One of the many problems of being Male
 

Does anyone notice that generally parents don't want you near their kids? When I say you I mean guys only. I don't think women have this problem.

I saw some 60 minutes experiment where a child actor played a lost child and then the hidden camera would count the people who would stop and help. The hidden camera show noticed that only women would stop and help. I think that's because generally if men were to stop and help they would be seen as a child preditor or something. Thus, I believe that men would be less inclined to help on those grounds.

It sucks even more in my sales world. While prospecting my natural market (that's fancy speak for trying to sell to people I know) -I found it helpful that I can offer a college savings plan. It's a real door opener. Now fast forward to today. I'm sitting in a cafeteria at Costco. A mother with her 2 year old child is sitting next to me. The first words to her out of my mouth was does she have a college savings plan for him.

Now, generally I've seen my sister talk to other mothers about their children. It seems that women will automatically trust other women. But strange insurance guys who have the best intentions -have no chance in hell unless they are somehow able to change their sex.

I have other stories on this subject but do share yours.

I can relate to this. I love little kids, but my father and I while in Virginia, would walk down the beach, and often smile or laugh at the antics of the little kids running around. If you could only count how many mothers looks truly worried when we did. It's almost insulting.

I like to use that kind of behavior on the part of mothers to freak them out a little. "Oh, I love children." (Pause) "But I don't think I could eat a whole one." Basically, if they perceive me as a threat, they are not someone I care to waste my time with, and, by the time they are done with them, neither will their children be.

I had a male friend who enjoyed interacting with my daughter when she was about two or three. As we used to hang out together often one night while I was cooking dinner he offered to help monitor her with her bath... now we had been friends for some time and I found myself doing some mental calculations. He was allowed to monitor her in the bath and I believed his intentions were in a parental caring aspect. I still found myself keeping a careful eye, just to ensure.

Some responses from my other friends ranged from he was stupid to put himself in that situation where suspicion could be raised to he's just sick and I shouldn't have allowed it!

I think it's really sad that males have a harder time in our society because of issues such as these, but at the same time there have been prevelant reasons to worry about such issues. *sigh*- no answers...

Unless I'm with my kid(s), I get the exact same response. Granted, I have semi-long hair, wear almost nothing but band T-shirts and have a few piercings, but still..

Like, when I'm picking my daughter up from school, the Mom's kind of look at me funny, and maybe say something under their breath until they see her come running out to me. Then it's a bit different.

I think it's because we've been media blitzed with stories about men abducting, raping, molesting, killing children for way too long.

It's not that I don't think we should all be aware of it and of the dangers, but c'mon the lead story on the cable news channels the last couple of days has been Michael Jackson. Not to mention, the news channels constantly breaking in to announce the latest Amber Alert and the endless litany of press conferences and speculation between the news anchors themselves and the endless parade of experts they bring in.

It really isn't any surprise that the public perception has shifted as far as it has.

I occasionally pick my nephew up from school. They don't allow you to wait in the office (I guess they have more important things to do :rolleyes: )so, I wait in the hall. Now, bear in mind, I'm a pretty average looking guy. Pretty clean, wearing respectable clothes, no piercings, no tattoos. Just your average run of the mill fellow.

I can't tell you how many times, I've had teachers stop by to ask me what I'm doing. I've watched lines of marching children shift away from me as they walk by. About a month ago, I had one of the big, burly gym teachers (I have a gym teacher radar...it's a gift? ) march up to me and demand to know what I was doing followed by a barrage of follow up questions. After the first couple, I just told since it didn't matter what I said, why not just pull up bit of the wall and wait with me if he was so damn worried about it.

when i babysit, i'm often asked if i'm the father. folks aren't used to seeing a man around a child outside of that context it seems.

Yeah I believe I've seen that sort of behaviour once or twice before now that I think about it. Funny cause women we don't know from a hole in the wall always walk up to my neice and touch her. (Shes adorable so it's hard not too.) They just walk by and touch the top of her head or touch her cheek and say how beautiful she is. My mom smiles...I actually do think she would react different if it was a man...unless maybe a much older man as many just have kind faces.

Asta!!

I've never seen Quadro have those kinds of problems... mind you, he looks like Brecken Meyer (= harmless young guy), but little kids just love him on sight, and I've never seen a mom even look concerned. Maybe it's because he's not by himself?
Do you notice the same looks if you're with a woman?

Having two daughters, I have to admit to a double standard. I of course would never hurt my children, and find it unlikely anyone else would either......but I am far more comfortable with women around my kids (the boy as well) than I am with Men. While I do understand the societal influence on my feelings in this regard, I cannot, or do not wish to change them.

I concur with Jess. I look pretty young and innocent, and as such, I've never seen anybody give me a sketchy look. The first thing I usually do when I see a little kid or baby is make a funny face, which makes them laugh and tends to disarm the parents, although I've never done it with any intention other than the former.

Unfortunately, I think it really has a lot to do with outwardly, superficial, physical appearance. If a parent can construe your "look" as "sketchy," then they're going to be more hesitant. It's a tough situation. Parents are extremely protective.

guthmund nailed this one.

Once again media hysteria has blown a few cases way out of proportion to terrify the masses and improve their own ratings. Yes I know that kids are abducted by men and men do terrible things to them, but we're talking about 0.0000001% of men.

The media has scared me too, just like these protective mothers. I am embarassed to admit I feel a little twinge of concern when I find myself on an airplane next to a middle eastern man.

I spend a lot of time in Germany and Croatia, and I can say from my own personal experience that the fears of sexual predation in the U.S. are orders of magnitude greater than in those countries.

Also, on the gender comparison, few people realize that females can also be sex offenders, at rates lower than men but much higher than generally appreciated, and the psychological damage to the victim is no less severe.

For example, in a recent study of juvenile sex offenders, 22% reported that they were sexually abused by females, usually caregivers.

Overall, my feeling is that both the level of fear, and the level of anti-male bias are not rational or justified in the U.S.

But as a father myself, I can certainly understand irrational fear . . . .

Some refs:

i get this too.

i just borrow kids for a few minutes at a time... then it's time to return them back to their parents safe and unharmed and a reminder to me to not have my own kids.

I don't know if you were asking someone specific, so, I'll answer as if it was asked in general.

No, I don't. When I'm with a woman, and it doesn't matter who, it's not the same. I mean, does a woman make me look less dangerous? It's not like I'm doing anything inappropriate. I would think the general public would excercise a bit of common sense rather than assuming because I'm a grown man and around a bunch of children that I must be some sort of pedophile on the prowl.

And it's a different sort of vibe depending on the gender of who's looking. Men tend to just watch like they're keeping an eye on me, whereas the women tend to just give the dirty and disgusted looks. I should mention it's not all men and women, just a sizable chunk of the population.

My nephew is in little league and sometimes due to conflicting schedules and the like, I am the only one at the ball park. A single white guy in the stands watching the little boys play raises a lot of eyebrows until I make it clear indirectly, either by cheering for my nephew or mentioning his name, that I'm not just out there to scout for fresh meat. It just doesn't happen if a female is there with me (my aunt, my mother, my sister, etc...).

yeah, I know what you mean. I think in this situation, I would choose to be a passer by rather than interfere, cos I would feel that as a man it would be not appropriate for me to talk to a lost child ( imean, lost in a crowd)

And it goes also for... if you see a woman dragging a struggling child, I think my automatic reaction would be its a mom with some kid throwing a tantrum... if it was man I think I would feel a stronger fear and reaction.

I guess it is just pure prejudice... but Im just be honest about how I'd react.

Case in point number two:

I'm at my nephews birthday party. Everybody is on the deck outside including me. I am well known among this crowd as "the unmarried guy". So everyone starts moving inside. Except a little girl. I am not going to go inside and leave a small child unattended so I try to talk her into going inside. Instead of going inside she wants to pet the cat which is walking across the grass far away. Luckily she doesn't charge for the cat but instead talks to me about why the cat doesn't want to come over and meet her.

While I'm having this discussion with her. Her father comes charging out. He seems suspicious. 'Why was I talking to his daughter?' -She wants to pet the cat instead of going inside. 'Why didn't I come get him?' -I didn't want to leave a child unattended.

So I guess I'm suspect as a single male in this society. If I was one of them -bringing my tottler along -I wouldn't be suspect. I mean Jeesh -it's not as if I joined the priesthood or something.

That is exactly how I feel, same thing, at a mall, woman with screaming kid=poor lady/bratty kid, the man with screaming kid=pedo, of course this is not always true but still in todays world i think you have to have a bit of this type of view in the back of your mind.

I am a parent, and I also agree with an earlier post that guys who make funny faces come across as more trusting if you know what I mean. I had a neighbour (before i had children) that was charged with being a pedo. nicest guy i had ever met. never in a million years would i have thought he was a pedo.
i trust nobody around my kid, everyone has a motive. its not being paranoid, it is just reality.

I ran across this on Fark today. It concerns the 23 year old babysitter in Florida who undressed for a 4 year old boy she was watching because he demanded it.

I didn't post this to delve into the quagmire as to her motives or how she should be punished, but rather to share a few insights in the article that relate to the conversation.

Link to the story

She was convicted and sentenced to 15 years in prison, but the majority of it suspended. So, 1 year in prison, 2 under house arrest and 10 on probation.

Again, I didn't want to delve too far into the actual case circumstances itself, just to post the relevant points concerning our discussion.

So, it seems that the vast majority of member's experiences are right on the money and truly are indicative of some larger, looming problem about how society views men specifically around small children.

Like I said, I believe we've been conditioned by the massive amounts of media coverage of child molestation cases and such that run rampant on cable news as they try to fill 24 hours of programming. I would be interested in hearing other peoples opinions as to why this is so other than the "just because" justification. In this case, I don't care much if you believe, I want to know why you believe.

And why is men seem to notice it more? Is it because we're the subject of scrutiny? I mentioned this to my mother and she didn't believe it. She about laughed me out of her house as I tried to explain it. After the ball game, which was the reason I mentioned it in the first place, she had to seriously re-examine the notion after she witnessed it first hand. It was an eye-opener for her, she said. I imagine, with a little discussion it could be an eye-opener for some here as well.

As a 19 year old male, I've encountered this problem many times as well. While I'm sure it is an eye-opener for many, I doubt behaviours will change. Like some have already said in this thread, they recognize the bias, and may have even been on the receiving end of it, but if it comes down to exposing your children to an (incorrectly?) perceived risk vs. hurting a stranger's feelings, I imagine most parents would choose to hurt a stranger's feelings and altogether avoid what they consider a potential risk.

Of course, this says nothing of the media's slantedness affecting rulings in court, as has always been the case in even broader issues than this.

Part of it may the paranoia in our society about stranger abductions. I say paranoia, because such abductions are exceedingly rare; they happen, and parents need to be vigilant about them, but they are very rare.

Very few men want to harm children, but looking at it from the other point of view, man are much mor likely to be sexual predators than women. Using raveneye's statistics, its about 4 times as likely. But those statistics also indicated that the women molestors, like most molestors, are in the position of being caregivers. Since women are much more likely to be caregivers for the children of others than are men, the likelihood that any one female caregiver would be a molestor as compared to any one male is much less than the statistics would indicate.

This particular issue seems to be more one of stranger danger. It would be interesting to see the statistics on what percentage of stranger abductions / molestations are by men, by women, and by teams.

I'm not a parent yet, but I am frequently left with children in my care (as a teacher and by neighbors during the summer). I would be more likely to be wary of a strange man than a strange woman, but I'm going to be wary of any stranger who wants to touch or play with my wards.

In this case, the bias has some basis in reality. Men, even if we take raveneye's statistics at face value and apply them to stranger abductions, are far more likely to be child molestors.

But let me emphasize before I finish this, that stranger abduction / molestation is rare, and caregivers should be wary of all stranger contact involving children in their care, regardless of the sex of the stranger. But I can understand being a little more wary of men.

We could really mix this up and say "If a black male went up and tried to interact with your children when you were a distance away watching, how would you feel,"

Really, what's the difference between this and racism? If I sit here and say, more black men than white men statistically are in jail for violent crimes, and refuse to let any black men in my home or near my kids, you would think I would get in trouble.

Are the gloves off? Do many of you support racial profiling as a more efficient means of screening people as well?

[Edit: I'm only asking this as a philosophical question, not to start a flame war.]

I can't find stranger abduction statistics relating to gender. I can tell you that 1 in 4 of all abductions are stranger abductions. That the likely abductee will probably be an 11-13 year old white female from "middle class" (does such thing exist anymore? Another thread maybe...) cross section of society.

The question, for me anyway, is why do we have these irrational fears about men and children. Of 797,500 children reported missing, 58,200 were abducted by nonfamily members and only 115 of those were the violent, long-term "stereotypical" abduction scenarios (all that according to the NISMART-2 research study for the year 1999). That means 739,300 children, that is if my math is right, are abducted by family members. So, if the vast majority of kids abducted are abducted by family members, why aren't they as heavily scrutinized as the lone male?

My sister and mother have no problem leaving my niece and nephew with me for hours on end. A friend of my mother regularly leaves her teenage daughter in my charge during the summer when school is out. According to statistics, it's more likely for me to abduct them rather than some random guy at the park.

But really, all that is irrelevant as far as I'm concerned. I mean, if you're that worried about a child being abducted, wouldn't you be wary of everybody? If I was so terribly frightened of the notion that someone could spirit away my child, you better believe I'm going to be watching everyone around them like a hawk and not just the lone males.

Many of those are runaways, but your basic point is sound. Most abductions are by family members, most others are by non-familial caregivers such as babysitters, and parents should be aware of the potential here.

However, this is another case of absolute numbers not telling the whole story. Younger children spend nearly their entire lives either at school / daycare, or with an older family member. They spend huge blocks of time with family, and very little unattended in a public place, where most stranger abductions occur. The vast majority of cases where a family member abducts a child, it's a non-custodial parent. Most of the time, the non-custodial parent has the legal right to see the child. What's to be done about this? I don't know.

Not when you eliminate custodial interference abductions, which constitute the majority of family member abductions. Look at those "Missing Child" flyers, and look at the "last seen with" person. It's almost always the father. Second, you've obviously been assessed as not being an abduction/molestation threat. This is what parents should do with all potential caregivers.

Exactly. Any stranger around a group of kids, regardless of sex, should be watched carefully. Men, in our society, are much less likely to be primary caregivers, so seeing one at the park around a group of kids, for example, is going to draw attention.

i currently have a friend who's child was abducted by the ex wife and taken to South Korea... State department isn't much help.

there's lots of family member abductions that I have witnessed for the past 2 decades.

My mom would never let me go to my friends' houses if only their fathers were there. When asked why, my mom said that women are safer. What a bunch of crock.

Anyway, the reason men are thought of predators more than women when it comes to abduction might be because a lot of abductions end in rape of the child. Or molesting. Typically, it is a male who rapes or molests, not a female.

However, it's not fair to men to judge them. Women will always be wary of men over their own sex, but I personally believe we should watch out for anyone that might be getting a little TOO friendly with a child.

Much of it, maybe most of it, is the media conditioning; men kidnap young girls, men are child molesters, men are violent. I wonder, though, if there's a biological component; keep the "strange male" away from the young. In prides or groups of some kinds of animals, including simians, the dominant or higher-ranking males may try to injure or kill infants who are not theirs (by smell); because they want all offspring to be from _their_ line. So I wonder if some of this mistrust is inborn. Not that, as noted, women don't abuse or abduct children. But female child abductors, if not members of the family, are usually seen as mentally ill but not interested in the child sexually -- to be pitied, in other words.

I have seen a male child molester in action; not actually doing anything sexually, but a street person trying to engage in inappropriate conversation with a very young girl (7, 8) who some absolute idiot of a parent had apparently left alone at a city busstop _very_ early in the morning. He was easy enough to scare off; all I had to do is look at him (When he saw me, I saw fear in his eyes, and he knew I saw it; he literally slunk away).

The point is, yes, there are predators in this world, but they aren't going to be some guy that came with one of your girlfriends to a party; they aren't suddenly going to grab your kid and run. You put your child are risk if you're insanely careless, as the parent of the child above was. You also should examine any longterm relationships between your children in adults. But one time? At a party? The friend of someone you know? Hell, you might as well check every male's pockets for stocking masks while you're at it!

Well said, Rodney, I agree completely.

I think it's sad that men are slotted into this stereotype. As long as the interaction isn't inappropriate and the man interacting with the child isn't a stranger, what's the harm in it? I don't think I'd feel any better about a strange male or female approaching my *future* child. In the news here recently more women have been attempting to abduct children, though it is less common, a perversion for children is not limited to gender. Kids should be taught to be wary of all strangers.

I have no problem approaching children.... more so I have children approach me more often. But it is a sterotype... but we really cannot help it, when there is a higher percentage of male sexual offenders. But thats only a certain portion.... it only takes a few people to ruin it for the rest of us.

By this logic -since there are 1000's more strange men than female caregivers -then statistically men are much more unlikely to be molesters. Yes, this logic is fallacious on both counts.

I also admit that I am more careful when my step-daughters are around men, but given the reality, I don't appologize for it. (I don't freak out either).

But as for myself, I am very careful to avoid the appearance of impropriety when I am with around other female children.

What reality?

Statistics say (and we all know about statistics, but since there isn't anything else to work with) that a small percentage of all child abductions are committed by non-family members. I imagine that all of those abductions weren't commited exclusively by men. So, I think it's pretty reasonable to say concerning the statistics I posted above that less than 58,200 abductions in the year 1999 were commited exclusively by strange men. Less than 59,200 out of nearly 800,000 that year. So, 7%? 8%? of the total number of kids who disappeared in 1999 were abducted by "strange" men.

Now that's still a risk, but a risk worthy of special scrutiny? Is the risk of your children being picked up worse than say....being in a car wreck? attacked by a dog? hit by lightning? Is the risk so great that as a parent (or whatever) you have to be especially vigiliant to ward against it or as a male especially vigiliant in changing your behavior to keep the feathers unruffled?

I keep asking why people behave the way they do, but I guess the question I should be asking is why don't you fix it? If you recognize you're being manipulated or the logic is unfounded, why don't you make the effort to change that behavior?

Can I be completely irrational about something and expect the masses to adjust their behavior accordingly to accomodate my irrationallity even in the face of all common sense and logic?

It just boggles my mind that in a world where compromise is king and civilized people are expected to try and see the whole picture rather than just their viewpoint, that people refuse to even bother to see the other side. I see comment after comment like, "Well, I do it as well, but I'm not going to change nor apologize," and it just blows me away.

Surely more to come, but here's some more linkage..

Hmmm...the latest case in the news about two little girls missing and it looks like the father did it and not some anonymous pedophile as was feared.

No. You're comparing apples to oranges. I was comparing caregiver molestation to caregiver molestation, and my reasoning is sound.

raveneye's statistices indicated that 22% of the children in the study were molested by females, and 78% by males. This would seem to indicate that males were 3 1/2 times as likely to molest as females, at least in the population studied. The problem with this is that it looks only at the percentages of the results, and doesn't really tell us about the incidence from the other end.

Since most molestation occurs by a caregiver, we should look at them primarily. The 3 1/2 times as likely is sound only if there are equal numbers of male and female caregivers, but this is not the case. Children, particularly young children, are much more likely to be in the custody of a female caregiver than a male.

Let's take a hypothetical situation. I'll be making up the numbers here to illustrate my point. Let's take a population of 10,000, and assume that 100 of them were molested by a caregiver. Using raveneye's statistics, 78 of the molestors would have been men, and 22 women. If the care givers are equally split between males and females, the that would be 78/5000 males and 22/5000 females who molested a child. The likelihood of a male being a molestor would be 1.56%, and a female 0.44%. But there is a much higher percentage of female caregivers than male. Let's shift that split to 3/4 or caregivers being female, something much closer to reality, I think. That would give us 78/2500 males molesting and 22/7500 females, or a likelihood of 3.12% among males, and 0.29% for females, or about 10x as likely among males in this particular population.

If you want to compare the incidence of males and females who perform stranger abductions, I'm game. But lets compare apples to apples, the number of female strangers children are exposed to relative to the number of abductions, and the number of male strangers children are exposed to relative to the number of abductions. Look at a public park during the day, and you'll find the number of women around the children greatly outnumber the men, yet the number of stranger abductions comitted by men outnumbers those by women.

Let me emphasize something else here before I'm finished. I think the parent in your second example clearly overreacted. There isn't enough information in the first story to judge.

If parents are more wary of all strangers, children would be safer.

Again your use of statistics is flawed. Who says that the victims molested by men weren't molested by the same man or a very small group of men. Whereas it is very unlikely that the children involved all have the same caregiver. Secondly, the statistics point to the "caregiver" scenario as being the preferred modus operandi for female perpetrators and "stranger" scenarios being preferred by males.

The actual study was suggesting something in the way of a Modus Operandi. That is women committing this crime feel more comfortable doing it to someone close -such as a child under their care. Males committing this crime feel safest committing it to a unknown child. Thus talking about male caregivers as being molesters is not supported by the data presented here.

However, lets take your hypothetical 100 molested children and re-analyze the statistics so it says something that I prefer it say. (See How to Lie with statistics -particularly the chapter on Statisticulating for more information on the games that we are playing).

From your population of 100 -22% (we won't talk of confidence levels or variation) were molested by females and 78 were molested by males.

Since it is possible that one male can molest 78 children and it is unlikely that 22 children have the same caregiver. One can conclude that it is 22 times more likely for a perpetrator to be a female than a male -this from analysis of the perpetrators perspective. Of course from the victims perspective they are still more likely to be molested by a male than a female.


Yes, again this is comical. There are some underlying assumptions when studying statistical data. Some of these statistics are taken from the perception of the victims and is limited with what you can determine about the perpetrators. What I'm trying to say is that you are repeatedly making assumptions that may or may not stick. To do a proper statistical analysis requires more use of the numbers than what we are given here. We need to know N. We need to sample randoms from populations and not just pick out the ones we are studying. If we are applying the data to a predictor model then we should perform General Discriminant Analysis and not just ad hoc a 22/100 without a concern for the variance among different populations.


On a more speculative note: I'm willing to gamble that women who are caught committing this crime get a less severe punishment than men.

Its sad when the filth of the sickos of society permeate our lives to the point where we feel uncomfortable doing what is natural.

I couldn't agree more Demeter.

Uh, we routinely have groups of 20 or more children being cared for by the same caregiver in daycare or in schools or in cub scouts. In fact, when children aren't with their parents, they're likely to be in a group setting.

But lets set those aside, as it's not really possible to ascertain the incidence of molestation by males and females by looking solely at victims, which was my point in the first place. Lets look at actual offender rates.

According to the USDOJ in 2002,(table 38) 96.3% of sexual assaults in the United States were committed by males. Similar numbers are reported for other years. The fact is that men are far more likely to commit a sexual assault than women. Being suspicious of any one man based on this is overreacting, I agree, but it is a reaction that is based on empirical evidence, not just predjudice.

That said, I agree completely that the parents in your examples were unjustified about suspecting some wrongdoing or potential thereof on your part. If I see a person of either sex not known to me in the school halls, I'll stop and check for a pass from the office, but won't harrass a man any more than a woman. Under those circumstances, such suspicion was unwarranted, as there was little to no danger of abduction.

Agreed, I'm glad you acknowledged my point.

So this is sexual assault and not child molestation. Why are you blurring the distinction between the two?

A couple points:

For clarification: all the statistics in that report are based soley on victims. This is the BOJ Crime Victimization Survey, which is a survey of victims, not offenders. This in no way reports any "actual offender rates" of any kind, since there is no time frame in the questions and it does not identify or count offender individuals.

In my experience, people's attitudes/generalizations/preconceptions about sexual abuse vary quite a lot from place to place. Because of this variation, and because very few people are aware of this nationwide BOJ survey, I believe that most people's preconceptions wrt this subject are based less on statistics of this kind than on more complex and variable social experience and cultural habits.

In my current mixed neighborhood there is a predominance of cultural backgrounds in which fathers are very physical with their children, show a lot of affection, are more likely to carry them than mothers. When I take my daughter to the park there are always lots of dads there interacting and playing, and I don't feel uncomfortable also playing with whoever my daughter is playing with. This is a mixed neighborhood in South Miami, where there are lots of people with Mexican/Cuban/Haitian background, fairly strongly religious, mostly Catholic and mostly moderately conservative to liberal.

But there is a lot of variation within the U.S. When I was living in Eugene Oregon, in a very liberal, non-religious neighborhood, I would say that there was often almost borderline paranoia about men interacting with children in parks, as if every man was already assumed guilty. There seemed to be an unwritten rule that if you were male, you interacted with your own child only, whereas women were freer in general. I don't know why this particular neighborhood was like that, and it might not have anything to do with conservative/liberal or religious/non-religious; it might have just been chance variation. But I do think cultural background and caregiving habits in general are quite important, and probably more important than nationwide statistics in determining an individual's (largely unconscious) preconceptions.

My brother loves kids and I am constantly having to warn him to back off in public situations where little kids are concerned. Women do not appreciate having strange men approach them about thier children, and yes, while it may be a stereotype or upholding a stereotype, the fact is that it is a situation that makes a woman uncomfortable. My brother can be very overeager around children and I keep telling him to calm down and stop acting like a kid himself--this REALLY makes people think there's something wrong with him. I've had to explain to him time and time again why him approaching children makes their mothers uncomfortable, but I don't think he's ever going to understand it or fully grasp why that is...and the fact that my brother IS a little weird makes it even worse.

If a guy's not a complete stranger I'd have no problem with him being around my (future) kids. It's the complete strangers I would worry about--even though I should be worrying about those close to me--those who might be hiding their true intentions.

I think it's sad that we have to be paranoid of men in this way. Very sad indeed.

Child molestation is a type of sexual assault.

Are you disputing that a large majority of sexual assaults and/or child molestations are comitted by males?

I just did a search of the Megan's law database, using my own zip code and half a dozen others, and here's what I found.

In my zip code, one female registered sex offender, more than 80 males.

Jumping around a bit we get: 2 females, over 100 males. 0 females, 70+ males. 1 female, more than 100 males.

Male sex offenders outnumber females in my quick little survey by a factor of between 50 and 100 to 1.

In Los Angeles County about 1 female for every five to six pages of males.

I don't see how there can be any dispute that men commit these crimes much more often than women, and that, by your own admission based on raveneye's statistics, men are more likely to choose stranger abduction as their method of aquiring a victim.

It's unreasonable to be suspicious of a man trying to sell you insurance or who's looking after your child's safety at a party; I agree completely on those. Being cautious of a strange man around a group of kids in a park is also, I think, an understandable reaction.

Again, this kind of reaction varies tremendously from place to place. In northern Germany or coastal Croatia, for example, most people would laugh and think you're joking or crazy or just sick if the reason you're cautious is that you think the man might be a child molester. If you're cautious because you think he might be trying to steal her purse, then that would probably be seen as a more reasonable reaction. Or in Croatia if the reason was that you thought he was a Serb, then that would be an patently obvious reason for concern . . . . .

In any case, doing a male/female convict comparison test is logically not relevant to determining how rational it is to be cautious of males but not females. If you want to know whether A is a risk in and of itself, you don't ask what the risk of B is, and compare the two. You need to know the risk of A itself, absolutely. For example, you don't say "I'm not going to swim in pool A because it's 10x dirtier than pool B" when pool A has only 10 sand grains and B has one sand grain in it. If you don't swim in the pool, it's because it's too dirty absolutely, not in comparison to some other pool. Or you don't say "I'm not going to bother driving safely in town because it's 10x more likely that I die on the freeway than in town." (just making up numbers here)

Similarly, if someone decides not to be vigilant about females as child molesters, then the logical reason would be because the absolute risk from females alone is too small to worry about, not because the risk from males is 10x higher, which is completely irrelevant because it's a female standing there, not a male. And the critical point here is that nobody knows even within an order of magnitude what the absolute risk is. So any decision one makes is without any concrete support whatsoever.

Here's a little thought experiment. We know that the overall rates of child molestation vary tremendously from place to place. Let's say that in state A the overall rate is 10x what it is in state B, but that the relative male/female perp ratio is 10 in both states. If all you're relying on is your comparison test, then you would have to conclude in both states to be vigilant of males but not females. That's because it's 10x more likely that a male be a perp than a female. But look: in state A the absolute female perp rate is the same as the absolute male perp rate in state B! Therefore to be logically consistent you need to be just as concerned about females in state A as you are about males in state B. But is anybody going to react like that? No. The vast majority of people are going to do the same male/female comparison test as you did and conclude in both states to be vigilant of men but not women.

That's why this reaction is irrational. There is utterly no known absolute risk to base it on, so people take the psychological path of least resistance and suspect men because they already know that men are "more likely than women" to be sexual predators. Suspecting women for most people creates too much cognitive dissonance, so it's avoided regardless of the absolute risk from women.

And finally, the comparison test is reducible to absurdity: if you eliminate women by making a male/female comparison, why stop there? Why not eliminate white men by noting that, within men, there are a disproportionate number of black and hispanic convicts? And why not also eliminate rich men, because there is a disproportionate number of poor convicts? It's logically the same: you're eliminating women because there are a disproportionate number of male convicts, so why stop there?

So if one is basing one's behavior on convict comparison tests alone, then to be logically consistent, the conclusion,

should be altered to read:

And of course that is exactly how most people do react in reality, in general, for exactly the reasons that you give for focusing on men but not women.

Actually, it is an interesting DISPARITY that the arrest record of males is so high with regards to molesters -yet the voice of the victims indicate that females share a large proportion of the offences committed. What I am suggesting is that women are probably not being subjected to the same level of enforcement and/or judicial scrutiny as males.

And yes, I believe that there is a difference in the level of scum that preys upon women versus the ones that prey upon children.

In terms of absolute numbers:

There are 86 registered male sex offenders in my zip code. There is one female.

I don't see any need to discriminate at this point between child molesters and other sex offenders, because it's perfectly reasonable not to want anyone who's ever been convicted of any sex crime around children, and I certainly don't want them around me.

If I see a person I don't recognize around the group of kids playing on the playground equipment in the courtyard of my condo complex, I'm going to take note of that, keep an eye on him or her, and probably introduce myself and ask a couple of friendly questions. If it's someone who belongs there, say a new resident, or a cousin or uncle, I've just met a new neighbor. If it's someone who doesn't belong there, I've made it known to him or her that he or she is being watched. I've had three people take off as I was walking up to them as they watched the kids playing.

I do this regardless of the sex of the person, because I don't see any reason for someone who doesn't live here, regardless of sex, to be on our playground.

But I also stand by my belief, based on the evidence, that it's a reasonable reaction to be more suspicious of men than of women, especially when it comes to stranger abductions.

In many states, an 18-year-old male who gets caught having sex with his 17-year-old girlfriend is convicted and becomes a registered sex offender by her angry father. The point is that the label "sex offender" is very broad and covers a lot of areas where young, dumb males get into trouble and girls get off scott-free. So, you need to look at the conviction of the offender to determine the risk. This is usually public record. For example, there is a sex offender down the street from me that was convicted of "sexual assault against a person under the age of 14."

Frankly, Raveneye logically destroyed everyone's argument. Discrimination is discrimination, no matter how you justify it.

The absolute numbers I'm referring to would be 86/M, 1/F, and 86/M - 1/F, where M and F are the total male and female adults present at any given time within that zip code. And to the 86 and 1 you'd have to add the number of men and women respectively who are offenders but were never convicted; that number certainly is larger for women than men.

All right, let's look at that belief. The total number of stranger abductions of children in the U.S. last year was 50. Tragically, all of those (to my recollection) either are unsolved or ended in the child's death. So the absolute probability that an American child was abducted by a stranger last year was about 1 in a million. (Incidentally, this number hasn't changed appreciably in the last 50 years, except to drop somewhat in the last few years.)

So: how worried/concerned/cautious/suspicious should we be about stranger abductions? Well, the number of "worry points" for this risk is 1 in a million, or 0.000001 on a scale from 0 to 1. Now let's assume that all 50 of those abductions were by males (I don't know what the actual number was). Now let's assume that the probability that a strange female abducts a child is 1 in 100 million (just pulling the number out of the air). That's 0.00000001 worry points.

So now the question becomes: how much more worried should we be about men than women on the basis of the child abduction risk? That's simply the absolute difference between the worry points for the two sexes. What's that number? It's 0.000001 - 0.00000001, or about 0.000001. So the amount by which we should be more worried about men than we are about women is 0.000001. My point: this number is absolutely, utterly infinitesimal. This number is so small that it is not possible to even perceive. How are you going to be 0.000001 more cautious?

The bottom line is that the probability that either sex abduct the child is infinitesimal. That means, mathematically, that the difference between the two probabilities is also equally infinitesimal, so the difference in caution should also be equally infinitesimal. It's a funny thing about tiny numbers: you can multiply them by 2, 3, 4, 5, 100 and they are still tiny!

So when you have these tiny risks, it is absolutely, utterly irrational to discriminate among people based on them, whether the discrimination is among blacks, whites, hispanics, socioeconomic groups, or males/females, or whatever. That's because within each group the absolute risk is tiny, so the differences also are tiny. The rational thing is to treat everyone identically when it comes to these risks.

Unfortunately, although this argument has been around for at least 50 years, since the burgeoning of the civil rights movement in the U.S., people still don't seem to grasp it. Or they seem to grasp it when it applies to discrimination against blacks, but not when it applied to discrimination against men in general, which is half the human population. It's a curious little piece of insanity in American psychology.

So I would say that this belief, that it's a reasonable reaction to be more suspicious of men than of women when it comes to stranger abductions, is based on a fundamental misconception about relative risk.

And I'll point out here that I'm not putting myself above anyone else here; I have pretty much the same unconscious biases as everybody. But for me, when I see myself acting on them, it pisses me off, or maybe even makes me feel ashamed of myself, makes me want to become a better person. I think we (emphasis on Americans in particular) do have a lot of evolving to do in the area of basic trust in our fellow man.

50 stranger abductions in a year? You're off by a factor of close to 1,000.

58,200 non-family abductions in 1999. Of those, most were someone known to the child, but 37%, or more than 20,000 were stranger abductions. 75% were by males, 25% by females.

Evidence not that we shouldn't be wary of either sex, but that we should be wary of unknown adults of both sexes around children. And because more men than women are perpetrators, by a large margin, it's understandable that people are more wary of strange men than strange women.

I agree with the point of the OP. It is more difficult to be male as regards this issue than it is to be female. It sucks that people are suspicious of men trying to protect their children or sell them insurance. I understand and agree with that. Further, as I said, when I see a person I don't know, of either sex, on our complex playground around the kids, I'll approach that person regardless of sex. It's harmless, and if that person has reason to be there, they have nothing to fear and no reason to be offended.

I agree that it's foolish to automatically trust all women and distrust all men. But given the disproportionate number of men who commit these crimes, I understand distrusting strange men more than strange women around children.

Also, I don't grant any stranger my trust. Trust must be earned, not given out freely.

As the article points out in the first paragraph, there were 115 stereotypical kidnappings in 1999, which was closer to the definition of abduction that I was using, and closer to the definition that most people seem to use when they use the term informally. If you broaden the definition to include any instance when the child is briefly detained, then of course you're going to increase the number practically without limit.

I understand it too, I'm just pointing out that it is completely and utterly irrational.

When the KKK looks to justify their prejudice against minorities -they frequently point to police statistics. Why then is it "ok" to justify a prejudice against males by claiming that a higher percentage of them commit crimes?

[B]I can unerstand both sides. However women shouldn't be surprised when men start becoming anti-child. For myself, I have little to do with kids, never around them alone, and in fact, the places I go are private places. We do our best to keep out children except for meal times, and then they have to be with their parents.

i have noticed this aswell :( im 20, dont look like a gangster or anything by any means; if im walking down the street and there happens to be a mother and a child walking towards me, the mother will most often pull there kid to the other side of them.

i mean its not like im going to take your kid you can calm down, im just walking honest.

compleatly unrelated to the kid thing, i was in walmart the other day and i was looking around for hair removal stuff, and i ended up in the "female only section" with all the makeup and whatnot, the sales peroson there basicly got mad at me for being in there because i wasent "the type of person that should be in that section" being a guy sucks sometimes :S

I think that whichever stats one uses - it seems true that men are a greater threat. Probably not as much a threat as some claim and maybe less dangerous than reversing SUVs, but still more a threat than women.

What I want to say though is that I'm happy for people to be suspicious of me. I think there's a difference between being wary (suspicous) and pre-judging though, and too many parents lean toward the latter without any evidence.

When kids are concerned - I am sure that there are many more guys with protective instincts than harmful intentions. What I see is an offensive attitude (occasionally) from parents in situations where there is no danger (ie in public) and where being wary would suffice.

I would agree with this, and go further to say when race is brought into the equation, going beyond "wary" has profound social consequences.

For example, "blacks" are currently the most segregated racial/ethnic group in the U.S. The main reason is that whites believe that crime rates are higher in neighborhoods where young black men live, so white families do not move into these neighborhoods.

And the crimes that whites are most afraid of are of course sex crimes: rape, sexual assault, pedophilia. However, the reality is that the proportion of blacks living in a neighborhood is an extremely poor predictor of the incidence of such crimes. Nevertheless, the absolute best predictor of a white person's subjective belief of a neighborhood's crime rate is the proportion of young black men in the neighborhood. It's a far better predictor than the crime rate itself.

So, we have extreme segregation into white and black neighborhoods, regardless of income and educational levels. Even extremely liberal people who would be appalled at the suggestion that they are racist or sexist will not move into "black" neighborhoods because they have convinced themselves (wrongly) that such neighborhoods have higher crime rates because of the young black men living there.

Again, this is irrational behavior because the differences in crime rates due to race alone are infinitesimal. As are the differences in crime rates due to gender alone. Since people seem to be more willing to justify anti-male discrimination based on crime rates than they are to justify racial discrimination based on crime rates, it would seem that willingness allows a back-door entry to racism: it's OK to discriminate against a black man as long as it's not because he's black, but rather because he's a man. But that's very convenient because the difference in crime rates between black/white are very similar to those between men/women, so the gender discrimination provides an excuse for all the usual kinds of racial discrimination and fear. When it comes to sex crimes, for most people the visceral part of the brain takes over and the logical part goes out the window.

Sometimes I think that 90% of the injustice in the world is due to fundamentally irrational fears . . . .