Eek! A Male!
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 paedophile panic, we jump to the very worst, even least likely, conclusion first. Then we congratulate ourselves for being so vigilant. Read on…
+1
about 2 years ago
i’m more surprised that this editorial is coming from the wall street journal than this actually happening. And I mean that in a good way towards the journal.
Although i definitely agree with the article, and its great that people are starting to recognize the paranoia, i still think its the exception not the rule.
i think there is a trend, but i still think most people dont fall into this paranoia, just the people who read the news headlines too much. that and dateline.
im not going to change my actions just because im afraid of what people will think or accuse me of. im more mad at the man who doesnt stop and help the girl who drowned because he was afraid of what society would do to him. c’mon, society may have it wrong, but dont blame them for your inaction.
about 2 years ago
oh my
about 2 years ago
Yeah, that’s how it is in america. As a social worker I chose to work with boys in the criminal justice system as I was fed up with female social workers in the foster care system many of whom distrust or even hate men.
about 2 years ago
I would help even though I say I don’t and won’t, because this is a human being. I do the same for animals, more so because they rely on humans for their lives (pets mostly). However, I fully realize this can have dire consequences because the courts lean to erring on the side of caution. And the state will prosecute because it has become a headline grabber.
Maybe they feel they are actually doing good or being the champion of the victim. I tend to feel not. Been there and don’t see the good in the milk of human kindness.
In cases where children are involved either physically or in print, the standard modus operandi is to tell the ‘accused’ that he or she is already guilty in the eyes of the public. If he goes to trial, they will throw the book at him and ruin his life… prison is no place to be an accused child abuser. Plead guilty and you will get suspension and have to sign up as a sex offender FOR LIFE whether you did it or not, let alone any grey areas. This impacts your life (no jobs, unsafe living situations, violence towards you, harassment from law officials and others) you become a pariah and this effects family, and friends if you have any after.
Society is creating an enormous sub-population of ‘sex offenders’. Like serial killers, you fear them and want to get a heads up, but in so many instances, the real threat is in the family or with the family friend or relative. Yes there are true predators, Virginia, but not the thousands being added to the roster every year. That is simply stocking the barrel.
I have to tell you, I am concerned with helping a kid lost in a store or crying in a restaurant, let a lone in the damn bathroom.
about 2 years ago
This anti-paedo hysteria is especially strong in the UK. I really tense up if a kid I don’t know talks to me in public (this doesn’t happen much actually because Brits are pretty shy and kids have been so indoctrinated into the ‘stranger danger’ schtick).
It really bothers me that as a male I can’t interact naturally with kids. Yet, as an older male, I don’t remember this hysteria being quite so bad in the 1970′s when I was a kid. Yes, we were aware of ‘stranger danger’ and not getting into cars with strange men (common sense really) but there was nothing to stop adults from interacting naturally with kids.
I agree strongly with Pojowolf about society creating industrial quantities of sex offenders. The trouble is, such a label does not give the public any meaningful qualitative information as to the danger (if any) such an individual poses. To most people- a convicted paedophile is either an actual child molester or someone who is very likely to become one- there is never any context. And our politicians regularly use ‘paedophile’ and ‘terrorist’ in the same breath- both are apparently the greatest threat to our society. Indeed, in the UK, laws are framed in such a way as to make the ‘crime’ seem far worse than it is- so if you were to accidentally come across child pr0n by clicking on a dodgy link, that would be classed as ‘downloading’ even if you didn’t save the image. And if you did save the image you’d be done for ‘making’ pornography- even if you had nothing to do with the actual production of the image. There are even convicted sex offenders who were charged simply for owning material bought legally from Amazon. This does nothing to protect vulnerable youngsters and everything to benefit self-serving law enforcement agencies and politicians.
about 2 years ago
Peter Paige, one of the lead actors in the American version of “Queer As Folk”, made a movie on this topic called “Say Uncle”. Interestingly enough, Mel Gibson, living proof that bigots can come from Australia just like anywhere else, also made a movie on this topic a number of years ago called “The Man Without A Face”. It got a good review from Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times (in my opinion, the world’s best movie reviewer): http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19930825/REVIEWS/308250301/1023
about 2 years ago
Josh — some constructive (I hope) criticism: Don’t you think the PaedoBear just reinforces the stereotype that pedophiles lurk around corners trying to seduce kids? I’ve never liked the PaedoBear.
about 2 years ago
paedobear to me is kinda poking at the ridiculous stereotypes the attach to us.
about 2 years ago
Pedobear is just a god damn meme and nothing more. It doesn’t mean anything and no one should ever take him seriously.
about 2 years ago
Agree entirely with Pojuwolf and 17oOo. A year or so ago the British TV presenter Esther Rantzen conducted a non-scientific experiment in a UK shopping centre by getting a small boy and girl to stand around (separately) looking obviously lost and anxious. Almost every adult there, over a period of 15 minutes, passed them by without a second glance, or hesitated but then moved on. The only adults to stop and try to help were a male security guard and a female member of the public. Rantzen interviewed a few people who had hesitated then moved on, and they all said (male and female) they were worried about other people’s perceptions. WE NEED TO STOP FEARING AND WORRYING and be proactive again – do not give in to the current mindset. If we give in to this, we are cowards. Think positive – people are beginning to recognise the paranoia stirred up by the media (as 17oOo says).
about 2 years ago
i really don’t care to much on the girl, that died. This girl was in the wrong moment on the wrong place. Biologically seen, this girl was outside of the safe community, where the opportunity, that she dies, is small. This means, that the human view of the event ; “poor girl” is not acceptabe.
For me one question of this event is more going to following direction :
why did women not see the girl ? Are they so occupied with the traffic around themselver ? Do they “not having the time” to look around ?
What is the reason of doing nothing ?
about 2 years ago
i dont understand you…. first you don’t care much, that these things happen and it was a rare accident. But of course we can’t just throw out hands up– its the womens duty to ensure shes safe…. why again can’t the man who saw her help her? And why would you not be upset the man didn’t help?
about 2 years ago
Personally I don’t like being around kids in the first place, I just don’t seem to get along with them very well.
In public, I REALLY dislike it when a kid approaches me or are even around me. I don’t know if it’s that I generally wear all black and have long hair or just that I’m a male, but every time there’s a child within 20 feet of me I get all sorts of accusatory stares.
Three weeks ago, some woman I’ve never seen started scolding me on the bus. She was telling me things like “I know who you are and we’re watching you” and “if you ever touch another child again”. I was so shocked by what I was hearing it took me a while to figure out she thought I was a registered sex offender (I’ve only ever been in court twice, both times for traffic violations).
She wouldn’t listen when I tried to tell her she was confusing me for someone else and didn’t even stop when I threatened to call the police for harassment and slapping her with a lawsuit for slander. I ended up getting off the bus 6 blocks early because I was scared someone on the crowded bus would start to believe her and I’d be on the wrong end of a beat-down…and feeling incredibly disturbed the rest of the day.
All that said, I can sympathize completely with the construction worker that saw the girl and did nothing because I would have done exactly that myself.
If society wants me to stop and help kids I don’t know, they can stop treating me like the criminal that I’m not. Otherwise, they can look out for the safety of their own damn kids.
about 2 years ago
don’t let the kid suffer for the sake of the parents
*sorry that i keep posting, but i had to say that
about 2 years ago
I’ve typed out three responses to this and deleted them all cause none were remotely polite. So I’ll simply say that suffering children stopped being a persuasive argument to me around the time I started getting IDed to buy video games.
about 2 years ago
i deleted three responses i made because they were the same exact thing i said in the reply before this
about 2 years ago
What? Females can’t be kidnappers? Haha. Someone should do a post on Westburo Baptist Church in the U.S.. Or GodHatesFags.com. They really get under my skin. Bet there would be alot of comments there. Probably already is in a political post somewhere…
about 2 years ago
Well, I’m a single older (than most here) male and I’ve never given a shit what some whacked out soccer mom thinks, if a kid looks like they need help, I’ll offer it, or if they’re in danger, I’ll do what I can to get them out of it. And making it very public that I’m doing that: Crying kid in a store, grab kid by the hand, loudly proclaim “come on, let’s find your mom” and taking them to the customer service counter. It’s not like I could do anything different – there are cameras.
Of course, if I see a kid crying in a store and see some older creep grabbing them by the hand, I might just body tackle the sumbitch, so I just better watch that I don’t see myself doing that in a store.
I think I need to smoke less pot.
about 2 years ago
There are over 300 million people in this country and in a number that huge you’re bound to have some bizarrely twisted individuals who are into sick fringe behavior.
As Dennis Miller once said. “If you ever get to the point in your life when you are so puzzled, confused and frightened that you feel the only way out is to abuse or molest a kid, well then, you have to kill yourself. You have to lean into the strike zone and take one for the team.”