading). Even when they’re the first to question the child – and that’s not always the case – it’s going to be very difficult for that child.

 

Sometimes all this has to be done anyway.  The problem of child sexual abuse, like all child abuse, is serious and real. But starting this process in motion should be based on more than “you just get the feeling that something’s not right…” (Special note to my liberal friends: How would you feel about a presidential candidate who said we should call the cops about anyone we thought might be a terrorist because we “just got the feeling that something’s not right…”?  UPDATE, APRIL 18: Or consider this story from The New York Times about what happened to a man who spoke Arabic on an airplane.  Liberals would be outraged.  Yet the behavior of the airline is no different from what Cole says we should do to children.)

            Part of the problem is the very fact that Cole runs a Child Advocacy Center. Day after day she sees the very worst that some adults do to some children.  I don’t know how you can do that and not emerge from it feeling that the world is a dark and dangerous place for children. But it’s a distorted view of reality – and another example of the tyranny of personal experience.

          “Imagine what the world would look like,” Cole writes, “if we did everything we could to keep kids safe?”

           Actually, if we went from doing what’s prudent and sensible to doing everything, it would look pretty awful. 

           

          ●It would be a world where children were raised to cower in their homes, afraid of everyone they meet – or running home after so much as seeing a stranger nearby.

          ●It would be a world that destroyed any opportunity to build the self-confidence, self-reliance and independence they’ll need to thrive as adults.  What will our children do when we’re too old to always be there to protect them?

          ●It would be a world in which children were taught to treat normal human kindness as suspect, making it far less likely they will be able to receive such kindness – or give it.

             We’ve already  gone way too far down this road, as Lenore Skenazy, once labeled the “world’s worst mom” for fighting the trend, documents on her Free Range Kids website.

WHOM ARE WE REALLY “PROTECTING”?

            Like so much that is done in the name of “child protection” Child Abuse Paranoia Month columns are not about protecting children at all – they’re about protecting parents.

          

            Specifically it’s about our efforts to protect ourselves from one of the inevitable side-effects of parenthood: Worry - that constant, nagging fear that the worst will happen to our children as soon as they are out of our sight.  (Interestingly, in my own experience, this does not stop when the child becomes a young adult.)

            When our daughter was in college and wanted to spend a semester of her junior year studying in South Africa my wife and I worried – constantly.  The easy way out would have been to say no.   But we let her go, and it turned out to be one of the most important and fulfilling experiences of her life.  (We remain grateful that she did not tell us about going shark diving off Cape Town until after the fact.)

            At other times, I’m sure we gave in to fears when we shouldn’t have. But putting the children first means rising above our own fears as much as we can, whenever it’s prudent.   

           Anything less is not child protection, it’s adult self-indulgence.

Now, about that distracted driving idea...

Provided by The National Safety Council​

Child abuse in America: Why we need to remember “McMartin”

I was asked recently about the issue of highly-credible allegations of child sexual abuse not being taken seriously when they should.  The explanation once could be boiled down to simple shorthand – it’s a response to “McMartin.”

Another commentator recently wrote a column extolling the virtues of one of those awful parking-place shelters that do so much harm to children.  I wonder if he would have been quite so credulous about the claims made by his primary source had he realized that she was a key player in the injustices that once could be summed up just by saying “McMartin”?

When it was all still fresh in people’s minds, we understood that “McMartin” was a reference to a wave of mass hysteria over alleged “mass molestation,” usually in day care centers, that seems almost incomprehensible today.  Or, as The New York Times put it in a story looking back on that era:

[S]ome of the early allegations were so fantastic as to make many people wonder later how anyone could have believed them in the first place. Really now, teachers chopped up animals, clubbed a horse to death with a baseball bat, sacrificed a baby in a church and made children drink the blood, dressed up as witches and flew in the air — and all this had been going on unnoticed for a good long while until a disturbed mother spoke up?

But they believed – oh, how they believed.  The case involving the McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach, California was among the first and got the most attention.  But, as the Times explained, it didn’t stop there: 

 McMartin unleashed nationwide hysteria about child abuse and Satanism in schools. One report after another told of horrific practices, with the Devil often literally in the details. 

Criminal cases of dubious provenance abounded. One that received great attention involved Margaret Kelly Michaels, convicted in 1988 of rampant sexual abuse at the Wee Care Day Nursery in Maplewood, N.J., where children said she had sexually abused them with knives, spoons and forks, and had urinated in their mouths. None showed signs of injury. Six years later, Ms. Michaels’s conviction was overturned. Another prominent case from those days involved charges of rape and sodomy brought against the operators of the Little Rascals Day Care Center in Edenton, N.C. As with McMartin, there were bizarre allegations early on about babies being murdered and children thrown in with sharks. Though defendants were found guilty, their convictions were later overturned and charges were dropped. 

They believed in large part because a whole lot of medical professionals and therapists told them to believe.  “Believe the children,” they said.  “Children don’t lie,” they said.  And if you don’t believe the children then you’re little better than an abuser yourself.

But the children were coached.  Sometimes bribed, sometimes cajoled, sometimes bullied until they told the “professionals” what they wanted to hear.

In what is probably the best account of all this, Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker’s book, Satan’s Silence, the authors describe how Dr. Astrid Heger, then of the Children’s Institute International, which fomented the McMartin hysteria, questioned one girl who repeatedly denied being abused.  Heger tells the little girl:

I don’t want to hear any more “no’s.  No, no!  Detective Dog and we are going to figure this out.  Every little boy and girl in the whole school got touched like that … I think there’s something to tell me about touching.”

That’s far from the worst example.  Watch the documentary accompanying the Times story for others:

But I mention the example involving Heger here because Heger now runs the clinic that’s the first stop for medical and mental health examinations for thousands of children taken from their parents by the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services.  The clinic is right down the hall from theparking place shelter she wants to keep.

Both now and during the McMartin case, Heger had only the best of intentions.  But she's mistaken now as well.  She claims that if her shelter is closed “rates will go back up of [sic] reabuse.”  But according to the excellent database maintained by the California Child Welfare Indicators Project, the rate of reabuse didn’t go down in the years since the shelter opened – it stayed the same.

The other reason to remember McMartin is the devastation left in its wake – not just the lives destroyed by legal bills, at best, and jail terms at worst.  But all the children who lost their families, and all the children who actually were persuaded they were abused when in fact they were not.  Click on the comments tab for the Times story and you’ll find a comment from someone who says he was one of them.

And even that is not the end of the damage.

The hysteria was just starting to abate when my book, Wounded Innocents, was published in 1990.  At that time I wrote:

When hoaxes are exposed, they cast suspicion on all children who say they have been abused and make it easier for the public to retreat back into denial of a very real problem.

Recently there have been charges that the problem of false allegations in [divorce and] custody cases is beginning to produce a backlash.  Instead of automatically believing the charge, some judges are said to be automatically disbelieving.  If so, the blame rests squarely with the child savers who started the hysteria.  They have managed to find one more way to destroy children in order to save them. 

If that’s happening now in some cases, there may be a variety of reasons.  But one reason can be summed up in one word: McMartin.

Binghamton, N.Y. is a cesspool of depravity! BEWARE! BEWARE! BEWARE!

If there are any children outside in New York’s Southern Tier anymore it’s only because so few people still read newspapers.

No parent in her or his right mind would let a child out of the house, or even out of sight while in the house after reading the ten – ten! – fear-mongering stories splashed all over the Binghamton, N.Y Press & Sun Bulletin and its sister paper, the Elmira Star-Gazette on December 4. (Assuming, that is, that the parent made the mistake of believing the stories.)

Given the shrunken size of small city daily newspapers, it’s hard to imagine there was any room for anything else in the papers that day; apparently there was nothing but story after story sending messages like this:

Beware!  Sex offenders actually live in our neighborhoods!  Don’t drop your kids off anywhere! (except grandma and grandpa – maybe).   A volunteer gives a gift to a preschool child – it must be “grooming”! Johnny needs to get two blocks to a youth basketball game – quick get the minivan!  What?  Your teacher helped you after class with your homework and no one else was in the room?  Call the hotline!  Your teenager is moody and having school problems? It’s sexual abuse! 

The ten stories appeared under the umbrella title “Protecting our children from people we should be able to trust.” Other headlines included: “Background checks can’t replace vigilance” and “Grooming: It’s how predators have their way with you and your child.” After reading through all this it’s apparent that either the Southern Tier is a cesspool of depravity beyond comprehension – or post-Penn State paranoia has gotten way out of hand.  (The papers did publish a brief op ed column I wrote in response.)

Consider a few anecdotes from the series:

● A day care center director sees a volunteer laughing and joking “excessively” with a child.  The volunteer buys the child a gift – “a seemingly innocent charm.” Knowing that “this is often a predator’s ploy…the volunteer was confronted and removed from the daycare center.”  The center director declares that “I’m completely convinced the child would have been a victim.”

● When Jim Norris returned to coaching a grammar school basketball team after many years he was shocked that

parents would be driving their sons two blocks or whatever and dropping them off – two blocks … I say to [an assistant coach] “What’s this all about? No one walks or rides a bike?”  He says “Jim, these aren’t the old days.  You have no idea who’s out on the street these days.”

● Kim and Robert Michalak of Johnson City are taking precautions:  

[They] both work full-time and use the phone to stay connected with their four active sons. Each boy is required to call in his whereabouts and ETA, wherever he goes. Kim makes it her business to know their friends and the friends' parents, and has a seat on [the Johnson City] school board.  "I have my ears to the wall," she said.

To help you keep your ears to the wall, there’s a 1,542-word guide to things to watch for, in adults and in your own children, reprinted verbatim from a mysterious website.  Advice includes:

Emotional and behavioral signals [of sexual abuse] … can run from “too perfect” behavior to withdrawal and depression, to unexplained anger and rebellion.

Well, that certainly narrows things down.  Oh, wait.  The guide helpfully adds this: “Be aware that in some children there are no signs.”

Another “expert” warns that “Abusers generate situations where they are alone with the child … Babysitting, tutoring, coaching and special trips enhance isolation.” Well, yes.  But they’re also standard parts of a normal childhood.  Are we now to tell teachers they shouldn’t offer students help with their homework?  Should guidance counselors stop meeting with children to let them seek help with personal problems?

And you know how the right-wing keeps telling us marriage is the solution to all family and societal problems?  Not if you already have a child from a previous marriage. The Press & Sun Bulletin tells us that, according to one expert:

A favorite target victim is a child living with a single mother … The predator  may offer to babysit or watch her children after school, and will sometimes pretend romantic interest in the mother or express a desire to be a father figure or mentor for her child. He may even marry her or move in with her. The relationship with the mother can be used as a cover for his interest in children, and her child can be used as bait to lure or gain access to other children.

So all you single moms out there: Forget about remarrying, or even dating.  Better just keep men out of your lives entirely.

CONTRADICTORY ADVICE

Some of the advice sprinkled among the stories is remarkably contradictory.

Rabbi Barbara Goldman Wartell says that at her synagogue, in the words of one story, “Everyone will also be watching everyone else, with little tolerance for odd behaviors.”  But the mysterious website warns that “people who abuse children look and act just like everyone else.” So shouldn’t we, in fact, be least afraid of those who behave oddly?

Elsewhere a parent declares that “The kids are never in one-on-one [situations] unless it’s with somebody we’ve known for years.”  But another story tells us that abusers are remarkably patient – “grooming” may involve years getting to know the child, and the parents, and gaining their trust.  The mysterious website reminds us that “the greatest risk to children …[comes] from friends and family.”  So isn’t “somebody we’ve known for years” the person to fear most?

Topping it all off was an essay from someone who is not just a helicopter parent but a fleet-of-fully-armed-Blackhawks parent.  (I’m not going to name her or her eight- and six-year-old children - the kids are likely to be mortified enough in a few years) but here are some highlights:

When school friends have parties, I attend with [the children]. I know a lot of parents who drop off children at parties, in many cases because they have other children to take to other locations, or they have to run errands. [My husband] and I don't drop our children off anywhere, except for perhaps their grandparents' homes.

Perhaps?  Are grandma and grandpa suspect too?  Back to the column:

The same goes for baseball games and karate and gymnastics classes. Because one of us, fortunately, is able to always be there, my children never have to wait for a ride home and they know someone who loves and protects them is nearby.

I also do my best to get to know those who interact with our children. Friends, parents, coaches, teachers -- talking to them helps me ensure that my young children are surrounded by good people.

Unless, of course, they’re just especially good at “grooming.”

There are parents who can't attend every function with their children. … Some other parents just seem to be more trusting, leaving their children alone or with acquaintances much of the time. It's up to the rest of us out there -- parents, teachers, coaches, care-givers, medical professionals -- to keep an eye on all children, especially from dysfunctional homes, because they often are targeted by abusers.

But aren’t parents who start “keeping an eye on all children” exactly the ones we’re not supposed to trust?

Do I sometimes feel I'm being overprotective? Absolutely not. … Something must be working. A few weeks ago, my son was playing outside. He came running into the house and said he saw a stranger. I was so proud.  …

Meanwhile, that mysterious website tells us to treat absolutely everyone as a suspect – and let them know they’re suspects the minute we meet them for the first time: “Find a way to tell the adults who care for children that you and the child are educated about child sexual abuse,” the website says. “Be that direct.” 

I am not naming the site, because it’s already gotten tons of attention in the wake of Penn State and I don’t want to give it even more.  (Anyone who really wants to find it can get to it via the Binghamton stories.)

But here’s why I keep calling it mysterious: I searched the site for a long time and could come up with not one name of anyone connected with the organization.  No president.  No executive director.  No board of directors.  No indication of the credentials of those offering the advice. All the e-mail contact addresses were generic – there isn’t even a media contact. [UPDATE: DEC. 2016: In this years since this item originally was posted, this information has been added to the site.]

Yet in the wake of Penn State, newspapers all over America are accepting this site’s data and its advice, in the case of the Binghamton paper, reprinting it whole.  That’s remarkably – um – trusting.

REAL PROBLEM, FAKE SOLUTIONS

Yes, the problem of child abuse is serious and real, and prudent precautions are in order.  But don’t believe the scare numbers.  For example, as I’ve noted before the claim that one-in-four girls and one-in-six boys will be sexually abused (which is the first thing you see on the home page of the mysterious website) is based on a study with a definition of abuse that can include a 19-year-old kissing a 17-year-old goodnight after a date. 

And you’d certainly never guess from the Binghamton stories that all crime in America, including child sexual abuse, has dramatically decreased in recent decades.  Yes, Jim, these aren’t the old days.  They’re better.

There is no way to seal off our children against all risk of molestation, any more than we can check the driving record of every adult who volunteers for the carpool.  And behaving like the mother in that op ed column, and following all the other paranoid advice, creates its own dangers for children. 

Dangers like:

●Raising them to cower in their homes, afraid of everyone they meet – or running home after so much as seeing a stranger nearby.

●Destroying any opportunity to build the self-confidence, self-reliance and independence they’ll need to thrive as adults.  What will our children do when we’re too old to always be there to protect them?

●Teaching them to treat normal human kindness as suspect, making it far less likely they will be able to receive such kindness – or give it.

Lenore Skenazy, author of Free-Range Kids, has crusaded against hyper-protective parenting.  Long before Penn State, she wrote about the harm caused by the kind of paranoia on display in the Southern Tier in this column for The Wall Street Journal.  She pointed out another danger to Milwaukee Magazine media columnist Erik Gunn:

We don't help kids if we're telling them to distrust half the population.  If most people are good and your kid ever is in a dangerous situation, could they ever go to a principal at school or their father or their teacher and tell them what's going on? If nobody is to be trusted you’ve left your child without anywhere to turn.

There also is the risk of setting off another wave of panic like the “mass molestation” hysteria that destroyed the lives of hundreds of children in the 1980s amid lurid false allegations of Satanic cults lurking in day care centers. 

            And there’s one more risk: When every adult becomes afraid to show normal affection – when, like one teacher in Binghamton, they stop giving hugs and give taps on the shoulder instead – then children actually become easier prey for child molesters.

            That’s because, as the Binghamton stories point out repeatedly, molesters target children who are denied normal affection.  As child abuse researcher Dr. James Garbarino put it during the last wave of sex abuse hysteria in the 1980s:

The more you define making physical contact with kids as being extraordinary or something that makes one suspicious, the more you leave the field open to people who want to touch kids for the wrong reasons.

WHOM ARE WE REALLY “PROTECTING”?

            Like so much that is done in the name of “child protection” the behavior described, and encouraged, in the Binghamton stories isn’t about protecting children at all – it’s about protecting parents. 

           

            Specifically it’s about our efforts to protect ourselves from one of the inevitable side-effects of parenthood: Worry - that constant, nagging fear that the worst will happen to our children as soon as they are out of our sight.  (Interestingly, in my own experience, this does not stop when the child becomes a young adult.)

            When our daughter was in college and wanted to spend a semester of her junior year studying in South Africa my wife and I worried – constantly.  The easy way out would have been to say no.   But we let her go, and it turned out to be one of the most important and fulfilling experiences of her life.  (We remain grateful that she did not tell us about going shark diving off Cape Town until after the fact.)

            At other times, I’m sure we’ve given in to fears when we shouldn’t have.  But putting the children first means rising above our own fears as much as we can, whenever it’s prudent.    

Anything less is not child protection, it’s adult self-indulgence.

Child abuse at Penn State: The myth of one-in-four / one-in-six

In the weeks since Penn State, one statistic keeps turning up in the  media.  It’s scary, it’s ubiquitous, it’s meant to stampede people into things like universal mandatory reporting – and it’s wrong. 

It’s the one about how, supposedly, one-in-four girls and one-in-six boys will be victims of child sexual abuse. 

Ever wonder why, in all the scores of news stories, editorials and op ed columns where this stat turns up nobody seems to cite an actual study?  Maybe it’s because of what the study actually reveals.

Our full analysis is on NCCPR’s Monthly Blog at the trade journal Youth Today.