At a societal level

vibrators aside, and this place is a business, so thts worth bearing in mind. How do I stop
my son from
participating in atrocities? If I think he’s a lovely ld who won’t film himself doing I peakable things then am I part of the problem? How do I parent the potential for depravity? Help!

Exactly @pickledandpuzzled , they don't have to sit around feeling like weirdos, they find their tribe and think all's well.

The last two of those were deleted for being threads about a thread, which this is not.

Thanks - I didn't know that.

But yes I see this thread as being separate, but was just rather naively thinking it is such a huge and important topic that looking at it in detail is probably better by looking at specific aspects.

It seems rather ironic that MN allows random people to report posts and have whole threads on safeguarding removed because those people don't like what women are saying.

How very anti a safeguarding culture.

MN are quite anti-safeguarding in many ways. I note they're quite happy to advertise sex toys to us though. What kind of world are we living in when women discussing how best to safeguard children can be stopped by some random (dodgy by definition) bloke not liking it but we can have ads of vibrators forcibly inserted into such discussions.

Not a good one.

Awaits deletion....

Compared to the sophisticated answers here mine may seem a bit simplistic but I feel attitutes have changed massively, racism, sexism etc have become far less acceptable and many people present a public image that conforms with that but human nature changes more slowly. There's a lot of men out there who would never publically advocate for child abuse or rape in women but who harbour dark fantasies, you only have to look at sexual fetishes to see that what turns some men on the most is the forbidden and child abuse must surely be the most forbidden of all.
As a pp said we have let the genii out of the bottle, the internet gives access to endless porn, young boys from 11 and 12 are seeing things on their phones that previous generations would have seen as private and shocking, by the time they're grown men some guys are so jaded by "normal" porn that they have ED in real life, they can't relate to normal sex with a real woman. Then there's Only Fans, seen by some as a normal career, but just encouraging men to feel that they really can buy any woman they want.
I don't have the answer for this, we can't turn back time, but we need to get away from the culture that says no one should judge, no one should be ashamed because there are times when we should do both of these things

Thank you for explaining CheckingTheNumbers . It jumped out to me as part of the article that seemed ambiguous in what they were trying to present.
It's a shame figures like that, that include non-problematic or less problematic relationships, are muddying the water with much more concerning trends such as much older men expressing they'd have sex with a minor.

two other threads on safeguarding were removed yesterday

I know its probably impossible to say exactly why, but in general way, why were they removed.

I was on one of the threads, and I thought many were contributing from experience of working within that framework.

It fact it did come up that the notion of "bad apples" was exactly why safeguarding often doesn't work.

Just to say I am not at all surprised by the article suggestion of men being opportunist sexual predators.

@LolaSmiles
The report found that 3 per cent of respondents had had sexual contact with a child. Researchers stated that over 95 per cent of those who answered “yes” to the question “have you had sex with someone under the age of 18 while over the age of 18?” were older than 24. The age of consent in Australia is 16.

There was a previous post about this report

There were a few questions about the data collection - e.g. the legal age of consent for about 90% of the people surveyed was 16 but the survey chose to set the consent cutoff age to 18 in its questions. Contact that is legal for most of the survey participants (e.g. first relationship in sixth form) falls into this survey's definition of sexual contact with a child.

The statistic you quote above is also a bit misleading - 85% of the people in the survey were over the age of 24 so it is unsurprising that the majority of people who answered yes were over this age. At a basic level they are comparing the total number of people in a 6 year wide band to the total number of people in a 50+ year wide band

The number of people below 24 who answered yes to the sexual contact question was small - relatively small levels of underreporting would greatly impact this value

Agree with @MalagaNights and @Vegemiteandhoneyontoast - great posts.

Ironically, in the push for individual expression and 'authentic selves' and forcing acceptance of that on others we've become more like animals who are less sentient than humans not less. Despite the biological denial of the queer theorists, they behave more like animals than those who can suppress their own desires in the interests of the wellbeing of others. Queer theorists, whatever justification they make, seem to be purely driven by individual want and desire, and do not care how dreadful the impact of this is on others.

Nowhere do we see this more clearly than dodgy groups in schools 'teaching' RSE to their own agenda with no care whatsoever about child wellbeing, no proper safeguarding vetting or knowledge of child development. For profit and individual gain at best and in some cases (where the groups doing this have been linked with adult entertainment toys etc) then you have to question whether darker motives are at play.

Who does it benefit to get children to recreate dick pics for example? Not the kids, that's for sure.

I agree with Malaga and Vegemite. Now instead of being shamed for breaking traditional social and cultural norms it seems that those who continue to adhere to them will be shamed instead for prudishness, or “kink shaming” or being “vanilla”, or just labelled as fascists for having boundaries and caring about safeguarding. There also seems to be a concerted effort to weaken ties between parents and children and to minimise the rights and responsibilities of parents supposedly in order to give children more freedom and autonomy. Of course this also leaves children more vulnerable and less secure on multiple levels, emotionally, physically, psychologically etc

When was it that 'choice' and 'it's all about you' came in? Our culture's expectations of its member seems to have really slid since then and public behaviour is the worst I can recall. We've thrown out the expected norms of behaviour that kept society running and now it's Anything Goes, which clearly isn't working, at least not for the majority.

Giambattista Vico, back in the 18th century, had some things to say about what we see now and he called it The Barbarism of Reflection.

Vico sees that history is cyclical. Vico claims that history begins in a barbarism of sense and ends in a barbarism of reflection. The barbarism of reflection is a returned barbarism in which the common sense established by religion through poetic wisdom holding a society together has been broken down by individual interests. The interests are spurred because individuals each think according to their own conceptual scheme without concern for the society, which makes it barbaric.

Vico describes the returned barbarism this way, "such peoples [in the barbarism], like so many beasts, have fallen into the custom of each man thinking only of his own private interests and have reached the extreme delicacy, or better of pride, in which like wild animals they bristle and lash out at the slightest displeasure". These private interests lead into a civil war in which everyone betrays everyone else. This takes humanity back to where it started, individual giants acting solely on their own individual passions.

https://iep.utm.edu/vico/#:~:text=Vico%20claims%20that%20history%20begins,broken%20down%20by%20individual%20interests

Sounds familiar, doesn't it.

From what I see, our culture is at a true low point and I can't see how that will improve.

I agree with you that it is a mistake to think we just need structures which protect us from the bad people. The world isn't just good and bead people, it's people making choices dependent on the conseuqnces and we can create such permissive culture that otherwise good people start to act in ways which can impinge others in harmful ways but the 'rules' allow.

We used to know this. It was the idea that we needed to be 'civilised' and that norms, shame, judegment and ostracisation could be used to guide behvaiour to comply with norms which were agreed tacitly by the group.

We've thrown this out, and decided it's abad thing, and instead tried to hang everything onto 'safeguarding' and a legal framework, but there are many things that just can't quite fit within this and these grey areas used to be managed by agreed norms of civilised behaviour.
This was particuarly importnt for men, where strong drives around sex and aggression need to be very carefylly managed by the group with very strct codes arounf acceptable behaviour to be part of the group. Patrucuraly tiwards women and children. Laws can cover the clear extrems fo this but there are many other behaviours where men's code was socially enforced in a way we've abandoned.

I think we are trying to strech 'safeguarding' to cover all of these and it just doesn't work and the gaps are showing.

There always has to be a tension between the group norms (civil behaviour) and individual expression but I think we've gone way too far in throwing out the norms wholesale in the beleief that anyting goes will bring ultimate and freedon and happiness. It doesn't. And safegurding and consent, whihc is all that's left, allow a whole lot of grim stuff whihc can now just run rampant.

“It's a saying they have, that a man has a false heart in his mouth for the world to see, another in his breast to show to his special friends and his family, and the real one, the true one, the secret one, which is never known to anyone except to himself alone, hidden only God knows where.”
― James Clavell, Shōgun
I know the original was directed at (Japanese politicians?), but I think it describes quite well men in general...

@parietal I think this is it.
https://www.humanrights.unsw.edu.au/news/worlds-largest-child-sexual-abuse-perpetration-prevalence-study-recommends-significant-investment-early-intervention-measures

There was some discussion about it on an earlier thread here:
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4947992-really-shocking-child-abuse-tendencies

can anyone find a link to the actual research paper? that news article is such a muddle that it is hard to say much about it.

There's also the total normalisation of sex work - their body their choice and all that, but why should selling themselves now be seen as an easy route to riches for teenagers?

And as a society we have a complete cognitive dissonance when it comes to CSA. On one hand there's nowt worse than a nonce, all of whom deserve nothing better than to have their balls stuffed down their throat by a baying mob. (I paraphrase). OTOH children have unfiltered access to porn, and to hypersexualised clothing, and it's "cute" when they sing and twerk along to overtly misogynistic and rape-y "tunes".

I once saw a little girl wearing a T-shirt which bore the slogan, "you've been a very naughty boy. Now go to my room". Said little girl was barely in early puberty. In what sort of world is that acceptable?

It's shocking reading, especially desires of men over 50.

I have a question about this part though.

The report found that 3 per cent of respondents had had sexual contact with a child. Researchers stated that over 95 per cent of those who answered “yes” to the question “have you had sex with someone under the age of 18 while over the age of 18?” were older than 24. The age of consent in Australia is 16.

I'm reading it in two different ways and would be interested how others have taken it because of the over/under 18 element.

If 95% of those who reported l having had sex with someone under 18 (which could include anything from being 19 and sleeping with a 17 year old to more problematic age gaps into established adulthood) are over 24, is the conclusion that:
A) these people were, and are, predatory adults now with an interest in children
B) people in this age group were historically less concerned with 18 as a cut off so there's likely been some areas where 16-21 year olds have slept with each other but all above the age of consent
C) people currently under 24 aren't having sex for the period where their younger boyfriend/girlfriend isn't 18

I agree with OP though, there are monsters and then there are enablers. We've seen that with the men in women's spaces debate. When third spaces would actually solve every supposed argument, no-one's willing to countenance that as a solution because of course it doesn't enable male people getting access to unconsenting women's vulnerable spaces / naked bodies.

A true 'culture of safeaguarding' and enabling whistleblowers to speak up without penalty would make for better safeguarding but I can't see how that would ever happen give how society currently works, sadly. But DBS and better recruitment practices (e.g. looking at social media posts for porn for example) is a good start. However society seems to almost be pushing in the other direction away from the latter. All these dodgy companies with links to 'adult' services who are going into schools to talk about gender identity and sexuality - it just shouldn't be happening.