TW To notice that a lot of child murders have one thing in common

Reading these threads makes me glad to be a lesbian, but even that doesn't mean that we get a pass from male violence. Not like they just leave us alone!

I have seen dating profiles where women say they are single mothers. I understand why they do this, but they are advertising their kids to paedophiles.

@lastminutetrip
I learnt everything about how not to parent from my own parents.

And to answer your questions - no disability, had eventual CM, mix of UC when they were tiny and then worked /studied around school hours, no family help, unstable housing for several years, many sleepless nights worrying about bills, food on table etc but never once thought a man could get me out of that. But again that probably comes down to the countless poor choices I saw each of my parents make and how that affected their children.

I do think the risk of abuse is not limited to a step parent. It’s the step parent’s family having access to a non biological child.

That’s an excellent post.

The biggest factor in child abuse is that there is a step parent in the picture.
It's like 90-95%.

It's fucking harrowing and whilst I married a man who wasn't my eldest child's father, and he was really lovely to her, now that marriage is over, I absolutely will not be having a new partner to have around my younger two.

As I've aged I have become far less naive I guess.

Totally agree with you

As usual, this comes down to relative and absolute risk. The relative risk posed by a step-parent, new live-in partner, etc, might well be higher than that of the natural parent. But the absolute risk posed by either is still tiny.

Put another way: If a child is murdered, there's probably a higher chance that it was the step-parent (etc) who did it than the natural parent. But very few children are murdered at all in the UK. In fact the amount of national coverage that almost every case gets is testament to that. Yes, of course every murder of a child is one too many. But preventing all of them would require taking 80% of children away from their mothers "just in case", because we're not very good at predicting who will murder their child.

Why does this matter? Because as a society we have decided that attempting to deal with relative risks is a slippery slope that leads to discrimination.

If you look at the statistics for any rare crime, and divide the population up into small enough chunks, you can guarantee that you will find that some ethnic or social group commits more of that particular crime (relative risk). But that doesn't mean that even people from that group are actually especially likely to commit that crime (absolute risk) - it just means that they are a bit more likely to be the perpetrators if the crime is committed. Posh white men are more likely to commit fraud in the City, but most posh white men don't commit fraud, and it would be unfair for the police to pick up the first posh white man they come across when they hear of a case of fraud.

So the police and politicians have decided to concentrate on absolute risk, which avoids all the awkwardness of profiling. Hence why we hear things like "Crime is down 8% year-on-year", which is great if you were not a victim of crime this year, but doesn't help much if you were.

The OP may very will be right, that a disproportionate amount of the violence against kids is being perpetrated by step-parents (etc). But that doesn't tell us anything about whether we can do anything to fix the problem by somehow targeting men who start relationships with single mothers. The vast majority of those men will not harm their new step-kids; there are probably people reading this post who are in that position and know that their new partner is not a threat. What we can do is try to make people generally more aware of the warning signs of a bad partner, through education. But with 70 million people, occasionally some bad things are going to happen, and to some extent that's the price of living in a free society where we don't point the finger of suspicion at someone based on their circumstances or demographics.

The mothers involved in the child molestation cases of the singer from Lost Prophets (Ian Watkins?) chill me to my soul. So many of them seemed excited and happy to have him do it. Like they were specially chosen.

I don’t disagree that women and mothers can be abusers.

However “allow it to happen” is loaded

could that be the child is in the step partners care whilst she goes to work, as that may be the ONLY childcare option available due to lack of support.

lack of support which probably placed her in a position vulnerable to a predatory man in the first place

Tbh what scares me is the mother being complicit in allowing the new partner to abuse her child in so many cases. It's documented time and time again. Some mothers collude, others allow it to happen when they're not present and the child is left with the new bloke.

@Worldinyourhands I thought this was common knowledge. For an adult to abuse a child, two criteria need to be met: 1. access to a child, and 2. an opportunity to offend. Step parents can easily fulfil both criteria.

The comments upthread about the 'evil stepmother' trope remind me of my feelings about that phrase "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned".

Men who feel rejected routinely commit murder and mass murder and serial murder but yeah, sure, "no fury like a woman". Right.

When I was studying a social work degree around 11-12 years ago, my tutor had just written a paper entitled Who Kills Children? and his findings were heavily indicative that the primary perpetrators are step parents.

however those are still a minority of step parents. People do need to be more careful and more sensitive to their children’s needs, for sure, but the majority would not need social care intervention.

Do agree that child protection is woefully under-resourced, though, and often a job taken by less experienced (and less burnt out) social workers.

You sound very secure.

Can I ask if you worked, have any kind of disability, whether your partner paid CM, whether you had a secure home in place ie owned your own home or paid rent, had parents or family to support your choices?

these are all reasons why women turn to men, who statistically earn more, to assist with living costs to support them. It’s often that or absolute poverty in some cases.

It is another topic, it's all over these boards any day of the week. Your sweeping and rather rose-tinted statement is highly falsifiable, so I raised that point. My childhood was, sadly, not particularly unusual.

When I divorced my ex my children were all small and I had full custody. I made a promise to myself I would never live with anyone until they were all safely off to uni. Eldest is in first year, middle one in A levels and the last is doing GCSEs.

I’ve had an absolute ball dating, much more fun than my 16 years with the ex. These days I have a fairly significant ‘other’ but I don’t live with him, he doesn’t stay overnight, the kids didn’t meet him until I had known him for almost a year, and everyone knows that they are my absolute priority.
I have never understood women who turn to a new man and start that awful fawning dance and let a stranger come in to their children’s lives like that.

Obviously, there are exceptions. But this should be the case. Why have children otherwise? But that another topic....

You also have to realise that some men seek out single women to abuse children. Doesn't help the statistics.

I 100% agree with this.

the poster said she hopes her daughter “turns out” gay, not “turns”

Stepmother folklore isn't that much about the evils of the "step" part, it is about less than ideal parents in general, and the step part just makes it psychologically nicer for a story we tell children. It would be much worse for the listeners if it was the Cinderella's own mum and a golden sister.

I don't know whether more children are living with unrelated adults now, widows/widowers with small children and new partners were quite common in past, maybe there was a short period when people generally lived longer and the divorce rate hadn't caught up yet and things are coming back to normal now.

There are many families with step parents which work great and provide stability and love for their children, but no-one writes about them.

Those high risk cases are generally known to school/social services. We need better support for them, not demonisation of people who are trying to make the life work.

Can we not blame women for male violence today, I’m fed up of it. Violent men will be violent whether the women “let” them in to their homes or not.

please read the comment above that another poster made about financial pressures adding to a woman’s need to have a partner in order to support herself - again backed by evidence of the motherhood tax.

and she said “turns out” not just turns.