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?

@QuintadosMalvados your comments are increasingly strange about gay men tbh, you're drawing some very wild conclusions based on nothing. So because posters have asked you logically about data or reminded you that by staying in care they will encounter many more unrelated males means women are now "revering" gay men. As much as you keep trying to say it has nothing to do with prejudice towards gay people the tone is obvious.

Relationships between heterosexual people have broken down that all hopes and dreams are now pinned on relationships between two people with the same sex.

Like this is just ridiculous. If you genuinely think people have all their hopes and dreams pinned on this simply because people have disagreed with you or pointed out logical inconsistencies in your argument I think you need to go outside and touch some grass.

Men and women are actually more protective than not. It's just that we don't hear as much about the daily cases where someone steps in and nothing happens.

On a societal level it does seem that when wo men have more power/are more involved in society there tends to be greater priority given to the protection of children. Or to put it another way sexual exploitation is less accepted. Thinking about Afghanistan for example. In Victorian England the move to make having sex with children illegal was driven by women (sometimes by nagging their powerful husbands) who might not have had the vote but did have increasing societal power and permission to use it in a "feminine" (protecting morals/children) way.

But it doesn't follow that on an individual level women are more likely to protect than men. The data is going to be a bit skewed because predatory men will seek out abuse tolerant women to aid them since women are more likely to be seen as "safe" and more likely to have caring roles for children. Hence a lot of scandals happen in patriarchal societies where women don't have much power overall but do have power in e.g. children's homes.

All of which is a long winded way of saying that banning gay couples from adopting is not a good way to prevent child abuse.

Yeah I agree with all of this. I think in more matriarchal minded groups, there is a greater sense of care for children and well everybody. Although the majority of instances where women have had a large amount of power or societal power have been within a patriarchal institution or culture and so we've seen large scale abuses carried out and covered up by women, but I don't think that's due to gender or sex differences I think it's just the culture we live in that overlooks parts of society that aren't worth overseeing or spending money to protect. I think the horrible cases we see like this are showing we need to spend more on proactively preventing abuse and much more supervision of all children within care, rather than making knee jerk reactions that just perpetuate benevolent sexism.

I haven't looked it up but I'm quite certain males in general occupy positions of power, prestige, yielding a lucrative income disproportionately compared to women.
Children of homosexual men may enjoy more material resources.

Any comparison between homosexual male adoptee outcomes and heterosexual households (where, mind you, mums are notoriously under supported and there's a higher incidence of absent fathers especially in the lower stratas), must therefore be adjusted for income and background.

An overwhelming number of children grow up in households with a mother present, any comparison with homosexual males should be on a per capita basis. We also lack archival data going back decades showing child abuse rates in homosexual male households. What we do have is rates of male abuse. When adjusted for time spent in the vicinity of the child, males are more physically and of course sexually abusive than female carers.

Stepfathers (unrelated males) abuse children at a higher rate than bio dads.
Most CSA, especially familial or incestuous, will never be reported or surface.

Noone is claiming mothers' presence prevents CSA but it can surely act as a mitigating factor. Note that 96% of paedophiles are male. The odds of the mother colluding with the father to abuse the child are lower than those of two unrelated males colluding. Nearly all paedophile rings are headed by males and sustained by male demand. Women, where present, are seldom primary perpetrators but mostly aiding in the abuse or, in rare instances, renting out their children for drug money etc. Renting out to whom, you might ask? Male paedophiles.

Yes, some mums remain in denial or engage in blaming the child, prioritising their relationship with the abuser dad over the safety of the child, others may connive out of fear or resignation as a result of domestic violence.

All of that can happen in a homosexual male household, with one male heinously abusing the child too. In fact in baby Davey's case one of the dads was abusing him more actively, they were both callous and disconnected from the infant. The less abusive partner would spend inordinate amounts of time at work and was literally convicted of failing to act to protect the baby.

It's inevitability more complicated than a view centred on one set of statistics might suggest.

For example, assuming that most Western mothers are not homophobic these days, one would expect that most women who raise boys who turn out to be gay would be supportive of their sons, if the latter decide they want to raise kids themselves.

Hard to imagine such women choosing to completely alienate their own sons by adopting the views of the heterosexists in this thread. And if they do, one would then perhaps have to question their suitability to be parents of gay boys (or perhaps even any boys) in the first place.

If statistics mean more to you than the real nature of your own children, such that you would deny your gay children parenthood even if you know they are good, responsible people, then it's certainly arguable that you are not a worthy parenthood candidate yourself.

So why not ban adoption by all males then?

Adoption only by single women or lesbian couples?