At a societal level

[pickledandpuzzled]

I think we have been thinking about safeguarding wrong. We design it on the basis that a small minority of people are predatory monsters, and everyone else is ok.

Observation suggests that many people are uninterested in the agency of others, and given the opportunity will use others for their benefit. Other people are possessions, trophies, staff.

The article below suggests a huge proportion of men will offend if they can get away with it.

How should we structure safeguarding, if that’s the case? What will a safe society look like, and how do we reach it?

https://apple.news/ArOEhJbJ1R1GNjarVdZJuEQ

That is truly horrendous. I've got to get up for work but will revisit this thread later.

Can we just move to a man-free island? I say that as a straight woman and mother of sons.

im surrounds by nice men, good men. But this? I don’t think women ever understand man’s capacity for depravity. We are shocked by behaviour in Ukraine and Misdle east, but it would happen here if society broke down.

It’s a compelling argument against anarchy, that’s for sure.

It seems we really need societal structures and norms. All the repressive stuff of the past that we threw out, turned out to be offering some protective functions. We accidentally threw out the baby, too.

Do we need to move away from individualism and towards a utilitarian approach? The best outcome for the most people?

I haven’t studied sociology, women’s studies or feminism, or even done proper reading on it. Someone will be along shortly talking about third wave or liberal Feminism or whatever. I don’t know any of that.

Also on my way to work but I want to save this for later. I will be interested to see if it stands given that two other threads on safeguarding were removed yesterday.

Briefly, I have always worked in areas requiring a high level of safeguarding training and I have understood that we should always think, it could happen here, it could be anyone of us, and it is everyone’s responsibility so the same strict rules apply to all members of staff.

Yes, a bit of shame is a useful tool for society. Mind you, even Japan has lost control of men, that’s the most polite and manner driven society I can think of.

porn is a problem. It has become insidious.

OMG this is vile. And yes to a man free island.

Also marking to come back to later. Really interesting question Pickled

Thanks Op for posting this, with the article. Interesting and disturbing research , particularly the part about high earning married men who work with children....
The more knowledge there is that helps break the cycle, the better

There is a thing called contexual safeguarding. Dr Carlene Firmin has done work on this. I think her work is mostly around environments - physical environments e.g. school stairways. It seems this could be extended into social environments.

In theory there's supposed to be a 'culture of safeguarding' in good schools etc but in reality this can easily not happen in my experience. It sort of goes against human nature in many ways - the avoidance of difficult situations and the social consequences of speaking up which all on this board know about all too well. The problem is safeguarding systems do indeed seem to be built around the individual bad actor and the individual terrible circumstance.

We design it on the basis that a small minority of people are predatory monsters, and everyone else is ok.

OP, could I check what you mean here please? My understanding of safeguarding comes from being DBS checked for RDA coaching, where the vast majority of volunteers are middle aged/retired females. Nobody, including sweet grey haired old ladies, gets an exemption. So technically the safeguarding assumes that anyone can be not ok. Do you mean we should be thinking more pro-actively about levels of suspicion?

I got interrupted -so have edited my post - but to add I'd say a 'culture of safeguarding' could be seen as contextual safeguarding.

In my experience it doesn't happen because all too often people who speak up lose their jobs or suffer a penalty, even if just social.

I did some safeguarding training recently and pointed out that in the case examples given in every case the person who whistleblew / did something had nothing to lose... e.g. the taxi driver with Victoria Climbie but there were other examples e.g. a teenage girl who whistleblew when she was doing volunteering - though no doubt it was scary her parents were incredibly supportive and she didn't risk homelessness from losing her job / inability to get another job.

I agree with OP though, there are monsters and then there are enablers. We've seen that with the men in women's spaces debate. When third spaces would actually solve every supposed argument, no-one's willing to countenance that as a solution because of course it doesn't enable male people getting access to unconsenting women's vulnerable spaces / naked bodies.

A true 'culture of safeaguarding' and enabling whistleblowers to speak up without penalty would make for better safeguarding but I can't see how that would ever happen give how society currently works, sadly. But DBS and better recruitment practices (e.g. looking at social media posts for porn for example) is a good start. However society seems to almost be pushing in the other direction away from the latter. All these dodgy companies with links to 'adult' services who are going into schools to talk about gender identity and sexuality - it just shouldn't be happening.

It's shocking reading, especially desires of men over 50.

I have a question about this part though.

The report found that 3 per cent of respondents had had sexual contact with a child. Researchers stated that over 95 per cent of those who answered “yes” to the question “have you had sex with someone under the age of 18 while over the age of 18?” were older than 24. The age of consent in Australia is 16.

I'm reading it in two different ways and would be interested how others have taken it because of the over/under 18 element.

If 95% of those who reported l having had sex with someone under 18 (which could include anything from being 19 and sleeping with a 17 year old to more problematic age gaps into established adulthood) are over 24, is the conclusion that:
A) these people were, and are, predatory adults now with an interest in children
B) people in this age group were historically less concerned with 18 as a cut off so there's likely been some areas where 16-21 year olds have slept with each other but all above the age of consent
C) people currently under 24 aren't having sex for the period where their younger boyfriend/girlfriend isn't 18

There's also the total normalisation of sex work - their body their choice and all that, but why should selling themselves now be seen as an easy route to riches for teenagers?

And as a society we have a complete cognitive dissonance when it comes to CSA. On one hand there's nowt worse than a nonce, all of whom deserve nothing better than to have their balls stuffed down their throat by a baying mob. (I paraphrase). OTOH children have unfiltered access to porn, and to hypersexualised clothing, and it's "cute" when they sing and twerk along to overtly misogynistic and rape-y "tunes".

I once saw a little girl wearing a T-shirt which bore the slogan, "you've been a very naughty boy. Now go to my room". Said little girl was barely in early puberty. In what sort of world is that acceptable?

can anyone find a link to the actual research paper? that news article is such a muddle that it is hard to say much about it.

@parietal I think this is it.
https://www.humanrights.unsw.edu.au/news/worlds-largest-child-sexual-abuse-perpetration-prevalence-study-recommends-significant-investment-early-intervention-measures

There was some discussion about it on an earlier thread here:
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4947992-really-shocking-child-abuse-tendencies

@Beowulfa what I was trying to say- the safeguards we put in place assume there are not many monsters and we go to great lengths checking everyone to keep a few bad apples out. One of the concepts is making your context a ‘hard target’. Predators will be drawn to ‘soft targets’, places where safeguarding isn’t as clearly demonstrated.

That’s ok.
Would we design it differently with the presupposition that a huge proportion of men people would offend given the opportunity- that they are all around us and view people in that objectified way, that people are there to be used to benefit those individuals?

You can’t rely on the bad guys being outside your shark cage. They are your boyfriend, brother’s mate, colleague.

We’re trying to defend against date rape, not a stranger attack on a dark street.

So for example you may decide intimate care must always be given by two people.
That culture shifts to no casual sex.
That men don’t have easy access to victims- maybe we live like elephants in matriarchal groups, with men visiting at intervals.

I’m not making thought through suggestions, but playing with how things should look when the danger isn’t from a few monsters but a massive cohort of mainstream society.

Maybe men need to earn the right to female society through demonstrating certain attributes and responsibilities.

I think the social contract is broken at the moment.

That was me too, @OldCrone

It didn’t get a lot of traction.

There was a different thread that didn’t survive that reminded me about the article and made me wonder again-

If research shows- and it does- most (many?) students will rape if given the opportunity, this many men will abuse children or as they would describe it, ‘have sex with a a girl who’s really mature for her age’, is our safeguarding based on the best premise?

“It's a saying they have, that a man has a false heart in his mouth for the world to see, another in his breast to show to his special friends and his family, and the real one, the true one, the secret one, which is never known to anyone except to himself alone, hidden only God knows where.”
― James Clavell, Shōgun
I know the original was directed at (Japanese politicians?), but I think it describes quite well men in general...

I’ve been thinking the veneer of civilisation is very thin.

I agree with you that it is a mistake to think we just need structures which protect us from the bad people. The world isn't just good and bead people, it's people making choices dependent on the conseuqnces and we can create such permissive culture that otherwise good people start to act in ways which can impinge others in harmful ways but the 'rules' allow.

We used to know this. It was the idea that we needed to be 'civilised' and that norms, shame, judegment and ostracisation could be used to guide behvaiour to comply with norms which were agreed tacitly by the group.

We've thrown this out, and decided it's abad thing, and instead tried to hang everything onto 'safeguarding' and a legal framework, but there are many things that just can't quite fit within this and these grey areas used to be managed by agreed norms of civilised behaviour.
This was particuarly importnt for men, where strong drives around sex and aggression need to be very carefylly managed by the group with very strct codes arounf acceptable behaviour to be part of the group. Patrucuraly tiwards women and children. Laws can cover the clear extrems fo this but there are many other behaviours where men's code was socially enforced in a way we've abandoned.

I think we are trying to strech 'safeguarding' to cover all of these and it just doesn't work and the gaps are showing.

There always has to be a tension between the group norms (civil behaviour) and individual expression but I think we've gone way too far in throwing out the norms wholesale in the beleief that anyting goes will bring ultimate and freedon and happiness. It doesn't. And safegurding and consent, whihc is all that's left, allow a whole lot of grim stuff whihc can now just run rampant.

When was it that 'choice' and 'it's all about you' came in? Our culture's expectations of its member seems to have really slid since then and public behaviour is the worst I can recall. We've thrown out the expected norms of behaviour that kept society running and now it's Anything Goes, which clearly isn't working, at least not for the majority.

Giambattista Vico, back in the 18th century, had some things to say about what we see now and he called it The Barbarism of Reflection.

Vico sees that history is cyclical. Vico claims that history begins in a barbarism of sense and ends in a barbarism of reflection. The barbarism of reflection is a returned barbarism in which the common sense established by religion through poetic wisdom holding a society together has been broken down by individual interests. The interests are spurred because individuals each think according to their own conceptual scheme without concern for the society, which makes it barbaric.

Vico describes the returned barbarism this way, "such peoples [in the barbarism], like so many beasts, have fallen into the custom of each man thinking only of his own private interests and have reached the extreme delicacy, or better of pride, in which like wild animals they bristle and lash out at the slightest displeasure". These private interests lead into a civil war in which everyone betrays everyone else. This takes humanity back to where it started, individual giants acting solely on their own individual passions.

https://iep.utm.edu/vico/#:~:text=Vico%20claims%20that%20history%20begins,broken%20down%20by%20individual%20interests

Sounds familiar, doesn't it.

From what I see, our culture is at a true low point and I can't see how that will improve.

I agree with Malaga and Vegemite. Now instead of being shamed for breaking traditional social and cultural norms it seems that those who continue to adhere to them will be shamed instead for prudishness, or “kink shaming” or being “vanilla”, or just labelled as fascists for having boundaries and caring about safeguarding. There also seems to be a concerted effort to weaken ties between parents and children and to minimise the rights and responsibilities of parents supposedly in order to give children more freedom and autonomy. Of course this also leaves children more vulnerable and less secure on multiple levels, emotionally, physically, psychologically etc

Agree with @MalagaNights and @Vegemiteandhoneyontoast - great posts.

Ironically, in the push for individual expression and 'authentic selves' and forcing acceptance of that on others we've become more like animals who are less sentient than humans not less. Despite the biological denial of the queer theorists, they behave more like animals than those who can suppress their own desires in the interests of the wellbeing of others. Queer theorists, whatever justification they make, seem to be purely driven by individual want and desire, and do not care how dreadful the impact of this is on others.

Nowhere do we see this more clearly than dodgy groups in schools 'teaching' RSE to their own agenda with no care whatsoever about child wellbeing, no proper safeguarding vetting or knowledge of child development. For profit and individual gain at best and in some cases (where the groups doing this have been linked with adult entertainment toys etc) then you have to question whether darker motives are at play.

Who does it benefit to get children to recreate dick pics for example? Not the kids, that's for sure.

@LolaSmiles
The report found that 3 per cent of respondents had had sexual contact with a child. Researchers stated that over 95 per cent of those who answered “yes” to the question “have you had sex with someone under the age of 18 while over the age of 18?” were older than 24. The age of consent in Australia is 16.

There was a previous post about this report

There were a few questions about the data collection - e.g. the legal age of consent for about 90% of the people surveyed was 16 but the survey chose to set the consent cutoff age to 18 in its questions. Contact that is legal for most of the survey participants (e.g. first relationship in sixth form) falls into this survey's definition of sexual contact with a child.

The statistic you quote above is also a bit misleading - 85% of the people in the survey were over the age of 24 so it is unsurprising that the majority of people who answered yes were over this age. At a basic level they are comparing the total number of people in a 6 year wide band to the total number of people in a 50+ year wide band

The number of people below 24 who answered yes to the sexual contact question was small - relatively small levels of underreporting would greatly impact this value