Was he a perv?

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If you are CRB checked to work with children in the UK, it's very likely your sponsoring body will insist on 'welfare of the vulnerable' training, including recognising abuse, and avoiding situations where you may be wrongly accused of abuse. We tend to talk about 'welfare of the vulnerable' rather than 'child protection' these days because it's not only children it affects. And I've heard the argument that as an adult male I am vulnerable, not necessarily to abuse, but to false accusations of abuse, therefore these policies exist to protect me as well. Of course a sponsoring body also wants to protect itself from liability in the event of abuse or accusations of abuse.

Personally I think the public see through a lot of the media generated hysteria and realise that there isn't a child abuser around every corner.

He might be and he might not be. If he makes you feel uneasy though, go with your gut instincts.

Well of the peadophiles I have know about none of them acted like they liked kids.
This guy just sounds like he likes children..funnily enough that does happen you know.

Yeah thats sort of what I meant, too. They wouldn't advertise the fact they liked children.

Again, it's double standards - a 14-year-old girl who gets off with her teacher may really enjoy the relationship and consider it great fun. But the poor girl is always the victim in these relationships, never the instigator.

When it happens to a man, he's always a lucky bastard. Never mind what serious abuse of power could have occurred.

Double standards. Either it's socially acceptable for all or none.

It's best to avoid these relationships altogether I think, plus any relationship where someone is seen to have a position of power over another - i.e. therapist, psychiatrist, priest, pastor, nurse/doctor, relatives, and so on. It's not good.

Last edited by Tequila on 07 Jul 2011, 5:50 am, edited 4 times in total.

It's not just that, it's the constant suspicion whenever we have a camera around children and are taking photos; even if it's turned off, or even if the camera is pointed in a totally different direction.

Or whenever you speak to children, even when supervised in many instances.

Honestly, the paedophile hysteria has gotten to such a point where one totally unfounded accusation can ruin a man's life. Which is why there are very, very few male teachers in British schools these days.

You're better off avoiding them altogether.

Paranoid parents driven on by mass media fear has really had a large part to play in this. And the 'mob mentality' too - this is usually at open day events, where ill-educated, feckless and often violent parents get drunk in packs and start looking for anyone who looks 'dodgy'.

Carole, I know it's an overreaction, and I know it's drastic, but who's really at fault for that? Paedophobes such as myself and Tequila? Or the idiots who propagate mass hysteria about this whole issue?

I hadn't heard about this - what I'd like to know is, what do schools do about it?

It hasn't happened to me, but I've been at open day events where I've wanted to take photos and felt discouraged from doing so because of the general body language of the parents. It was just a 'sense' I had that I'd be better not photographing the event for my own safety because a lot of the parents looked like dirty, scruffy, scummy types and they were drinking heavily whilst 'looking after' (i.e. neglecting) their kids. That's what paedohysteria does. It hollows out our civic life, and discourages people from recording events in their lives. It diminishes our historical records.

I just found this message he sent me

"Do you have any pictures you could load up of you when you were little, or just younger than you are now so I can see what our children may be like. I will try and find some of me as well."

and this


"I can't wait to finally meet up with you! I keep looking at your pictures and think how pretty you are but I'm sure they don't do you justice, particularly the latest ones, as they are quite dark. It would be great if you had one that wasn't as dark so I could print it off and put in my wallet! How recent is your fourth picture, the one of you in the green top and black jacket?"

Last edited by sweetcupcake on 07 Jul 2011, 7:41 am, edited 1 time in total.

+1

The terrifying thing about it is your life is essentially ruined even if you are found to be totally innocent. I saw this happen to a colleague who used to be a principal at a junior high school. People only remember the accusation, never the acquittal.

My children are 100% dependent on me financially, there's no way I'm going to jeopardize my career if it can be avoided: no contact with children besides my own is my firm policy, caring for/interacting with children is "women's work" now.

Extreme creep vibes. No way should he be talking about what your children will look like, whether that's totally innocent on his part or not.

And my back is up with the second one, too. He's *too* into the visual (photographic representation) and too territorial, already. I feel bad for him if he just doesn't have a clue, but this is not proper behavior.

I'm with MV on this one - the more details you give, the less it sounds like a simple case of "pedo-hysteria" - for the exact reasons MV gave. My opinion is to ease out of the relationship ASAP or at least define firm and explicit boundaries.

It's not "mass hysteria". It's a legitimate problem, and it occurs more than even gets reported in the media.

I understand what you're saying about false accusations and suspicions. But you don't use a sledgehammer to kill a fly. I repeat that saying that you will henceforth avoid all children because somebody somewhere was falsely accused is an unrealistic response. As I said earlier, I like the idea of special training on learning how to avoid improper scenarios. That's far better than running and hiding.

What I think we need to especially avoid is backlash over the vigilance against child abuse. There will probably always be false accusations made, but that is not a reason to back off on our concern over the problem. It simply means we need to be more discerning about how we go about dealing with it.

I have been through that training - it was 20-30 minutes on sex crimes against children followed by 2 hours of procedures designed to prevent false accusations.

The basic strategy was to ensure that 2 adults were always present (ideally one would be female) in order to provide an "alibi" for the accused party. This is generally only possible during structured group activities such as what we did in the Cub Scouts. It would be logistically very difficult/impossible to follow these procedures in routine daily life, it's much more practical to delegate the responsibility to women, since they are supposed to be present anyway.

Nobody is advocating a reduction in vigilence, just advocating a shift towards effective, rational vigilence.

Well those messages would send me running I wouldn't need to ask on a forum. The fact you are asking is you aren't sure? I mean it could all be innocent but he's extremely weird.