Genuine question - not goady, I promise, I am GC myself..How do we safeguard boys (generally age 8+) in changing rooms and toilets?

Weetabix the men don't need to accompany their daughters into th ladies. It's male violence and male predators that are the problem

As the mother of sons who do use the male changing room I'd challenge any woman who decided to "use male spaces". Boys are entitled to privacy too. Whatever the solution looks like this is not it.

Are you equally happy for female toilets to be redesigned so that fathers can access to help daughters?

Why would women's toilets need redesigning? There are no urinals in women's toilets.

I think it was an excellent point made upthread about designing male toilets to allow mothers access to help their sons.

Are you equally happy for female toilets to be redesigned so that fathers can access to help daughters?

Personally I have decided I‘ll enter male spaces. It makes no sense having DH do sports stuff he does not like with DS, and leave me with the housewifey shit I do not like, even though that may be all the rage in Saudi Arabia

Personally I like neither, but it is a better solution than taking him to the women's changerooms for the sake of girls and women.

Personally I have decided I‘ll enter male spaces. It makes no sense having DH do sports stuff he does not like with DS, and leave me with the housewifey shit I do not like, even though that may be all the rage in Saudi Arabia.

The problem with using female facilities as your son gets older is that you are going to distress many women and girls. Can't you use the male facilities and explain to them, if challenged, why you are there?

Or send a male to accompany him.

Maybe all male toilets should have a security guard.
Or no men are allowed in without Chaperone.
Or men have a curfew and can only use public toilets after 8pm when all the boys are in bed.

...and some say feminists have no sense of humour....all boys in bed by 8pm. Ha Ha.

I have boys and took them with me into the ladies as long as I could, until about 9/10. After that I'd make them go with Dad/brother or hang around veey visibly outside if I was on my own with one of them. Largely, this has sufficed I think. Changing rooms we've always just gone into a cubicle all together with no issues. All the aho6ps they are interested in seem to just have one large changing room so that works really well.

Many restaurants and bars seem to have unisex toilets now or at least kind of unisex ie where you have a corridor of individual cubicle toilets with man/woman on the ouside and you just go in whichever one is free. Most Wagamamas have these i think? I actually find these a bit more worrying as you have adults of all sexes and small children all pushing past each other and it would seem easy to push a kid into a cubicle in front of you and lock the door behind you (eg recent case in SA where a man raped a young girl). At least you can go right up to the door on the unisex cubicle ones I suppose and bang on the door and check theyre allright.

I dont know what the answer is. ldeally everywhere should have male, female, unisex, and family toilets and chnaging rooms I suppose but that seems pretty unlikely. At least the unisex ones don't have the hideous urinals i suppose.

No problem @Coyoacan. I would have thought the same as you before and thought it existed only in urban legend, not unlike all of the attempted abductions that get shared around on Facebook.

It probably isn't that common as crimes go. But I've obviously thought about my own parenting what others do, and was I neglectful? Thinking about it, I allowed him into a small unsupervised room where he was in a vulnerable position and other males were free to wander into him. It does sound neglectful, given his age.

I'm not sure how the police record these sort of crimes, but it would be interesting to extrapolate the statistics.

The demand that men do their part by doing stuff with kids where they need loos feels deeply ironic to me.

Me and my husband pretty much have reversed roles. We had 50:50 split maternity leave, he brings/fetches kid from school (previous kindergarten). 75% of the time, he loves to cook, does laundry, keeps things in order (he needs more order than me), I love sports.

Saturdays I go to the pool with DS while DH does the groceries. Now feminist board tells me, we need to switch roles and do groceries so DH can so the cool sports stuff.

Oh I am so sorry Overprotective. There was I saying that that sort of thing didn't happen.

non-predatory men can't be relied on to keep male children safe.

In terms of toilet design, I don’t think they can be relied on to keep male children safe. If there is another man in a toilet where a predatory man attacks or assaults a boy I certainly think they will be likely to help keep boys safe.

Very few (no?) people have said that boys should be allowed into the ladies (with clear exceptions - SN, children who have been abused) unquestioned past a certain age.

I am not sure why you raise absurd curfew suggestions when useful suggestions and development of thought have already occurred and been discussed.

over
My next bit is not in response to your post.
So it appears the general feeling on this thread is predatory men are the issue and non-predatory men can't be relied on to keep male children safe.
I don't think allowing boys into the ladies indefinitely is the answer because there is no clearly defined age where a boy starts becoming a higher risk.
Maybe all male toilets should have a security guard.
Or no men are allowed in without Chaperone.
Or men have a curfew and can only use public toilets after 8pm when all the boys are in bed.

I feel for you and your son, because as you say, he's not going to be ready to use any facilities (male, female or mix) on his own for sometime.

At our swimming pool, its a women's communal room with one curtained off area to fit one person. He uses that to change and then he goes to the lobby to wait for me so he's not hanging around in there.

Yes, I know it will become an issue down the line and I've avoided thinking too much about it. Luckily he is short for his age so hope its still quite far in the future.

Overprotective007. It's dreadful that your son was attacked, and a hope he continues with his recovery.

The problem with using female facilities as your son gets older is that you are going to distress many women and girls. Can't you use the male facilities and explain to them, if challenged, why you are there?

Thank for sharing that, Overprotective- thank goodness your son has a lovely family around him- sounds as though you've reacted brilliantly.
And absolutely this is a reasonable subject to discuss in the feminist boards, not least because we're very well primed to discuss issues around toilet/changing-room safety.
We've been discussing it with regard to females for yonks so it's not a massive leap to consider its impact on boys.
If you pop it on another board, you're kinda starting again.

I’m so sorry Overprotective and glad that your son is doing well. Thanks for sharing your story as this is what many mothers of sons fear in that situation. The fact that mothers of daughters have many other things to fear for their daughters isn’t in any way sidelined by our concerns.

I have learned a lot from this thread - I’m going to hang out much closer to the entrance of the men’s (they can just deal with it) and I will use the thumbs up method mentioned so I know who is in there to start with. My husband generally takes my son swimming and is an equal parent, but he works and I don’t, so in the holidays if I want to take my son anywhere we do need to deal with toilets without a male chaperone. When I was looking after my SN niece this summer it was really nice getting to use the disabled toilet and not having this issue which made me realise how it has had an impact on my planning and days since my son got older.

The design of the toilets is interesting - I’m assuming urinals are near the door as the asssumption is more men are using them to pee so makes sense to have shortest walk there. It reminds me a bit of shops. Menswear is normally on the ground floor as men are assumed to make less effort so they won’t bothet going upstairs. The inconvenience for women of having to go further is not a problem for the retailers as the women will make the extra effort. I don’t see why men who want to pee shouldn’t be inconvenienced a little to enable easier protection of boys. But given that people keep designing toilet cubicles too small properly to fit a sanitary disposal bin in, I don’t have much hope for this. As I said, the push for so called gender neutral toilets seems to have led to more individual secure cubicles with sinks in and this is very helpful for me.

I'm not proposing anything that hasn't already been discussed I don't think. Hovering outside station toilets, reminding them places to not go after dark, don't go in park toilets. The usual stuff we say to kids.
I like the idea of a different male toilet design someone mentioned.
Personally right now I'm more worried about online safety but I have drummed in the need to be wary ( I hope).

I've name changed as a few friends know what happened to my son but I do want to share it here to make it known that this is a real issue and not just a scare mongering issue.

Last year my son, who was 7 at the time was attacked in a men's toilet in a restaurant. We were sitting at a table about 10 feet away from the toilets. I realised he was gone longer than usual so I went to the door and heard him screaming. It was horrible and that noise has stayed with me since. He was in there tying his shoelace by the sinks when a teenage boy age 17 followed him in and dragged him into a cubicle. He was attacked, injured and deeply traumatised by it. He must have been locked in the cubicle with him for about 5 minutes which must have felt like an eternity to him.

Luckily, he's a very loved and has a warm friendly open character and there doesn't appear to be much lasting damage. His sleep was disturbed in the months following, but he sleeps well now. He does have some funny OCD type characteristics which I think may have developed after the incident but we keep an eye on it.

We talk about it openly which I think helps. Us as parents seem to have been more affected than him and I still bring him, age 8 now, into the women's changing room and any public toilets. There is no way he is going to be using the men's on his own for a few more years and if anyone questions it I will tell them what happened.

I don't believe this would have happened in the women's toilets. The boy/almost man in question has mental issues, it turns out, and may have been targeting our son and was watching him from his own table where he was dining with his family. It wasn't an opportunistic attack and not all types of attacks like this will be. Its very easy for someone to hang around a toilet entrance and wait for a lone boy to enter.

So how are you proposing we keep 13 year old boys safe, Bernard?

Has anyone been saying that it's appropriate to bring tweens/early teens into the women's toilets? I didn't think so but might have missed some posts.

Nope. Not that I can recall.

Whoever accused me of "fucking lying" up thread when I said that some people don't seem to think little boys are in need of the same protection as girls: first off, I'm not sure why the need for spitting rage?
It was a fairly mild observation based on posters implying that small boys are potential peepers and pants pullers and/or girls are always at risk anyway and will be forever so boys need to suck it up.
I find that weird on a parenting thread. Just because you don't nessecarily view little boys as dangerous perverts in training doesn't mean you excuse their bad behaviour or think they are angels .
It also doesn't mean that you think 13 year olds should be in the women's changing rooms.
Lots of people have posted practical and helpful suggestions ( I think the placement of urinals etc is a really interesting one). I don't personally find "send them with a man" useful ( and thousands of lone mothers won't either) but I appreciate that men could be doing more with their kids.
And yes we all know the problem is male violence and it's up to men to solve, but while we wait for the temperature in Hell to drop, there's no harm in pondering how to keep (all) our children safe.

frogsoup It's my job as a mother to do what I can to keep my boys safe. However I as a mother cannot fix the problem of male predators in male toilets.

As feminists we are raising the problem of male violence and we discuss what we can do about it but we cannot solve that on our own.

Single sex toilets keeps the predators that prey on women and girls (mostly) out of the toilets.

Mixed sex toilets allows the predators preying on girls and women easy access and only protects those tween and early teen boys who are prepared to have their mother accompany them to the toilet. There are more men who prey on girls and women than men who prey on boys.

As a moral dilemma it's pretty clear to me, it's unacceptable to put a greater number of people at risk to reduce the risk for a smaller number. If it was a measure that had a neutral affect on others that would be different.

I'd be interested frogsoup in what practical measure you think we as feminists should be taking to solve the problem of male violence in men's toilets? I don't know I feel you have sons but the age they refuse to go into the ladies toilets with you is generally at or before the age where most other women feel they should not be there.

We do need the expertise of people who have been boys on how to keep boys safe

Beyond this, we simply need them to step up to the plate and do their bit.