AIBU - Men should not be allowed to adopt or foster children unless they're with a woman. Safeguarding first.

[RedQuail4]

I know this will get the "bigot" and "not all men" brigade out in force, but can we please talk about actual child protection instead of feelings and equality checkboxes?

Children in care are already some of the most vulnerable kids in the country. They've often been abused, neglected, or come from chaotic backgrounds. The state has a duty to place them in the safest possible environment, not to use them as a social experiment for adult rights or to prove how progressive we are.

Look at the data on who harms children. The vast majority of serious physical and sexual abuse is committed by males. Single male households show higher risks in the statistics for child abuse, domestic violence exposure, and poorer outcomes in some studies. Women aren't perfect (far from it), but the biological and statistical reality is that men pose a higher risk, especially without a female partner in the home. A woman in the household often acts as a natural safeguard - someone who is more likely to notice, intervene, or report concerning behaviour.

We've seen too many tragic cases where single men (or gay men with access to children without proper oversight) have gone on to abuse fostered or adopted kids. Social services and adoption agencies are under huge pressure to find placements, so corners get cut and "inclusive" policies mean they bend over backwards to approve single men. The child's safety should trump everything.

Why are we gambling with kids who already lost the lottery once?

Adoption and fostering aren't a right for adults. They're not about giving men a purpose or validating lifestyles. They're about finding the most suitable, lowest-risk home for damaged children. A stable married couple (or at least a man with a woman in the home) should be the gold standard. Single women? Fine, the evidence supports they generally manage better. Single men? A male couple? No. The risk profile is different.

If a man wants to parent, he can find a wife first. Harsh? Maybe. But we're talking about other people's traumatised children, not virtue-signalling or men's feelings. Safeguarding isn't prejudice - it's pattern recognition.

This isn't about hating men. It's about not ignoring sex-based patterns in crime and abuse data when placing vulnerable kids. Same reason we don't put male staff in every girls' changing room. Thoughts? Am I being unreasonable?

If a good father is available to take over parenting of his children from their mother, how would they end up in care?

YABU
hth

I don't really see where you're going with this point. Of course everyone should step up and care for their child. I'm not sure how their father being absent has a thing to do with the safeguarding reasons they've been removed. I doubt many of these single mums with safeguarding issues such as drugs etc have had children with men who aren't going to have these same issues so I don't think it's just a car of these men not being present I doubt they'd be suitable if they were. Interesting the majority of people who have their own children removed were care leavers themselves, so leaving children in care could really just perpetuate a pattern

Your original point was that crappy mother's have their kids taken away as a way of illustrating that women are abusive too.

All fair.

Except that you are then ignoring that fact that the number of mothers who have their children taken away is equal to, or less than, the number of absent/neglectful/abusive/feckless fathers.

And that just supports the OPs point that, as a social class, men are dangerous to kids.

Men who produced those kids sure - are they drastically very commonly gay? That's surprising.

Wherever you got that, it's not from the OP. Gay men have become the focus of this entire thread, but it's a red herring.

Got what? The whole premise of the OP is that gay couples shouldn't be allowed to be adopted because they're men. I'm asking if the data on gay men shows the same statistical ahem and you're wedging in some point about absent fathers.

"without proper oversight."

In brackets, a side note to the actual premise which is that men, as a social class, are dangerous to kids, and that adoptive homes with at least one woman as head of household should be prioritised over only-male heads of household.

You can pretend all day that the OP is about homophobia, it's no skin off my nose.

But you're misreading it.

No she said unless they're with a woman. A woman being present isn't "proper oversight". Also, What's a head of household?.how does one assess if a woman or a man is the head of house hold?

I’d be suspicious of a heterosexual male couple as adoptive parents, but that situation is bizarrely unlikely, so I won’t worry about it.

OK that's fine.
Just you're doubling the amount of men in the household.
Raising the risk.
Then you're raising the risk again if they're not related to that child.
Risk cannot be eradicated only minimised.

I thank you though for acknowledging that my objections are based on gender, not sexuality. Or at least not calling me a homophobe.

I absolutely would have the same objections if two straight men wanted to adopt a child but as this doesn't tend to happen it's a moot point but I would if they did.

Would you oppose a single male adopting?
How about a hetero couple whose support networks/childcare were male relatives?
How far would you go?
And what do you think will happen to all the children that you block adoption for, do you care about what would happen to them at all?

Just you're doubling the amount of men in the household.
Raising the risk.

That's not how it works though, you're completely over simplifying.

And what do you think will happen to all the children that you block adoption for, do you care about what would happen to them at all?

Exactly. I'm curious as @QuintadosMalvados would prefer they stay in care what data they have to show that the risk of being adopted by a gay couple outweighs the risk of staying in care in terms of outcome. We know being a care leaver results in higher levels of imprisonment and having future children removed for example so I'd be interested to know stastically that the risk of being placed in a loving caring home with gay parents is much higher because those parents are gay and therefore not worth trying to get these children out of care.

Change of mind. I will save my words and extensive professional safeguarding knowledge.

I work in safeguarding too.

I don’t need your “expertise”

I’m very happy with my decision and very confident in the nursery.

Thank you

I'd love to know what employer this is breaking all kinds of employment discrimination law. A blanket ban on the male sex in this context would be utterly illegal.

Jeez, why are you so keen to defend your position?
You disagree with me, so what.
Unless you are a male poster who has a beef with me because I'm 'tarring you all with the same brush', I don't see what all the fuss is about.

Maybe you're a social worker who feels they have to keep defending the policy on 2 men adopting children. I don't know, I don't really care.

Maybe you just like to argue.

I've cleared up any misunderstandings: namely that for me this is about men regardless of their sexuality (though I do note that you keep saying gay - possibly to irritate me or make me out to be a homophobe), made my position clear that one man is risky, two are riskier and two in the household who are not related to the child is riskier still.

Frankly, I've nothing all else to say about it.

A lot of minimisation going on in this thread. People don't appear to account for the sheer amount of time female caregivers spend with children versus male caregivers. The attempts at equating male and female CSA and physical abuse of kids ignores per capita representation.

No matter how you dice it, the male share of CSA is so overwhelming, any attempt at anecdotally drawing parity with female CSA offending would be laughable were it not a serious distortion that jeopardises child safeguarding.

1. A step father having access to kids can double the children's likelihood of suffering CSA, according to some studies. (Citations are not exhaustive but part of a larger sample that reveals the trend).

"Analysis of interviews obtained from a random sample of 930 adult women in San Francisco revealed that 17% or one out of approximately every six women who had a stepfather as a principal figure in her childhood years, was sexually abused by him. The comparable figures for biological fathers were 2% or one out of approximately 40 women. In addition, when a distinction was made between Very Serious Sexual Abuse... and other less serious forms, 47% of the cases of sexual abuse by stepfathers were at the Very Serious level" (Russell, 1984, p. 15)"

Around 80% of UK/Oz children in two parent households reside with their bio dads (giving this particular male cohort exponentially more access, opportunity than stepdads). Considering only about 7%-9% of children reside with a step parent, around 80% of which are male, step fathers are definitely over represented in CSA cases.

Keep that in mind when you see what follows.

"Among respondents to the 2019 CSEW who said they had been sexually abused before the age of 16, 5% specified that they had been sexually abused by their fathers, 6% by their stepfathers, 1% by their mothers and 0.3% by their stepmothers; 22% said other family members (gender unspecified) had sexually abused them." (Centre of Expertise on Child Sexual Abuse, UK)

"Stepfathers and non-biological father figures show elevated risk in multiple studies (e.g., presence of a stepfather roughly doubles risk for girls in some analyses)." (Russell study from 1984 posits this could be due to a 'Cinderella effect' where bio parents are instinctively less inclined to cause severe sexual harm to their own child compared to an unrelated parent.)

1. Around 96% of CSA perps are male (most are heterosexual males as hetero males form the vast majority of the population to which most CSA offenders belong). 4 of 5 CSA victims are female.

But in cases involving a boy victim, homosexual males are over represented.

"Groth & Birnbaum (1978): In their sample of convicted male child sex offenders, ~21% of those who assaulted boys were classified as exclusively homosexual in adult orientation. With exclusive male homosexuality at ~1-2.5% of the general male population, this equates to roughly 8-10x overrepresentation per capita for boy-specific offenses in that dataset."

3. Adjusted for exposure ie the amount of time the child spent with the caregiver, males are more physically abusive than female caregivers.

Women do the vast majority of child rearing. Adjusting for time spent is important to make like for like comparisons.

1. Males form 1%-5% of staff at nursery or childcare of pre pubescent yet commit the majority of CSA. In schools,makes form less than a quarter of teaching staff yet perpetrate over 80% of CSA.

"Males constitute the majority of sex-offending babysitters reported to the police (77 percent); females make up the majority of physical assaulters (64 percent)... Among babysitter offenses that were reported to the police, sex offenses outnumbered physical assaults 65 percent to 34 percent" (Finkelhor & Ormrod, 2001)."

1. Most CSA of pre pubescent kids is male perpetrated.

"Across all data sets (UK Crime Survey, Australian Institute of Criminology), males perpetrate roughly 90% to 95% of all child sexual abuse against pre-pubescent children."

1. Considering the factors above in their entirety, placing adoptive children with two males absolutely amplifies CSA risk as it gives TWO UNRELATED MALES, a group that's significantly overrated represented in CSA perpetration, access to the child and thus opportunities to abuse.

1. Pattern recognition and a commitment to child safety isn't bigotry.

Yes, mums aren't lining up to adopt kids, but the solution can't be to simply hand off the kids to the sole custody of the demographic which forms their biggest sexual predators and pray everything works out.

TLDR: A male having unsupervised access to a child is the biggest risk factor to child safety.

You can still disagree and insist on case by case. You can try and rationalise the heightened risk borne by children when they're placed with unrelated male caregivers but don't try to make a false equivalence with the severity of risk an average woman poses to a child

A very tough read that I had to force myself to read as it's harrowing but an excellent post nonetheless.
Thank you.
The whataboutery on this thread is annoying.
In the sense of: " what about women who do bad things?"
And the "what about this and that" about situations that cannot be reasonably stopped without absolute surveillance of everybody at all times.

Adoption by 2 males can be stopped though. It just takes a government with guts to do it.

A government willing to throw hundreds of children a year into instability and poorer life outcomes.

But sure, you care about the kids…

.

Disgusting homophobic posts on here i hope none of you have queer friends or children.