Not interested in arguing with you very PC types, just saying......

[cosima]

I went to a school fete today, there were two men there that I felt could have been paedophiles. NOW, of course this thread could go in to a laborious discussion about How did I know? / How could I be so judgemental? How dare I? What a terrible world when people are so narrow minded! etc etc, but actually the only action I am taking is to say to a mums website

Please remember that school fetes are open to the public, parents feel very safe in the environment, Paedophiles go to school fetes on saturday afternoons, and PLEASE KEEP YOUR CHILDREN SAFE AND IN VIEW.

No one is disputing that the vast majority of abuse happens in the home.

But, it does happen outside the home albeit more rarely.
But I think anyone with an iota of sense knows that the strange man wandering around in polyester is not more likely to be an abuser than the man in an expensive suit.

BUt if the majority of abuse is carried out by a family member, well that person does go out of their house.
So when you're in the park or the supermarket or wherever, the chances are there's a paedophile somewhere nearby.

Why do people assume peadophiles are creepy men who stalk kids out in the open?

I have been a victim of two peadophiles, one was a family member and one when i was 12 years old and he couldn't have been more opposite to what people think they are like.

He was a very friendly, sociable man. He befriended myself and my mother. He worked as a free lance music teacher at a local school and at home.

Peadophiles usually become good friends with their victims families or can even be family members themselves.

Op, YANBU in wanting to remind people to be safe and careful. However, i don't believe paedophiles are the type of people who LET you think they are peadophiles by wandering around looking dodgy.

I don't think the op deserves the silly response she got though from most people. This is a serious subject and having been a victim myself, i am more sensitive to people taking the piss.

Not the fact people were taking the piss by saying "A man in a mac with a comb over etc" but by saying "Oh for goddness sake, my dc are safe at a school fate" and kind of brushing off the fact that you should have your eyes on your dc at all times in public.

Agree with you all really.

Why I keep going back to teh park is that this is a well known theme park that I have a season ticket for.

And the staff do know, the senior staff have said that they keep an eye on the people in teh park - whatever that means.

Well, I'm not wanting to snipe, OneLieIn, but if I seriously believed a paedophile were taking pix of my chidren, season ticket or not, I would not be going back to the same place over and over.

Why don't you chat to him one day? Ask him in a friendly way what he's taking pictures of? If he's suss, I bet you don't see him again.

Winky, my kids dont go in the waterpark too much, i dont let them. when they do, they are dressed.

good idea about talkin to him though

But do be careful. My mother talked to everyone and anyone and the risk with that is these people who often are very lonely (she'd talk to tramps, slightly mentaly disabled 13 year old girls wandering the streets etc) and will attach themeselves to you and be very hard to shake off. My sitser, brother and father deal with people with various mental conditions. We might all try to segregate ourselves into some kind of pristine world where we're all middle or working class families with 2.4 children but there are vast numbers of people out there who are odd. I would imagine if say 0.5% of the male population fantasises about sex with children under 10 that that same percentage exists in the board rooms of the UK, amongst the parents in the PTA as amongst the nutters and outcasts but you need to use your common sense.

The best gift you can give children is confidence and ability to deal with difficult situation and to be able to handle risk, letting mid teens learn alone on the trains how to deal with drunk people, persistent teenage boys' sexual advances etc etc all the usual hazards of life so they learn to stay in groups or move to the carriage where the idiots aren't around etc.

What children always do is learn from their parents' fears and feed off them. My sister's children are frightened of dogs entirely because of how she reacts when she sees a dog.

We had a situation where our nanny's boyfriend's father was in jail for child sex abuse on his own family and the issue of whether it passes from father to child (as I am afraid is quite common and that wasn't paranoia but there was no evidence the lad was doing anything and the proportionate response was just to keep an eye on the situation. It was fine.

bollocks zenia, you will find if you bother to read up, that the majority of abusers in the home do not pass on their warped fucked up ways to thier own offspring, and also the preconception that abused children become abusers themselves, will never cease to amaze me, perhaps a small percent in say physical/verbal abuse cases, as in what you see, is how you will eventually become, but on the whole,what you are suggesting is quite frankly wrong, and creates more damage.

The oddballs of society used to be accepted as just being 'odd.' Now they get bricks thrown through their windows.

OneLieIn on Tue 01-Jul-08 21:00:12
"Whooaah turnip! I think that if I am at a water park and there are men sitting by themselves (who are frequently there, without children in a park that they have to pay a lot to get into that caters only for children) who are staring at the kids, this is wrong. I think that parents need to be responsible in this case. Do you think it is responsible parenting to let your children run around naked in a water park where there are lots of people and some like the guys above that you don't know?"

Can someone explain to me how the child is going to get hurt if it gets looked at by a paedophile who doesn't get a chance to either speak to it or touch it because of other parents present? I am genuinely interested. As long as the parents make sure the child is not approached or snatched, I can't see how this is irresponsible.

We spend our summers in Scandinavia where dc's spend their whole time on the beach. Nobody wears a swim suit until they are about 4 or 5. It is a public beach so lots of people present. It is perfectly possible that one of these people may have had indecent thoughts while watching my babies. Can you tell me how they have come to harm from this?

"Thank god ds's school fete was on a Sunday."

This is so funny!!!

Men get aroused by looking at us all the time and it does us no harm. The looking, the fact someone buys a medical text book and is aroused by the pictures whether of children or adults or goes to a zoo because he or she finds sheep erotic or whatever does not harm the people viewed.

I would never want to be in a society where I could not take my children to places or indeed go to them myself because I was bothered that people might look and be aroused or look and be interested in a nosy way. Obviously if someone is sitting there with binoculars trained on you that feels abusive and we've laws to deal with stalking but a society where people are free to look whatever their motivation is the kind of society I want to live in.

If someone is aroused by a beautiful woman or a child they may well look at people's family snaps posted on mumsnet and elsewhere and that's a risk you take if you put photos up. I don't on here of myself or the children and indeed I feel it almost breaches the right of the child to put up photos in a public place without their active consent actually but that's a separate issue. But if I did put them up and someone looked at that photo of my ankle, my hair, my body, or whatever is his particular fetishism, my child even and sat at home and got sexual arousal from that then no harm is caused and no crime is committed and in a free society that man or woman should have that right and indeed they do - we all do, have a right to go on line and look at pictures of goats in zoos and masturbate to them if we're into that or hunky male film stars etc.

In other words people should be free to think how they like as long as they don't act in a way that is a crime.

Some of the logic on this thread is not dissimilar to that used against witches in the 17th century

Ring any bells?

This idea that we can spot a paedophile by their dress sense or mannerisms or the look in their eyes is absolutely shocking.

But I think that we as a society now have such an intense fear of paedophiles that we want to attribute a certain "look" to them so that in our minds we are looking out for them and avoiding the dangers accordingly.

But in doing so we are maybe endangering our children more, because we are so busy avoiding the strange looking men at the fate, the zoo, at the theme park that we fail to see the normal, upstanding member of the community who is grooming our children ready to abuse them.

How many people on mumsnet who have been abused were abused by someone who abducted them at the school fate? Or on the beach? Or in the shopping centre? How many of their abusers were shady types who it should have been clear to the adults were abusers?

By comparison how many were abused by family members? People they loved and trusted? Whose family would never have thought of as being abusers?

Yet it is the stranger we fear most, even though he is least likely to harm our children.

It is much harder for a stranger to abuse. Because he has to break down the barriers. The fear, the mistrust, and he has to earn the trust before he can abuse. But the family member or the close family friend already has the trust. So for him it is much easier.

It is much easier to teach our children about stranger danger, because it is an unknown risk. One which they will probably never encounter. But to teach about the dangers of the family member or the close family friend is much much harder. Because how do we teach our children that someone who is close to them could hurt them, without making them mistrustful of those they should love and trust the most?

KerryMum on Thu 03-Jul-08 00:18:27
"cory I assume you post naked pics of them on internet as well then? I mean no harm is going to come from some guy yanking off to them is there?"

As Xenia pointed out there are plenty of pictures of naked children in medical textbooks- not to mention in the parenting booklets you get off the NHS. Of course somebody could yank off to them. Are you saying that the child model will come to harm if somebody yanks off to the picture 10 years later?

The reasons why child porn pictures are illegal and do harm is more to do with the exploitation of the children while the pictures are being taken. If they are made to pose in suggestive poses, then that is abuse. And there is also the factor that somebody who is doing that to their child may well be handing out their details to abusers, as well as abusing them themselves. So yes, these children are certainly coming to harm. And I would certainly never allow that.

If somebody took pictures up my child's skirt I would call the police as this behaviour is likely to frighten and upset the child.

But I refuse to believe that simply playing naked on a beach where somebody may be having indecent thoughts about you constitutes abuse. Always provided that the parent is there and protects the child from being approached or frightened by indecent behaviour.

Besides, surely if a paedo is perverted enough he could have indecent thoughts just watching your child walk to school or traipse round the supermarket with mummy. What are you going to do about that? Only ever take them out heavily veiled?

extremely well said icecreamsoda, that is brilliantly written, and says it all really.

xenia i am still waiting on your response, or do you choose to ignore me????. not that im really arsed, as i find most of your posts, pointless, and extremely annoying to say the least. the majority of the time i think you spout rubbish anyway.

Cory - it is not about them being snatched or abused that I was talking about. I was saying just like you about photos:

If somebody took pictures up my child's skirt I would call the police as this behaviour is likely to frighten and upset the child.

See my previous post about what happened to my DD in the town centre. I did not call the police because it was likely to frighten or upset her, I called the police because the guy who did it was a pervert taking photos up a young kids skirt and he needs to be caught. DD was pretty much unaware apart from the police and DH and mate running off after the guy. Just because a kid does not notice does not make it ok to do. This is abuse. This kind of behaviour should not be tolerated.

I am totally cool with nudity, but you take the risk of somebody seeing a picture of your kids fanjo on the internet. For this reason, sorry, but costumes on please.

The problem with men who are sexually interested in children seeing them naked isn't necessarily that it will cause them harm - I agree with the point made above that the child may not ever be aware - but that this behaviour may reinforce and escalate their sexual interest to the point that non-contactv offences become contact offences. But this isn't always true and some men may never go beyond 'looking'. However the response to this isn't to ban all nudity for children - thev response is to ensure we have a society where menn with this issue feel safe enough to address it without being vilified (ducks and covers)

If someone took pictures of a child in a public place and used those pictures for their sexual enjoyment, no the child in question is not physically harmed and will probably never be aware of anything.

But, if it were my child in the pictures I would feel physically sick at the thought of images of my babies used in this sick way.

Can anyone actually say that they wouldn't have a problem with that?

Sometimes I think some posts are written by robots spouting pc and 'I'm so lib and non judgmental I must be so cool' crap that they've lost touch with real feelings and their own opinions.

But's that's just my opinion.

But what can you do about it, Ivegotaheadache? Will you lie awake at night thinking of all the possible photographs taken of your children? Of course it would anger and upset me deeply but ultimately, what can I do about it? I'd go mad if I thought about all the possibilities.

It's not about being cool and liberal. It's about being rational and realistic and keeping perspective. Not imagining there are crazed child killers and paedophiles around every corner where a child is in a swim suit.

I like your approach. I don't think like you therefore I must have lost touch with my real feelings and my own opinions. Brilliant that.

And the obsession with those who are apparently PC is ridiculous, feeble and when someone brings it up, my first thought is, "Now here is someone who is unable to think for themselves so they've used the classic PC-gone-mad claptrap."

It's really really lame.

mat, if you post it again I'll reply. I haven't read back and seen what you'd asked me to answer.

I am certainly very concerned about the various types of thought crime this Government has introduced. By all means ban acts which our culture prohibits against children but not people who book of male nudes or who like to look at farm catalogues because goats turn them on or whatever floats their boat. Obviously we want to ensure no goats were damaged in the making of the catalogue etc but if there is none then I'm no objection.

And yes we certainly need to stop men who are flashing. Wasn't there a judge or someone like that who was doing it on the underground trains but I think he was found not guilty. There is certainly a lot of it about and always has been. I wonder why the act of exposing themselves in public is on its own erotic? It's nothing to do with child sex that inclination, I'm sure. It's a different eroticism although I suppose just as one parent in every school abuses their children or whatever the stats are perhaps 1 exposer in X number will also be into sex with children.

I certainly don't worry about people in the privacy of their own homes were to take photos from my web site and masturbate over my picture every night. So what? Every time we go out we're looked at. Presumably just about every time most men look at us they're thinking about some kind of sexual thing in relation to us. It's just how people are. It's why we're here, it's why we have children. If someone is thinking about a form of sex we don't like - and that could be a huge range of things that's their right - freedom of thought.