The bookstore chain Barnes and Noble issued a rather belated apology to Dr. Omar Amin, 73, of Scottsdale, after he was thrown out of a children’s book section in Arizona. He was told that men are not allowed to be in the children’s section unless they are accompanied by a minor. That’s right. He was told that as a man he was viewed as a danger if reading alone in the section.
Amin was shopping for books for his grandchildren at his neighborhood bookstore when a female customer complained that a man was seen reading alone in the section. Barnes & Noble employee Todd Voris reported explained that men are viewed as potential child abusers if they are alone in the section.
What is fascinating is that the company responded to the incident by publicly supporting the decision to throw Amin out — insisting that Voris “acted appropriately.” What followed was days of criticism of the company.
Finally, yesterday the company did a complete 180 turn and denounced the decision as wrong and unacceptable. Now, Barnes & Noble vice president Mark Bottini maintains that “[i]t is not our policy to ask customers to leave any section of our stores without justification. We value Dr. Amin as a customer and look forward to welcoming him in any of our stores.”
Once again, I am amazed by the ineptitude of major corporations in such controversies. The company had to have deliberated on the first response and decision to embrace the policy. Then it abandoned that position and denounced the very act that it previously called appropriate.
There is something perverse in our society that the image of an elderly man reading in a children’s section is enough to send a woman to the front desk to report a suspected child molester.
Source: Daily Mail
Anon, you don’t need to hide behind a grammar lesson and I don’t need your grammar lesson AND you understood exactly what I said. And in case not, let me say it another way:
The reason YOU mis-attribute things to me is that you mis-attribute things whenever you get to feeling threatened.
You get to feeling threatened, it seems, when any man anywhere (except for an ex-wife’s new husband or boyfriend…hmmm…) is criticized or, even not criticized but perhaps not given enough “consolation.”
If women don’t value you highly enough it’s because the feminist bitches are liars and something about their panties.
And if they appear to nail you for any of that, they have misquoted, misinterpreted, lied, made false allegations, been strident, or — I don’t know, something else about their panties.
NONE OF THIS GOES IN QUOTES UNTIL MY STRIDENT SISTERS OR ABUSED BROTHERS QUOTES IT.
“So you moved from “Malisha says mothers are punished for reporting abuse of their children” to “Malisha is waving her panties and yelling at me when we all know that mothers are abusers” to “Malisha REPORTS FATHERS FOR BEING ALONE WITH CHILDREN.” You got me into the position of the woman who actually reported Omar Amin to B&N for reading children’s books.
Is it possible that you cannot understand the way you are distorting information even on this small thread in a big world?”
Hey Malisha, honey, baby,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark
In English writing, quotation marks or inverted commas (informally referred to as quotes or speech marks)[1] are punctuation marks surrounding a quotation, direct speech, or a literal title or name. Quotation marks can also be used to indicate a different meaning of a word or phrase than the one typically associated with it and are often used to express irony. Quotation marks are sometimes used to provide emphasis, although this is usually considered incorrect.
…
Quotation marks are not used for paraphrased speech. This is because a paraphrase is not a direct quote, and in the course of any composition, it is important to document when one is using a quotation versus when one is using a paraphrased idea, which could be open to interpretation.
I would suggest Malisha that when you fabricate quotes or misquote people, you not use scare quotes around your intentional fabrications or misquotes, especially if you are going to follow it up with the suggestion they are distorting information, because then your readers might be misled into thinking the fabrications and misquotes are accurate and represent the original when they do not.
Thank you.
Anon, I checked into one of your earlier posts on this thread, and look what I found:
“Just because Malisha reports a father alone with a child is no reason for BN or the Po po to kick him out, arrest him, taze him, or gun him down, regardless of what some idiot man hater would have you believe.”
So you moved from “Malisha says mothers are punished for reporting abuse of their children” to “Malisha is waving her panties and yelling at me when we all know that mothers are abusers” to “Malisha REPORTS FATHERS FOR BEING ALONE WITH CHILDREN.” You got me into the position of the woman who actually reported Omar Amin to B&N for reading children’s books.
Is it possible that you cannot understand the way you are distorting information even on this small thread in a big world?
By the way, a friend of mine on the west coast 25 years ago was a REAL single mother — no marriage, no father, no idea whose kid (paternally) she had, no child support, no divorce, no custody dispute. Kid had no dad and mom had been a happy hippie and raised him. He was about 11, 12 when all the custody stuff hit the evening news as the national obsession after “Kramer versus Kramer” hit the box office. She was traveling in an Amtrak train with her son and got rousted by the police who wanted to know if she had custody papers for her son! Nobody even turned her in as a suspected abuser or kidnapper; she just couldn’t show custody papers! She got jailed overnight while her son was sent to social services and then the next day someone from her son’s pediatrician’s office got word and called the police in the foreign city (halfway between her home and Missouri, where she was headed to visit friends) to assure them that she was legal to be with her kid. Now she never followed up on finding out why all this was done to her; she gathered up her (quite freaked out) kid and went on her way but she had to borrow money because Amtrak made her buy a whole new ticket.
So it was a MOTHER ALONE WITH A KID that had caused all the ruckus. She brought this up one time in a public forum that was about the kinds of problems kids might face in foster care, because apparently when her son was held by an agency overnight, he was not really housed in a safe place, but IN A JUVENILE DETENTION FACILITY with kids who were on drugs!
It is a sign of sickness, Anon, a sickness that runs so deeply in our society that it is better for us to let children and their protective parents KNOW the truth than to have them walk into the traps where it can be sprung on them.
Think for a minute. You feel bad for the guy who has to feel afraid of something he KNOWS can happen to him when it shouldn’t. All he has to give up is getting himself into a situation where he feels threatened. He can teach if he wants; only a tiny percentage of teachers are ever accused or convicted of sexual abuse of children. He can become a priest if he wants; very few priests have been accused of sexual abuse and among those, even fewer were punished for it.
But what about people who are wrongly accused of being PAS mothers and although the allgations against them are never proven and they are totally innocent, they are punished anyway? Well, I think if you’re going to be so sorry for the guy who fears helping a strange kid in a public place, and he has the choice to NOT GET INTO THE SITUATION HE FEARS, then you should very well understand when I say:
Have Kids at your Own Risk.
It is a sick world out there. It is a world where false allegations of PAS behavior can succeed, against all the odds. It is a world where it is not safe to try to protect your kids if an abuser has a better lawyer than you have. Or than your mother can hire. So be very careful.
But Anon, we live in this sick world. Many mothers are so bad that their grown sons, years and years later, still harbor hatred towards women and express it in all sorts of dysfunctional ways. Ain’t it the truth.
“You want me to cry tears for him because he had to be afraid of false allegations if he did something he wanted to do? I can’t get that worked up about it, sorry.”
It’s amazing you can tell us that Jerryball’s position is irrational in this thread where Jerryball’s position was totally validated.
And it’s a pretty common occurrence for most men to feel this way. And this is why male teachers are afraid to be alone with students, and male doctors afraid to be alone with patients.
And you know this, and still insist that these fears are irrational, and you still minimize false allegations by telling people they rarely occur and are ignorable and trivial and we should all just grow up.
Since often a child’s outcry against abuse is turned into something other than what it is (such as being turned from a child’s outcry against abuse to “a vicious feminist bitch’s brainwashing” or “a borderline personality disordered female psycho’s false allegation” or “an example of man-hatred” etc. etc. ad nauseam), be really careful ever letting a child complain about abuse. It might be better to return to the way it was before all this “tell somebody and ask for help” bullshit started. It might be better to return to “shut up about it and maybe 30, 40 years from now you can find a good shrink to help you work through it, or not.” Right now, I’d bet on the latter being the safer course, all things considered.
And this is really just a sign of sickness.
Anon, you do make it easy to spread the word. You give me material.
Anon, you finally got around to doing what I thought you would do much sooner! Here’s the history.
One of the feminist publications (pre-Internet) published an article I co-wrote with one of the guys from Men Against Rape. It was called something like “Who is the Supervisor?” It was about the notion of supervised visitation for kids who had FOUNDED cases of sexual abuse against their fathers. Several of the visitation “outfits” that were set up were run on the idea that the kids had to stop objecting to anything, and we actually saw one visit where the kid was put in a room FIRST with the supervisor who was a guy about 6’4″ tall and about 300 pounds, and he told this five-year-old that she needed to be “nicer” at her visit. He told her, verbatim, “You said things that weren’t nice; so I need you to stop doing that, OK?” She nodded.
SO I wrote that article with this guy (from North Carolina; I forgot his name now) and it got published in the MAR Newsletter and then in one of the men’s pro-feminist newsletter too. Then years later, I see the article on-line, posted by someone in one of the fathers’ rights organizations. He claims that the article proves that I am an “ugly idealogue” because if you simply change the word “pedophile” to “man,” you will see that I hate men. I don’t want men to have visits with their kids. Well first off, the thing was ridiculous because I did not use the word “pedophile”; I used the word “abuser.” But the reviewer was obviously thinking “pedophile.” But the other issue was that I didn’t express any hatred at all. I said that the visitation supervisors should not give the KIDS the idea that it was THEIR conduct he or she was supervising; the supervision was for the PARENT and not for the CHILD. The child, having done nothing wrong, did not need to be guarded.
Of course, this is one tiny example of the problem. But you have exactly done what I laughed about. I said, “Well if you replace the word ‘abuser’ with ‘German’ then I hate Germans! If you replace the word ‘abuser’ with ‘Moldovian’ then I hate Moldovians. WHy not just replace the word with ‘people’ and then I hate PEOPLE!” We all had a hearty laugh about it.
But let me be very clear about this: I do not think an old man reading a book in Barnes & Noble should be bothered or disrespected, suspected or evicted. I DO think that if a child makes a serious complaint against a parent, relative, friend, teacher, priest etc., that the complaint should be taken very seriously. In fact, I think that a child should not have to see ANYONE she doesn’t want to see, period. But that’s a whole different story, a story about the “life interest” and it doesn’t go on this thread. But I DO think that if a mother supports a child’s allegation that her father abused her, that it is much more likely that she was abused than that the whole problem can be attributed to a bad mother and a gang of rotten feminists. Research has actually showed that. And I DO THINK that the lawyers and others who immediately try to turn every child abuse case involved in a divorce into an anti-mother auto da fe ARE to be hated and SHOULD be hated and by ME, they naturally will be.
If false allegations are made against a good father, in my system, that would be taken care of very quickly, because in my system, there would be NO criminal penalties for intrafamilial sexual abuse until and unless an emancipated child applied for it on her own AFTER the age of majority. Not only would there be NO criminal penalties, the child would not need to go to court to readjust parental “access” but she could go to the “Child At Risk Classification Office” and deal with her own custody and visitation herself. This would take the whole thing out of the pockets of the lawyers because no lawyers would make any money off it. Since there would be no secondary gain on the part of parents manipulating kids and making false allegations, the system could right itself in a few years with a lot less bullshit going on.
Now, Anon, you were so upset that I hated men and was so unconcerned about poor Jerryball’s feelings. Huh? He wanted to help a kid but he was afraid to do so so he didn’t do so. End of story. You want me to cry tears for him because he had to be afraid of false allegations if he did something he wanted to do? I can’t get that worked up about it, sorry.
If you told me, on the other hand, that poor JerryBall was just reading a book and some wacko turned him in for being a possible pervert and he got kicked out of a Barnes & Noble Store, I would be 100% on his side and I would completely condemn the store — oh, wait a minute, that’s what I actually did.
So should I worry about what he had to fear since it did not come about? Do you feel sorry for me if I have to cross the street to avoid walking by a guy who looks dangerous to me and I think he may be “up to no good?” If he doesn’t actual cross the street after me and knife me, what harm was done to me? I had to feel afraid and I had to act on it? Big deal. It’s a dangerous world out there. If I can’t get over it, I should seek help. Fortunately, I have had that terrible experience a few dozen times and I always managed to recover from it within the block.
People need to grow up. YES there can be false allegations. Do I need to give up ALL MY COMPLAINTS about all sorts of real things that really do happen and that really are bad because not all allegations are true?
Jeez, if I do, I better join something more radical than a bunch of feminists. And if I have to be responsible for a guy feeling fear that someone will say something bad about him some day, I need to straighten out not just MY HEAD but HIS TOO.
What I said I would teach all the women and professionals I meet about child abuse is this: Since often a child’s outcry against abuse is turned into something other than what it is (such as being turned from a child’s outcry against abuse to “a vicious feminist bitch’s brainwashing” or “a borderline personality disordered female psycho’s false allegation” or “an example of man-hatred” etc. etc. ad nauseam), be really careful ever letting a child complain about abuse. It might be better to return to the way it was before all this “tell somebody and ask for help” bullshit started. It might be better to return to “shut up about it and maybe 30, 40 years from now you can find a good shrink to help you work through it, or not.” Right now, I’d bet on the latter being the safer course, all things considered.
Sorry about that. It’s a dangerous world out there. I’ve been telling people that for a while. But if you think of it, your temporary fears when you were asked for help by a kid didn’t do you terrible damage, did it? You’re going to be OK. It’s not like anybody shot you through the heart because they thought you were a thug or anything. My advice would be to either get over it or seek help.
Now flip this statement.
Take out that Malisha was referring to men, and replace it with women, blacks, gays, Muslims.
If you did this it would be clear that this is a declaration by Malisha that she is okay with subordinating others members of a class in society due to mostly irrational fears of a fairly rare event.
If this were to keep “us” safe from Muslim terrorism, we would all denounce it as an extremist view and a prejudice against Islam.
If this were to keep “us” safe from women’s false accusations, we would all denounce it as an extremist view and a war on women.
If this were to keep “us” safe from gay’s converting our children, we would all denounce it as an extremist view and a homophobic.
But Malisha is okay with her war on men, and we have a name for that, it’s misandry, and read read read how Malisha eagerly teaches it to others to spread the word.
Jerryball, about your fear of helping kids? Sorry about that. It’s a dangerous world out there. I’ve been telling people that for a while. But if you think of it, your temporary fears when you were asked for help by a kid didn’t do you terrible damage, did it? You’re going to be OK. It’s not like anybody shot you through the heart because they thought you were a thug or anything. My advice would be to either get over it or seek help.
Jerryball, I frankly don’t know what your objection has been to my conclusion that the woman who “reported a possible pedophile” in the book store was ridiculous and that the book store was worse than ridiculous in behaving in an obnoxious manner. The only comment I see you made on the thread was that she was a nutty old biddy (I don’t know her age or anything else about her) and something about her groin (about which you know as much as SHE KNEW about the groin of the gentleman she had ousted from the shop). I wasn’t responding to you at all and didn’t really get what you were saying.
You did say: “Yawn. So now you made out that it was a distressed mother and not a self-distressed thought impoverished but overreacting observer that jumped to her own predisposed suspicions…? and — yet — you blame others for being nondistressed uncaring bloggers that jumped to a woman-hating conclusion???? and — yet — then you vented and vented and bla bla bla’d yourself into a corner that you — yet — tried to unpaint yourself out of? Lady, you have a problem. It’s called a flowing mouth that runs boundlessly with copious excuses for “feminism” (is that correct?). Perhaps you are too needy and too extraneous with all your copious and lavish vindications and bla bla bla. Oh, maybe you get the drift of this?”
Well don’t worry about me “getting the drift of this” —
But let’s see what you’re concluding about what I said.
First, you think I believe a “distressed mother and not a self-distressed thought impoverished but overreacting observer” made a complaint to the management at Barnes & Noble.
Wrong. That is not what I thought and that is not what I said.
I thought, “Oh those idiots listened to some wacko and kicked a guy out of the store for no reason.”
Then I thought, on a completely DIFFERENT track, “Well why would they listen to some wacko and act on her nonsense when they won’t listen to mothers who really are trying to do something that the law calls upon them to do: to take care of their kids?”
And then I thought, “Because of the obvious social misdirection: AWAY from the circumstances under which most sexual abuse occurs [close relative, in the home, hidden by family secrecy] and TOWARD innocent strangers who can be blamed for problems without much difficulty.”
THEN I put up an observation that most child sexual abuse occurs within the family, but that is often not believed, especially if a mother is supporting her child’s allegations; whereas people get hysterical and exhibit both moronic punitive conduct AND excessive stupidity when a stranger, especially an elderly male stranger, can be targeted.
Only Anon made that into a feminist issue, by his sailing forth into a lengthy exposition about how abusive, dishonest and substandard women (feminists in particular) were, and how innocent were men.
But then he claimed that the men who are molesting children are those who are step-fathers and mothers’ boyfriends, who — although he admits they are male — seem to evade notice because he doesn’t think the feminists are attacking them. HE thinks the feminists are attacking HIM, so he counter-attacks.
Where you fit into this I cannot understand. If somehow you have a problem with the idea that opposition to false allegations does not equal the ipso facto condemnation of feminism per se, and feminists in particular, I think your point can be taken but it cannot be well taken.
From the beginning of my comments on this idiotic stunt the book store pulled, I have said and confirm here again, it was wrong (whether mentally unbalanced or just plain wrong I don’t know) of the woman to carry on about the man reading children’s books and it was DAMNED WRONG of the store to put him out.
If you prove to me that (a) This bizarre woman was a feminist; and that (b) her feminist theories include the idea that old men in book stores are pedophiles; and (c) that her feminist theories are generally accepted among the published feminists in this country, then I think you’ve got something there. Share it with Anon.
The point I was making is that it is dangerous to “steer my course” and not go to buy my progeny books, and cannot do the right, or innocent, thing anymore.
About my “copious excuses for feminism” — uh, listen up Jerryball (would that be to imply that the ball is jerrybuilt or is there some other reference I am not understanding?) — I am not making any “excuses for feminism.” There need BE no excuses for feminism. You may think there should be, because you oppose it, and therefore, people who don’t oppose it should give you their “excuses.” But if so, look elsewhere. I know lots of feminist women, and not a few feminist men. There are feminist men on this very blog. They don’t owe you, or me, or anyone an “excuse” — copious or scant — for feminism.
If you’re wondering what could be my “excuse” for feminism: Listen up, there is none.
If you’re wondering what could be my “reason” for feminism, different matter altogether. The foundation of my feminism is my belief that the good condition and health of the progeny of mankind depends profoundly on the health, strength and nurturing capacity of the mothers of those progeny, and that all things being equal, for a child to have a good mother is a great benefit to that child throughout his life. As a corollary to that axiomatic statement, that which damages the women of a culture, damages the next generation. That which supports and enhances the life capacity of the women of a culture, enhances the viability and adaptability of the next generation. That’s about it.
Well I am glad your tl;dr panty waving rant about the evils of menz and courtz has made you feel better.
Maybe we can both agree that most of this harm comes from stupid lawyers, jackass judges, and idiot politicians that listen to feminists.
OK, Anon, here we go.
When you get all adrenalin-plus because of the terrible feminists, all the links, logical connectors, and segues fall out of your comments. The degree of defensiveness any reader can detect without “enhancement by the FBI labs” is so high that most people won’t even get into it with you. In attack mode, you slice through information as if it has no meaning other than “BAD SAID BAD TO ME BAD BAD SHE YELLED SHE WAVED PANTIES BAD SAID OOOOOOH OOOOOH BAD BAD EVIL WICKED BITCH BAD BAD!” and little else matters. I’m going to tell you things now that are probably not interesting to you and if so, that’s fine because I’m saying them not just for you, obviously, but for others, both men and women.
FIRST: You leaped into a conclusion, and really a string of similar conclusions, that are not connected in most people’s minds, but that really are connected in terms of the fact that people who get riled about some of these conclusions do not distinguish them from the “similar conclusions” that they are not similar to at all. Tough sentence. Let me use a concrete example. You hear that “A mother trying to protect her child from incest is punished.” You jump to two very big conclusions from this small piece of data: (1) The mother involved is making a false allegation of incest against an innocent man; and (2) The reason the mother is doing this heinous deed is attributable to the bad conduct of the feminists. Further down the same distorted train of thought, you have it that the female attendees at PAS and FMS conferences are skeptical of the “claims made by the feminists.” How did you get THERE, Anon? Were we to presume that the “claims made by the feminists” = “this hypothetical mother’s false allegations of sexual abuse”? So, because YOU assumed the mother protecting her child made a false allegation, YOU then assumed that being “skeptical of the feminists” would therefore be equal to DISBELIEVING the mother, when we have not even examined what the hypothetical mother did, and what motivated her to think (or to LIE) her child had been molested.
This is your case against the feminists?
You then carefully explain that the reason men are thought of as having molested children is due to the bad conduct of divorced women (or just single mothers, if they had children out of wedlock). You explain that it is mothers’ boyfriends and step-fathers who are molesting all the kids.
OH?
Well, for one thing, you are part correct. Apparently, one out of every six children who has a step-father is indeed molested by the step-father. Well that’s a pretty big figure, but not all that unbelievable considering that about one out of every 15 girls and one out of every 19 or so boys is molested by a “father or step-father or father figure.” OK. Let’s be conservative, and keep the step-father statistic the same, and cut the other two in half. Then it would be one out of six kids with a step-father, and only one out of 30 kids with a father. There’s some overlap in that Venn diagram of course. I’m not a statistician (which is why I do not regard these kinds of things so terribly important) but it does break down to about 3% of kids being molested by fathers. Higher percentage molested by step-fathers, lower by biological/legal fathers. OK, but it’s not an insignificant number.
On other threads we recently heard that about 3% of the population was considered to be sociopaths.
Maybe, you can break down how many of those sociopaths are women; I haven’t looked into it.
But my point under “POINT # ONE” is that you’re very angry at feminists and think they should not be regarded as good, credible or entitled to broadcast their opinions, and so far as anybody can tell from your writing so far, the reason you think that is that you believe feminists support female-made false allegations of child sexual abuse against innocent men, probably for reasons of man-hatred.
Hmmmmm. I don’t think that the studies have revealed that to be true.
POINT # TWO: My original statement, having to do with the fact that “stranger danger” was a very small problem compared to intrafamilial sexual abuse of children, and yet that a miscellaneous nasty-minded woman in a Barnes & Noble store would be believed while she had no evidence whatsoever, while a mother, who knows her kids, knows what her kids have said, and loves her kids, will often be DISBELIEVED (although HER STORY is much more likely to be true and she may have a lot of very credible evidence and no record of lying, perjury or criminal behavior) stands, and IS NOT MISANDRIST.
Do you believe that because I am a panty-waving strident bitch, then whatever I say must be not only disbelieved but attributed to the nasty feminists? It would be far more logical to examine the evidence of something I have said than to go foaming at the mouth about what a man-hating, woman-disrespecting, undignified, non-credible person I am, wouldn’t it? But you haven’t gone there. You haven’t any interest in going there. You’re busy equating my observation that you conclude something bizarre from something I have never said to your belief that I am calling you and/or others Holocaust deniers. (By the way, the logical jump on that one happens to go off on a tangent out of the atmosphere and into a black hole.)
POINT # THREE: In spite of what happened in your case, and even in spite of what you think happened in your case (and I can believe that a lot went wrong in your case because the family courts are from hunger), POINT # 3 is a very important one, and one that I have not made publicly before, and one that I make publicly now because I am not involved in any of these cases now, and have chosen to never be involved in any of them again. (It’s ridiculous to get into them; they are designed to be wrong so they will be wrong, and one cannot change the initial blueprint on a building already standing.)
For about 16 years I was on the lecture circuit for health care providers and for others, including law enforcement officers, as a layperson, on the subject of how child abuse cases get mismanaged and essentially screwed up in the social service agencies and courts of basically ALL the states, regardless of the particular individual laws within any one state. I went to all these events for free, if my transportation and lodging was paid, so I was invited to tons of them because their budgets could be all used up and they could still add me to the menu. The reason I did this was to be able to hear what the providers and the LEOs had to say (anecdotally) about what was going on in their jurisdictions. It was, if you will, a form of research. So I would tell them all, during my presentation, that (a) anybody who wanted to meet with me outside the generally arranged meetings had only to let me know and I would schedule a time, be it 6 a.m. or 11 p.m., in the hotel lobby or wherever, with or without coffee; and (b) anybody who wanted to brainstorm with me could just make up names and we would talk about the stuff without exposing anyone to trouble.
You would not BELIEVE the things I learned. I learned from two cops in Colorado enough inside information to get a picture of what really happened in the JonBenet Ramsey case. I learned from a Pennsylvania cop what had happened in his department with a child RAPE case in a state-run children’s hospital. I learned about the various ways that agencies and courts worked together to “satisfy” anybody who had information that shouldn’t come out or, in the alternative, to marginalize them or discredit them — and even to get them railroaded for felonies so their stories would be disregarded. THIS INCLUDED A FATHER OF TWINS who ended up in jail for eight years so he could be shut up about what was done to his children BY SOMEONE IN THE COUNTY’S EMPLOY.
And I saw the cases where the mothers (and three fathers) who tried to protect their children were deprived of custody, visitation, their livelihoods, their good name, were fired from jobs, were even kicked out of churches, in one case were excommunicated (KICKED OUT OF GOD ITSELF!), lost their licenses to practice medicine or other professions, etc. etc. ad nauseam. In about two dozen of those cases, there were very erudite amicus briefs written by highly respected organizations who had research, knowledge, and expertise at their command.
The system does not work.
It cannot be made to work.
It is dangerous.
Finally, into my eleventh year on the lecture circuit, a woman with two Ph.D.s met me in the ladies’ room of one of the hotels, where I had just finished presenting a panel with the Chief Judge of one of the jurisdiction’s family courts. She came up to me and said, “I have seen this happen in my own practice. A child who was definitely molested, with physical evidence, with corroboration of two doctors, and my own testimony, and she is now in the sole custody of the alleged molester and is only allowed one hour of supervised visitation with her mother once every two months in a locked room with a guard.” I gave her my standard response: “I believe you.” She said, “But I am a mandated reporter. The law says that I MUST report suspicion of child abuse for any child I treat; yet I can be throwing these children into a snakepit if I report suspected abuse. I don’t know what to do.” I dried my hands. I said, “I am not a professional and I do not have a license. Therefore I have nothing to tell you about your profession or your license. I am not a lawyer and I am not a public official. All I can tell you is this: if I thought that something I was about to say would endanger a child, I would wonder about whether it was really necessary to BELIEVE that my thoughts, the thoughts behind the words I was about to utter, were actually true.” She stood there. I stood there. She said, “Well of course, anybody can have a bad hair day. I could possibly begin to suspect abuse on a day when it was just a bad hair day, so I could just think about it, sleep on it, and reconsider. The next day I might forget.” I said, “anybody could do that.”
After that, I realized that her conflict was a very important one. I began to tell professionals about this conversation I had with her. (She is very highly regarded as a professional and I did not name names but I did outline her background and credentials.) They nodded, they understood. Then I realized I should tell mothers about what was going on so they could make their decisions with real aforethought.
One woman came to me with this problem. Here’s the dialogue:
OW: I can’t just tell her that it’s OK and she has to put up with it, can I? Won’t she hate me for that?
ME: I don’t know. Will she hate you? Won’t she? I don’t know. I do know that it is very dangerous to claim that your child has been molested by her father, since it will be immediately presumed that you are making a false allegation to gain advantage in a divorce.
OW: But aren’t guys like that, who would abuse their children, the very same ones who would be most likely to divorce?
ME: Sure they are, sure they are.
OW: So why would it be assumed that I am lying, when she’s been saying this to me, to her brother, and to the therapist?
ME: I am not saying it’s definitely going to happen and I’m not saying it will definitely work, what I’m saying is that it is definitely a possibility.
OW: How can I let this go on?
ME: I don’t know. Before we realized there was a big problem with the child protection teams, that was an easy question to answer, but now, it is a hard question. Either way you go there are horrible dangers.
OW: But how CAN I tell her to just shut up about it?
ME: Well, I don’t know that either, but you can start with the TRUTH, in age-appropriate terms.
OW: Such as?
ME: Such as, “Honey, I’m sorry that is happening. But I can’t tell Daddy what to do, or what not to do. He won’t listen to me. You can tell him yourself, and maybe he will listen to you. But if he doesn’t, I’m not sure there is anything else we can do about it. If he does that, it is WRONG, but I don’t know what can be done about it.”
She stood there. She looked at me like I was crazy. I realized that what I was saying WAS technically crazy, and my friend Jack Swiberg from Oregon (rest in peace), a family therapist, would have said to me, “That’s technically psychotic,” but there it was.
NOW, I didn’t tell that mother, OW, to go to the feminists and ask for help. They wouldn’t have given her any help and there was no help TO GIVE. She had to make her choices her own way. But I thought she should know what the terrain was like if she thought she could go into battle in that terrain.
I will tell everybody I know, every therapist, every mother, every single person who has any reason to listen to me, the same thing: IF THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO, AT LEAST KNOW THAT, and make your choices based on real knowledge of the real world.
And do you know what, in the last couple of decades, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of therapists have heard about the dangers of the “mandated report of suspected sexual abuse.” And perhaps THOUSANDS of mothers. This is not something that can be remedied, in our system, but it is something that can be KNOWN about our system.
And that is the real purpose of First Amendment rights. And that is the real purpose of communication, too. And your discussions with me, Anon, they’re not about my alleged hatred for men OR your disavowed hatred for women. They’re about KNOWING what’s going on.
It’s the only way to be able to steer your course.
I’m glad I got this carefully said. I’m even glad your anti-feminist attack mode got me to carefully say it.
Yawn. So now you made out that it was a distressed mother and not a self-distressed thought impoverished but overreacting observer that jumped to her own predisposed suspicions…? and — yet — you blame others for being nondistressed uncaring bloggers that jumped to a woman-hating conclusion???? and — yet — then you vented and vented and bla bla bla’d yourself into a corner that you — yet — tried to unpaint yourself out of? Lady, you have a problem. It’s called a flowing mouth that runs boundlessly with copious excuses for “feminism” (is that correct?). Perhaps you are too needy and too extraneous with all your copious and lavish vindications and bla bla bla. Oh, maybe you get the drift of this?
The point I was making is that it is dangerous to “steer my course” and not go to buy my progeny books, and cannot do the right, or innocent, thing anymore. For example I was in the restroom of a restaurant about to leave to return to my party and table. A young boy of about 5 came out of a stall and asked me to “help” him. For about one split second I innocently thought of being helpful, but then, remembering the zeitgeist of the day, I realized that in helping this lad, I would be putting myself in danger of being accused of something that was so far from my mind, it would never have occurred to me as acting dangerously up until at least 20 years ago. After all, I had helped my kids, my cousins, and my nephews when they were tots. I told the boy I would find his mother. I went outside the restroom, found his mother, told her I would guard the door while she attended to her son’s distress, and did so.
This is why, acting or being in a place innocently, somebody could inadvertently be accused of dastardly deeds. These conditions are easily misinterpreted and men and women have to be careful about how their innocent motives may be misinterpreted by hysterical dirty-minded observers who think they have the right to “steer my course.” The world’s undergrowth is winning.
I heavily blame the pompous pious churchy-do lady whose thoughts emanate from her lusty groin only to believe her motives are catching to others. She needs to add some loft to those base suspicions. Otherwise Grandfathers should stay out of the Children’s Section to find a grandchild’s gift book. The Children’s section in my Barnes & Noble bookstoe is open to view of the ENTIRE bookstore? What a self-righteous poseur this old biddy is.
Bron,
The origin of the phrase “politically correct”. It’s a really interesting language site, especially if you’re looking for the meaning of some of Shakespeare’s more obscure language. http://www.phrases.org.uk/
The rest of what you say is really funny classic psychological projection.
Um, yes, I do own a hardhat. No, I am not wearing sweatshop.
Huh!?
MommaBear,
Gavin DeBecker says that we should not ignore the “gift of fear.” I believe that. I feel that anybody who makes me feel wary is someone I can take my kids away from, as a general matter. There’s no problem in that. It’s having someone REMOVED from a public place (rather than ME REMOVING MY CHILDREN) that I think is a bridge too far.
Anon,
What are you wearing, sweatshop? Oooooh, do you own a hardhat?
Mike Appleton: I saw a case where a judge jailed a 19-year-old kid for two years for having sex with his 17-year-old girlfriend CONSENSUALLY and while the girlfriend and he wanted to get married. He would not permit the kid to be paroled. I have seen strangers convicted of “sex offenses” that aren’t even on the LONG LIST for sex offenses — one of them was a holistic doctor who honestly answered a QUESTION a 9-year-old kid put to him about INSECTS MATING! The hysteria about things that do NOT amount to sexual offenses seems to be a sort of perverse “social correction” so that the society can assure itself that it is really not allowing one of its oldest taboos to just melt away — or something. I’m no anthropologist. But what I see is more and more trouble for innocents and less and less real attention to the majority of problems relating to child sexual abuse. Everything’s being redefined as what it is NOT. Normal behavior on the part of normal people is being redefined as criminal, while offensive and abusive actions are being redefined as every kind of lying, mystifying, junk science imaginable and some not EVEN imaginable. It’ not safe out there to be either a non-abuser OR an abused person; either way, you’re most likely to be mischaracterized if you have an enemy.
Malisha,
What you should find hilarious is how you compare this thread to holocaust denial and then deny doing so.
And yes, you are right, you are justified to snidely call me hunk, but it is misogyny to refer to you as a panty waving honey, babe.
MommaBear:
Your suggestion that pedophilia is somehow a progressive political doctrine is nonsensical. I certainly hope that you are not one of those who believe that supporting equal rights for gay people constitutes approval of deviants who prey on children.