Mermaids: no parental access to emails

[Pigeonfaces]

I’ve seen some stuff on twitter recently about Mermaids telling children that the email address they use to access a forum (presumably a Mermaids support forum) needs to be one their parents can’t access.

Obviously this looks absolutely awful. No reputable organisation should be encouraging children to have an online life their parents can’t supervise.

I wondered if the (faulty) rationale behind this was that the email account would provide access to the forum- so anyone with access to the account could access the forum.

But this made me wonder about something else - how on earth does Mermaids know who the people using the forum actually are? How do they know some of them aren’t middle aged men looking for vulnerable kids? What is the security for this forum?

And if the forum can’t be made secure, what on earth is Mermaids doing having the forum at all? Isn’t their internet based model inherently unsafe given the ages of the children potentially involved?

What is mermaids

Indigochi, it is an organisation that perpetuates sexual stereotypes to the point of convincing children that because they may not conform to those stereotypes they must be of the opposite sex. They facilitate and mutilate.

Must add, “ in my opinion”

12 and 24 should not be mixing without supervision at all really.

Slightly off topic as obviously a different situation.

But when DD1 was 13 she was invited to a birthday sleepover with another girl in her year. They were good friends and she had stayed there before, a nice family, medical, religious, serious sorts, probably rather naive.

Another mother informed me that another girl in their year group had been receiving inappropriate messaged on Facebook from the 24 year old boyfriend of the older sister of the birthday girl. Now this 13 year old was older for her age, well developed physically and rebellious. Her parents kept a close watch on her, including regular phone checks and her Facebook. When they saw these messages they contacted the police.

Various parents cancelled their daughters attending the birthday party.

I felt sorry for the birthday girl and her blameless family.

So I spoke to DD1. It went along these lines:

Me: When you stay at A's does her sister have her boyfriend round?
DD1: Yes
Me: Don't chat to him and do not give him your phone number if he asks. (DD only had supervised access to Facebook via my account).
DD1: OK.....(a few minutes later) Why?
Me: Apparently he's been sending messages to B via Facebook and her parents aren't happy. It's not appropriate.
DD1: Oh....(a few minutes later) actually he is rather creepy. When we were painting our toe nails he wanted to join in and have his toe nails painted.

🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩

Me: Thing is, a 24 year old bloke should be out having fun with his 24 year old friends and his 22 year old girlfriend, not hanging around a bunch of 13 year old girls.

Point taken. She went to the sleep over, confident about our talk, he wasn't there. The Facebook messages had been on the safe side of legal so no police action.

It's a completely inappropriate age range and parents need to be alert to this.

I don't know how some of these activities by Mermaids are legal.

This is do depressing. Seems to me there are three different safeguarding issues here.

1. Encouraging children to use online communication methods parents can’t access.

1. Not having an effective way of checking who participants in a forum are - an initial check isn’t enough surely. Particularly dangerous in a forum where the participants are meant to be a) children and b) vulnerable children with concerns around dysphoria, bodies and sexuality.

3. Encouraging children to take steps that conflict with normal safety guidance for kids- such as, don’t accept calls from private/withheld numbers, don’t ever give out details on the phone to an adult you don’t know.

I do not see how their model can be safe & don’t understand why the Charity Commission lets a charity do this. (I’m assuming they are a registered charity.)

@TehBewilderness

Mermaids appears to be a homophobic child grooming organization.

I’d like to see them called to prove they’re not.

"Gendered Intelligence" is another one to watch out for. Not only do they run sessions for "young persons" (8 - 25) but they invite adults to "identify as a young person" in order to participate:

TRANSFORMING SPACES CONFERENCE
Conference hosted by Gendered Intelligence

November 20, 2018
By Aaron Barnes, Associate, Diversity Trust

(Extract)

"Day 2 was, for me, slightly less intense, but perhaps not so for the young people who were leading the way.

I was invited to join a Trans Storytelling group, despite being marked “for young people only.” I was told that if I identified as a young person I could join, which presented me with a problem; I recently turned 30, and I’m one of those people who as an actual young person was always told I seemed older than my years, and identified with that. Did I “identify” as a youth even when I was a youth, much less now, as an actual bona fide adult? I decided to come in anyway, as I had been invited, and took it as an opportunity to offer the wisdom of my oh-so-many years.

I found the room surprisingly quiet for a session that was supposed to be about storytelling, and I fought the urge to take up the extra space with my own voice. I did fill the silence a little, with tales of my own experiences with how storytelling and roleplaying had helped me as a newly-out trans person, and encouraged the young people to both seek out the stories of their “elders,” and to share their own, as just by existing they were making history today."

("Diversity Trust" might therefore be yet another one to watch!)

Archived: archive.is/6pHIX

Also courtesy of "Gendered Intelligence":

Gendered Intelligence Training Session for Teachers at ‘Kiss My Genders’

(Extract)

"Gendered Intelligence co-hosted a teacher training session at the Hayward Gallery last night for teachers of primary, secondary and higher education. The aim of the training was to “explore ways of talking about gender and identity, using Hayward Gallery’s Kiss My Genders exhibition as a discussion starter” and to “build skills to discuss key topics of trans awareness and gender identity, drawn from the exhibition, in the classroom.”

Gendered Intelligence has been delivering training in schools, including primary schools, since 2008. In itself, confusing young children about biological sex and eroding boundaries between the sexes through pretending that sex is not real, should be something that rings alarm bells for anyone concerned with safeguarding and child protection.

This exhibition though, and Gendered Intelligence’s involvement with it, is yet more evidence that ‘gender identity’ ideology is queer theory, which normalises kink, BDSM, fetish, porn and extreme sexual practices. In practice, this means that many young people who identify as part of the queer community, are being pressured to accept kink and paraphilia through fear of being accused of ‘kink shaming’ if they don’t. Once children are trained not to trust their intuition and to believe that having sexual boundaries is ‘bigoted’ they may be more easily manipulated into accepting further erasure of boundaries through a lack of confidence in their own judgment and a fear of being ‘non-inclusive.’

Continued at:
www.transgendertrend.com/gendered-intelligence-training-teachers-kiss-my-genders/

Having a quick exit button skin yo domestic violence victims is just another way for mermaids to alienate children from their support systems and position there service users as the most vulnerable in society.

You can’t tell your parents they won’t understand.
We’re your only friends, we get it.
See, our service users are so unsafe and in fear for their lives we need to provide an exit button on our page to protect them from their own family.

• akin to
• their

I was told that if I identified as a young person I could join

That's disturbing on so many levels.

Can this person not see that lifting the curtain like this undermines their own ideology,?

Either self-identification is specific to gender, as they say,, or it is possible to identify as a table.

Not to mention the grooming and safeguarding implications of this concept.

Beerincomechampagnetastes yes that's exactly it.

I've just looked at the Childline website. They do offer 1:1 phone support as they always have, but their 'Ask Sam' features explicitly says that Sam will reply publicly so that other people can read the exchange, and that info given to Childline is confidential unless a child discloses that they feel that they're in danger, when Childline will tell someone else.

That's how you support youngsters, while also safeguarding them.

Oh my lord everyone should read that archive link

'The first keynote speaker, Meg John Barker, is a highly respected author, academic, and accredited psychotherapist, whose work I am intimately familiar with.'

Who has said that there's no essential difference between male and female genitals apart from size (clitoris/ penis) with most people lying somewhere in the middle...!!!

And who has partnered to do work with a person who put paedophilia on a list as the most stigmatised sexuality.

Also

'Although I am not a parent, I have been “Dad” to countless young trans people; I have provided or assisted access to first binders, packers, picking up and taking first hormone injections, writing coming out speeches to parents and schools, I have had young people on the brink of ending their lives sit in my kitchen and drink cups of tea and hold on for just a couple more minutes until they could walk out and get themselves home safely. I know what it’s like to be looked up to.'

Erm...

And...

'And age for trans people can have at least two meanings; your physical age (i.e. the number of days, months, and years since the date on your birth certificate) and your “trans” age, i.e. How long since you came out, since you started socially transitioning, since your first dose of hormones, since this or that surgery, etc?'

That combined with saying this person could go if they self id as a youth, leaves it very open for adults to be going to these types of groups with children.

Although I am not a parent, I have been “Dad” to countless young trans people

This reminds me of Stewart Pearson from The Thick of It:

[Dismissing a colleague's concerns about her son coming back from a school trip]

"We've all got children, Mary. Well I don't literally..."