Anyone else hyper vigilant that some men may be pedophiles

[Cantgetwarmbrr]

I wasn’t like this before I had my Dd, she’s 5 now and just always in the back of my mind I wonder about people and hate feeling/thinking like this. For example, really nice, married guy neighbour with a son who walks his dogs and chats on to my Dd, which is nice 🤷🏻‍♀️ I even felt on guard when taking her to Santa as one Elf guy kept telling her how beautiful she was. It’s a horrible way to think, it’s just always there at the back of my mind. I can’t ever imagine letting her go to sleepovers etc, but know I’ll have to one day.
Does anyone else have this in the back of their mind sometimes?
I even said to Dh that I’d never leave her with another male, even close friends of ours etc, who I love and have known for years, why am I so paranoid about this? Does anyone feel similar?

I think the main thing is to teach your child some basic safeguarding such as that they don't have to obey every adult the only secrets they should keep with adults are Christmas and birthday presents and keeping lines of communication open with her

Parents also get groomed into trusting the paedophile so anyone so keen to be alone with child, practically begging to babysit or volunteering services where they will be alone with the child is not to be trusted. The amount of single mums who move in strangers and call them partners after a week is terrifying.

That is one thing I've never worried about...

This has been discussed on other MN threads, as well as the Australian study showing similar, and what is being completely overlooked is the "wouldn't get caught" part.

I'd imagine a hell of a lot of people would rob banks, steal cars, pick pockets etc if they knew they would never be caught, but they don't, so banks stay unrobbed, and these people are not bank robbers.

Context is all important. People also talk complete shite in anonymous studies because it gives them a chance to indulge bravado with no comeback whatsoever. You can see this when children are asked about knowledge of adult subjects, where they invariably claim to understand things they do not, and to have experienced things they have not. I'd be very cautious of concluding anything from a study that posits "wouldn't be caught/detected" because it does not reflect reality.

The 1% figure is based in reality.

One of the worst things about being a mother is how you can hyper worry about everything.

I definitely struggled with the idea of peados (we had a very large amount of peados on our estate growing up) and now my DD is getting older I worry about rapists.
I can’t imagine her travelling or going out alone late at night but I know it’s going to have to be something I need to suck up.

Unfortunately, there isn’t much you can do apart from force yourself to try and not be so paranoid.

Its very unlikely that a child will be attacked when there are other people around.

Its people (often family members or close friends) who have regular access to them alone and so this can help you to try and reduce your anxiety, knowing that going to a friends house etc isn’t putting her at risk because she won’t be alone.

9 out of 10 paedophiles are male so there are also plenty of women out there. I think it's best to be wary about leaving a child with anyone especially very young children however there's no point worrying about someone you happen to meet in the street as they can't harm your child.
Ultimately you have to bear in mind the benefits to your child of having relationships with other people and offset that against the risks.
If you leave a child at nursery or school or with family you have to have a level of trust

@Londonrach1 Why?

@AnonnyMouseDave I think the same

@OhpoorMe Thats shocking

I agree!

How many babies and children are abused or killed and you find out that the mum has moved a new boyfriend in after only a few weeks of knowing him.

There is also the statistic that one in four adults have suffered childhood sexual abuse. I don't think you are unreasonable at all and I was / am the same based on many different experiences.

The 1% is based on conviction rates. There are bound to be far more paedophiles than are convicted.

However there's a difference between those who look at images and those who target children known to them. I guess there's also a category who would be interested in teenagers but not young children. So the number who'd actually be a threat to a toddler would be fairly low

I'd make sure I speak to my dc telling them often enough that we don't have secrets from mummy and daddy and teach them firm boundaries about private parts.

The National Crime Agency recently upped their estimate, saying that 1 in 50 men pose a sexual danger to children.

It's not a small number imo.

I would have no more concerns leaving my child with a trusted male friend than a trusted female friend.

Surely that position is completely illogical? A man is statistically far more likely to abuse a child than a woman, trusted or no.

As a victim of childhood SA I don't blame you. Thing is its rarely a stranger. It's more likely to be someone you know, trust and allow access to your child. Mine was a very close relative. I think you need to arm your child with the tools to protect herself. In my house we don't have secrets, the kids understand the pants rule. They know no one is allowed to touch them in private areas.

What have I just read?
Men who want to work with children are ‘weird’?
FFS.
I can’t even begin with this.

I too think about this often, and monitor situations - it's normal I think - just part of being a parent. Last year my son's friend at school (year 7) didn't make it home from school and was eventually found by police in a flat with 2 drunk men - so fucking horrible.

The 1% is based on conviction rates. There are bound to be far more paedophiles than are convicted

Indeed, but I still think it's important to keep perspective.

If you propose a situation whereby there are no negative consequences for anyone behaving in anyway they choose, unbridled anarchy, then it's easy to see how things would get wild and spiral out of control pretty damned quickly. But this isn't the reality we live in.

We have societal boundaries, policing, safeguarding, a judiciary, penal system, individual vigilance, and event the threat of good old natural justice if you step out of line, so I don't really see the value in wasting time worrying about how some people might choose to behave in a hypothetical setting that is vanishingly unlikely to ever come to pass. If we do get to that stage, then we will inevitably have a hell of a lot more on our plate to contend with than just worrying about paedophiles.

The 1 in 20 figure refers to a hypothetical situation, not reality, and as I said, even then I wouldn't trust that the respondents are actually being honest.

Caveat: I don't have kids, so I can't say how I would feel if I did. However, I do think you are being (understandably!) unreasonable. I really don't think that pedophilia is as prevalent as the media sometimes makes it out to be. I do think that online grooming is a worry, but that is as often done (more often!) by the peers of schoolgirls than by older men. People on this site seem as well to take an unjustifiably dim view of males in general: there was a thread very recently about someone who didn't even want her child to be in a nursery because they employed a male nursery nurse. That sort of thinking is disordered, frankly, and also ignores the fact that some women are also pedophiles (like Vanessa George)

In short, be aware of risks, but not to the point where you are seeing it everywhere. That helps noone and actually ironically makes it more likely that something will happen, as if you see everything as a threat, then real threats become invisible.

I don't think you're being paranoid at all, especially at this age when they can't articulate things as well as older children.

While women can and do abuse children, the very vast majority of peadophiles are men and they walk amongst us like normal men. A PP referenced 1% of the male population above like it was an insignificant amount. That's 1 in every 100 men you come into contact with are peadophiles... that's an astronomical number! And I won't want to even go looking for the report another pp mentions about 1 in 20 abusing children if they knew they'd get away with it 😡 In my view, men are always to be mistrusted until they reach a point where they've earned my trust because there's such a high proportion of them who are peadophiles, or just plain toxic human beings.

I absolutely protected my son to the same extent when he was that age. The only other males he was with without me were his grandparents and I always made sure grandmother was there.

I've loosened a bit once he was old enough to be taught and understand what inappropriate touch was, that no matter what happened he was to tell me and I would put an end to it etc. As far as I'm concerned, this is being a good parent.

Once a child is SA it's done, there's no going back and it's my responsibility as a parent to do everything in my power to ensure it never happens.

I’m not sure you’re paranoid and don’t know how anyone can suggest you are. In my time as a parent I’ve experienced a paedophile vicar (church playgroup) a paedophile TA at my kids school, my child’s friends mother with a paedophile boyfriend, a paedophile member of staff at my teenage child’s workplace… etc etc. These are just the cases where the culprit was arrested, charged and made the pages of the local press. This doesn’t even take in to account the amount of times my high school children 11/12/13 (and looking it) have been approached in the street in school uniform and propositioned , had filthy comments whispered at them, followed, harassed, had cars slow down beside them…

You're the weird one. Good grief.

Our family doctor ( a baronet as well as a doctor) is now a convicted paedophile. My children went to a state secondary. The brilliant, committed, working hundreds of extra hours, head of music is now a convicted paedophile. He ran trips to New York for many years. Both my children went. He wanted to be near young teen boys. He was caught for fiddling with a music student he gave private lessons to after he retired. He worked with choir boys at our local cathedral.

YANBU,

I think it’s ok to think this way. If you do, your child will be safer.

A school I was at recently had a case where a male TA assaulted a young child. He was reported a number of times before this happened for his behaviour and the school did nothing. He also had very inappropriate postings on his FB that if the school had’ve checked, they would have deemed him to be unsuitable for looking after young children. Maybe they did see it, but went ahead anyway.

As a result I not only don’t trust men around my young children, I don’t trust places to put our DC’s interests first, who instead are happy to throw them under a bus so long as their woke boxes are ticked.

@Cantgetwarmbrr it's completely reasonable to want to protect your child.

There really are a lot of men who are not safe for kids to be around. Many of my ex-pupils have come up in the news for offences involving children.

I have always been extremely protective of my own children. Even then, I discovered a couple of years ago that a family friend they used to visit (always in the company of a parent, thank goodness) has a string of convictions for sex offences against children. He and his late partner were major child porn aficionados. Makes me sick to think of it. These were just ordinary blokes with ordinary lives.

Child abuse isn't something that can be undone. You can never turn back the clock if something happens. The only strategy is to not let it happen in the first place.

1 in 6 girls and 1 in 20 boys experience child sexual abuse before the age of 16, according to the 2022 Independent Inquiry into Child Sex Abuse.

1 in 50 men pose a sexual danger to children, according to the National Crime Agency (which is 1.6% of all adults).

https://nationalcrimeagency.gov.uk/nsa-child-sexual-abuse

Over the past few years we've had revelation after revelation of institutional child abuse, from within the churches, children's homes, boarding schools, scouts, gymnastics, football, the BBC and more.

That's despite all the measures you list, like police, safeguarding, individual vigilance (which you seem to be arguing against), jail etc.

Some of the worst abuse takes place in current societal institutions, including the family.

So what makes you think that society needs to descend into anarchy before children are abused?

It's already happening on a grand scale. Burying our heads in the sand won't stop it.