to think this woman shouldn't be volunteering with this level of prejudice?

[QueenOfFlamingEverything]

I am doing a preparation course to become a HomeStart volunteer (for anyone who doesn't know, that will entail visiting families with young children in their own homes to befriend them and offer support).

The course is all women over 50 (except for me), many of whom (but not all) are quite old-fashioned in their attitudes but generally open to discussion and not prejudiced.

On the first week, one of the women, when we were discussing reasons why families break up, said she thought it was 'very selfish of women to take children away from their father' and that she thought that relationship counselling should be compulsory, even if the relatonship was violent/abusive.

A few sessions later she said, during a discussion on abortion, that the feelings of the father should be taken into account and that he should be able to prevent the woman having an abortion and raise the child himself if he wanted to, as it was selfish of women to deprive men of the chance of fatherhood.

Then, this week, she said that gay couples shouldn't be allowed to adopt because (and this is verbatim, I am not exaggerating here) 'there was a risk the child could be interefered with'

I (politely) disagreed with all the above statements btw. I cannot quite believe the course supervisors are going to let her loose on vulnerable families though... Would you say anything?

One thing I can say is that a HS training course is classed as being an 'open' discussion forum. It's also a 'safe' time, where everyone is encouraged to express their views. This is done deliberately, not only to make volunteers aware of views that they perhaps didn't know they had, but also to make them aware to the charity Organisers. The Organisers will be making mental notes about volunteers all the time.
Usually, they start a course with an idea of families who are waiting to be matched and their needs, and looking at the characteristics of the volunteers in front of them.
If you're concerned about your fellow volunteers views, then perhaps making a call to the Senior Organiser and expressing your concern in private would be a good idea. At the very least it will make you feel better, but also show your level of commitment to the training course.

i have not backtracked at all. re-read the first point and second i made. Or are you in capable of that? also isnt the whole point of debating is to try and change peoples opinions? You sound weird.

Why does my different opinion make me sexist? i do not get that.

MrSpoc - the reason there isn't 'more help' is much more to do with the reasons huntycat outlines.

A man cannot choose to continue a pregnancy. However, he probably has an opinion. It may well be that opinion is very useful to his partner. But his opinion could also be a form of pressure. If the relationship is at all controlling or abusive, it is crucial that the woman have some space to speak to a medic without her partner.

I feel very strongly this should be better enforced. When I had an abortion, I was given no time to speak to teh doctor alone. I chose to have my boyfriend with me, because I felt he should have a choice. As a result, when I asked about the possibility of adoption, he quickly said he did not like that idea - so the GP did not pursue it. The point is, he was a really nice, decent bloke and of course felt very strongly. But the doctor cannot advocate the rights of two patients when those rights are in conflict with each other. It puts the doctor in an impossible position and, IME, serves the woman badly. The bottom line has to be, no matter how strongly a man feels, for him, this is not a medical issue. For her, it is. Both abortion and pregnancy have health risks.

Thanks for your positive comments btw.

LRD you do put things across very well. I have not thought of it as just the male opinion yet it still effects the rest his life.

I agree th physical and mental trauma a women goes through in order to conceive is very difficult and would be even more so if she had to do it by being forced. I would not want anyone to go through that.

But i would like a situation what the male does have a choice but i am not sure how you would go about it.

You'd go about it by giving men a uterus. Why is 'her body, her choice' such a problematic concept for you?

I just don't think it is feasible or humane to give the man a choice. You would have to use the law in order to override the fact that biology and current medicine do not give him a choice.

I don't think this is an easy discussion and maybe the OP will find that what this woman and her whole group do, is to have this sort of discussion. But if this woman is firmly convinced men should have a choice, then biologically, medically, and legally, she is wrong.

round and round in circles. I have not said she should carry the child unwanted. Just that there should be more choice or help.

I am not sure how you would acheive this.

If she does pass the course they will know these
Issues and match her with an appropriate family. They're not thick, they wont want to do any harm.

I can imagine why, if you were a man desperately wanting a child, it would feel awful if your partner had an abortion. There are many situations where both men and women will feel awful about a pregnancy ending or being ended. I don't want to belittle that at all.

But the only way to give men a 'choice' is to give them control over a woman's body, and to take that control away from her. That is much, much more wrong that someone feeling awful.

So, I end up going back to where I started: if a man wants a child, his choice has to be made earlier in the process.

I would say speak to one of the organisers about your concerns. Ideally, judgemental views that would get in the way of them working effectively with families should be "weeded out" long before they get to the training - at the application and interview stage. If they get that far and things come out that show they would be inappropriate for the role during training, the facilitators really should call them out on it. By not addressing it swiftly and confidently, it doesn't send the right signals to the other people training - like yourself.

But, it may be that they will take the issues up with her at a later date so either she will not be taken on as a volunteer or offered some kind of training, coaching or other support to ensure she won't be judgemental when working with families. Charities aren't obliged to take on any Tom, Dick or Harry who wants to offer their time if they aren't going to be up to the job.

It is really important to flag up your concerns though because frankly, someone with that kind of attitude and the confidence to express it during training like that could cause a great deal of damage to vulnerable people they'd be working with.

Good luck!

I understand your points LRD and very well put.

Agree with all that Peachy and piedpiper4 have said on this thread.

I do have knowledge of a home start volunteer that advised a mother of SN kids that the children were "just naughty" and their behaviour could be fixed by "a good hiding".

That volunteer was dropped by the family pretty damned quick.

I do agree with the counselling comment, though not in the case of abuse.
I do also kind of agree with the abortion comment. For me abortion is comparable to murder. If someone had forced me to have an abortion I would have felt as though my baby had been killed and some men probably feel the same.

You're free to believe that of course, and presumably you would not choose to have an abortion because of that belief. But however the man may feel about a woman's abortion, he has no right whatsoever to stop her from having one. Bodily autonomy is far too important a concept to be overridden by the feelings of another, whose body it isn't. If he feels that strongly about abortion, he can choose to wear a condom to prevent the dilemma arising.

So if he doesn't agree with abortion then he must spend his life childless, incase the woman has an abortion?
I believe that when you are pregnant the body of the fetus is as important as your own.

I think the problem with saying 'not in the case of abuse' is, how on earth could you determine whether or not a relationship were abusive, prior to counselling?

Also, personally, my relationship would never have been picked up by anyone as abusive (because it wasn't unless you are saying that by my boyfriend thinking he had a right to an opinion, he was being abusive - which I don't think was how it was). Yet, the GP really could not give good guidance to both me and my partner, because our interests were conflicting.

I do think if a man or woman does not agree with abortion to the degree he or she can't face the idea that contraception is only 99& reliable, he or she has a responsibility not to have sex with someone who doesn't want a baby. Or to have sex but not that kind of sex, which some people I know would be happy with.

I used to help train volunteers that went into clients' homes, but not for Homestart. We had to cover boundaries, confidentiality, equal opportunities and child protection.

Another poster on here has said that homestart training sessions are a place for people to be open about their views. I can only ask why?

They may be volunteers but they are still in a place of work, not on an MN discussion forum. They should not be openly airing their views that in cases of domestic violence the parents should be encouraged to stay together (often contrary to child protection) or that gay people should not adopt because they will interfere with kids (obviously contrary to the Equality Act). The person in charge of these sessions should be challenging them immediately. Ultimately, the person in charge of the session and their employer is liable for exposing other members of staff and other volunteers to these views by not challenging them.

As for the reason for encouraging people to air such views being to weed them out - that is ridiculous. You are there to train them, not expect them to come in knowing what is and is not acceptable in the workplace and in clients' homes. As such, they should have been given equal opportunities training so that they would know why these things are not said and then they have the choice to behave appropriately and keep such opinions to themselves or hopefully change their opinion, or leave.

OP, complain, and complain to somebody higher up than whoever is running this shambolic 'training.'

Married women sometimes have abortions. A couple may have decided to have a baby but the woman changes her mind and wants an abortion. Basically the only way a man can avoid this situation completely is to never have sex again.

No Milly; it's not training as in 'you do X like this', a lot of it is discussion- around child matters, family etc. From how those go we learn a lot about people. It's been the system for as long as I have known, and HS has been running since since 1973 and we have to do a lot of training and residential courses in how it's run, it's been a successful three decades.

Obviously we do the rest- plenty of supervision, CRB checks, references. It's an extra aspect really.

I am not expecting it to be training as in 'you do X like this.' Equal opportunities training is discussion based, but that is not an excuse for allowing a volunteer to make homophobic remarks in a workplace. The workshop leader is obliged to protect other volunteers and staff from homophobia by challenging those remarks straight away.

And in terms of child protection, you absolutely do need to tell people what the law is and that they must abide by it. They absolutely do need to do X like this. Whether that is achieved through discussion or not is besides the point.

Actually I would liken it to the sessions we did on our counselling course years ago, and that was very useful for me personally.

When youa r elooking for volunteers for the sort of work HS does, you don't want to 'weed' out people just because they might seem a little odd or have difficult backgrounds- those can be positive attributes when making a match. TBH some of the people I raised most concerns about during training turned out to be huge assets- people who could not be intimidated by certain families and could stand their ground. Other more gentler people made wonderful volunteers in different set ups. But we had ten weeks to differentiate opinionated from overbearing, gentle from enabling, gentrified from judgy (and we had all types of family) and non PC from bigoted. That was a massive strength, and often (almost always) once you fed back the concerns to a volunteer they were more than willing to work on those traits because they WANTED to be there.

Well, I can only say (and after all these years you must know from my postings!) that there is no way I would ever allow a bigoted comment to go unchallenged. I can;t answer for this particular Organiser b HS is a very equal ops organisation. Indeed this would be worth feeding back to the Organiser OP- because whilst it does not need to be done in front of the group it does need prompt addressing and indeed should be laid out as unacceptable in the first 'rules' session, alongside confidentiality etc.

Obviously we did a lot of child protection yes, that was a formal session reinforced many times. My post was part funded by SSD and i had to take a % of their families so especially important in my region.

'Married women sometimes have abortions. A couple may have decided to have a baby but the woman changes her mind and wants an abortion. Basically the only way a man can avoid this situation completely is to never have sex again.'

That's a horribly hard situation for the man and I'm certain for the woman. But, um, yes - if a man really doesn't trust his wife (!), and is immovable on abortion, yes, really he's painted himself into that situation.

What it comes down to is, we don't have perfect right to have sex however we want with whoever we want. Sometimes, that means, no sex even if we'd like it. We do all have right to autonomy over our bodies.