Pedofilia and cultural context

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Of course it fucking does, and a warm and supportive community isn't going to do shit to stop such things from happening.

I'd like to try it and find out for certain.

[Trolldor]

Of course it fucking does, and a warm and supportive community isn't going to do shit to stop such things from happening.

I'd like to try it and find out for certain.

They did try it. It was called Victorian England where everyone was warm and supportive and all the bad things happened behind closed doors so nobody had to hear about it. There was, after all, no-one who had the power or authority to step in or intervene.

[charlou]

Of course it fucking does, and a warm and supportive community isn't going to do shit to stop such things from happening.

I'd like to try it and find out for certain.

They did try it. It was called Victorian England where everyone was warm and supportive and all the bad things happened behind closed doors so nobody had to hear about it. There was, after all, no-one who had the power or authority to step in or intervene.

Your sardonic version of 'warm and supportive' is not the genuine sense of community responsibility and care Rum's advocating, baa.

[Trolldor]

Of course it fucking does, and a warm and supportive community isn't going to do shit to stop such things from happening.

I'd like to try it and find out for certain.

They did try it. It was called Victorian England where everyone was warm and supportive and all the bad things happened behind closed doors so nobody had to hear about it. There was, after all, no-one who had the power or authority to step in or intervene.

Your sardonic version of 'warm and supportive' is not the genuine sense of community responsibility and care Rum's advocating, baa.

The safeguarding/child protection 'industry' is a sham and absolutely no substitute for caring, good open, warm and supportive communities, which we have increasingly few of in this country.

And what exact powers would a 'warm and supportive community' have in addressing the issue? What possible approach could it take? The key word there is "supportive". It would function as a support network, not as a way of addressing any issue. There is nothing a 'warm and supportive community' could do to prevent pedophiles. For that you need a framework, you need legislation, you need a police force, you need agents capable of enforcing decisions, you need qualified inspectors. You need the 'child protection industry'.
There's no doubt the current system is erroneously flawed, but it's better than having absolutely nothing but kind words and group hugs which is all that 'warm and supportive' suggests.

Perhaps I'm missing something, in which case I would like to know in what way 'warm and supportive' might address the issue of child Abuse.

[FBM]

I was a counselor in an adolescent half-way house for 3 years, and I've been directly, personally and professionally involved with hundreds of victims of abuse. I quit for much the same reason you did. Victims of abuse whose primary line of defense is cynicism, coupled with unreasoning rage, parents who deny, minimize, etc, and a legal system that commits its own atrocities because it's founded on the unexamined assumption that the one-size-fits-all approach to implementing public values, to which I alluded above, is the only right one. Rum, I think you've got a lot more input on that than I do, given your greater experience.

[Rum]

I was a counselor in an adolescent half-way house for 3 years, and I've been directly, personally and professionally involved with hundreds of victims of abuse. I quit for much the same reason you did. Victims of abuse whose primary line of defense is cynicism, coupled with unreasoning rage, parents who deny, minimize, etc, and a legal system that commits its own atrocities because it's founded on the unexamined assumption that the one-size-fits-all approach to implementing public values, to which I alluded above, is the only right one. Rum, I think you've got a lot more input on that than I do, given your greater experience.

I simply saw the system doing much more harm than good. I also saw managers and ultimately legislators not actually thinking about the kids but about covering their own arses. Currently I see the professionals working in this area leaving in droves. Even with high unemployment they can't recruit people because the system (not the work itself) is so mind bogglingly complex. Every step a child protection social worker takes now is prescribed and part of a process with incredibly constraining timescales. There is next to no room for professional judgement and/or human intuition. The system relies on the procedures being totally thorough and allowing for any and all eventualities. When circumstances don't fit the procedures and somethign goes wrong then the 'inspectors' come in like a ton of bricks and find someone to scapegoat.

The 'olden days' were not an ideal time of course but I would argue that we now live in a far more dangerous time for children and not for obvious reasons.

[FBM]

I simply saw the system doing much more harm than good. I also saw managers and ultimately legislators not actually thinking about the kids but about covering their own arses. Currently I see the professionals working in this area leaving in droves. Even with high unemployment they can't recruit people because the system (not the work itself) is so mind bogglingly complex. Every step a child protection social worker takes now is prescribed and part of a process with incredibly constraining timescales. There is next to no room for professional judgement and/or human intuition. The system relies on the procedures being totally thorough and allowing for any and all eventualities. When circumstances don't fit the procedures and somethign goes wrong then the 'inspectors' come in like a ton of bricks and find someone to scapegoat.

The 'olden days' were not an ideal time of course but I would argue that we now live in a far more dangerous time for children and not for obvious reasons.

Yup. Covering your ass and pointing the finger at someone else become survival skills because there's always some lawyer miles removed from the day-to-day realities of the people involved, whose job it is to solve problems by seeking out people to blame when...surprise, surprise...the system doesn't work the way they think it should. I'd rather be a homeless beggar than get back into that. It's rare when you can actually help somebody, and most of the time you have no choice but to implement a decision that you know is either useless or outright harmful.

[charlou]

I'm splitting the derail to a new thread ... will post a link when it's done.


Edit: http://rationalia.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=6208

[floppit]

I simply saw the system doing much more harm than good. I also saw managers and ultimately legislators not actually thinking about the kids but about covering their own arses. Currently I see the professionals working in this area leaving in droves. Even with high unemployment they can't recruit people because the system (not the work itself) is so mind bogglingly complex. Every step a child protection social worker takes now is prescribed and part of a process with incredibly constraining timescales. There is next to no room for professional judgement and/or human intuition. The system relies on the procedures being totally thorough and allowing for any and all eventualities. When circumstances don't fit the procedures and somethign goes wrong then the 'inspectors' come in like a ton of bricks and find someone to scapegoat.

The 'olden days' were not an ideal time of course but I would argue that we now live in a far more dangerous time for children and not for obvious reasons.

Rum, I spent years in SU involvement working with kids who'd been through the rescue system, I've ranted to the point I lost my job about the system but in the end I realised most of the rants were rubbish. I'll try to explain what I mean.

I simply saw the system doing much more harm than good. I also saw managers and ultimately legislators not actually thinking about the kids but about covering their own arses.

I agree that fear of court can be a massive problem. I had a great line manager who told me to worry more that my actions were justified and less about being in court because if I ever was it's the former that keeps a person safe. I agree that this is not reflective of the culture in social care where covering arses is at the top of too many minds, but that has happened because there is so much legislation. So why not blame the legislation? I did, for a long time but as I worked I got more aware of intractable problems like (in the late 90's and early 00's) that there were hosts of Looked After teens out of education because schools would not accept them, I learned when booking a venue NOT to say they were kids in care or it would always be fully booked, I learned that no council dare criticise foster carers for fear of losing them, I learned that without making it illegal to treat these kids like a pestilence that's what the same public who will the next day crucify a SW worker did. There's even a edict to allow teens to TAKE reasonable risks to counter the arse covering in the NCS. I would chew off my right arm for the problem to be as easy as just changing the big organisations but it's not, they're screwed whichever way they jump and that is why workers are leaving in droves. Workers know that you can't remove every kid, they know there aren't the places to put them, they know that splitting all but the worst of families leads to more not less harm - but when they make a mistake they face a public that wants to blame rather than accepts it's US as adults who just don't offer homes. It's more than just not offering our own homes, I've seen people with placards outside kids homes (with the kids newly moved in inside) wanting the new home shut or moved away from their street.

From nurseries to care workers for the elderly privatisation is now the name of the game, driving down costs in a market where there are too few workers in the first place. Nurseries were supposed to check CRBs and references but they didn't, in droves they hired people without either and without qualification checks, so much so Ofsted was overwhelmed and did turn a blind eye. I'll be the first to admit neither references nor a CRB mean a person won't abuse but hell it is preferable not to hire someone done twice for GBH! Care workers are also hired (occasionally) without proper checks but worse still in a competitive market companies are hardly chomping at the bit to report when they have to fire a worker for abuse- it makes them look bad. The law gets silly because we have lost the ability to hire and fire, the simplest basics of common sense are changed by low rates of pay, high staff turnover and competition.

Every step a child protection social worker takes now is prescribed and part of a process with incredibly constraining timescales. There is next to no room for professional judgement and/or human intuition.

I have a feeling that our viewpoint may conjoin when you say this because I agree (I have never been a child protection worker BTW but worked with many). Where i THINK we differ at the moment is that you blame the laws and rules and I blame the cheap ranting that leads to the laws and rules. I've been so angry for so long that wherever you have a group of people talk about child abuse there is such absolute consensus, and yet still there's not enough foster carers, still without laws saying schools MUST take kids in care they won't, still people campaign not to have kids homes near them, STILL a FC I know who goes to our childminder faced a petition to disallow her adopted Down's son from getting on the school bus. I don't believe it anymore - I think the ranting is about saying the problem is somewhere else and has NOTHING to do with actually solving it. I've watched many of these new rules and laws come into force and while they might stink so did the context in which they arose. So I'm blaming the majority who never own up in discussions like this, the people like myself who don't have a foster child, the people penning petitions to block a kid from the bus, and the hypocrisy of on the one hand talking about protection while on the other calling some of the children who need it most (teens) animals. Solve those problems and there's half a chance with the rest. If as a society we don't start to care and protect our children in real life the laws will get ever more daft - but hey ho at least it will be someone else's fault.

The 'olden days' were not an ideal time of course but I would argue that we now live in a far more dangerous time for children and not for obvious reasons.

Because of the work I did I came into contact with a lot of SW coming up for retirement. For my part I believe them that here was no golden era. I know someone talked about whether the uk had got better since Victorian England, but I doubt that too, once sex tourism is taken into account I'm not sure that bonking the poor kids has really dropped much.

I think if anything has left these problems so intractable it's our own hypocrisy, it's the knee jerk bonding process of pitchforks at dawn coupled with a NIMBY approach to actually looking after, or even accepting the presence of, other people's children.

[Pappa]

It's not a straw man. It's a reality. When you construct a legal frame work you have to account for the obvious, and the fact is that such an act is already a reality, and it is a crime. It is covered by the existing laws governing age of consent. Under your system there is no age of consent, only an assessment to be held, which means that an act is legal until it is declared illegal. Which means that many "crimes" already happen before they are crimes.
There is the ethical issue of retroactive law enforcement, and exactly how absurd the very concept is, but that aside you also leave yourself open to every extreme out there. As I said pedophilia is not based on an attraction to intelligence, or to wit, or to charm or personality, but to age. And you get some very different targets for individual pedophiles. Would the rape and abuse within the catholic church be 'illegal'? It happened in a wide variety of countries, so which cultural would you analyse it by? By the culture of the country in question? Or by the culture of the catholic religion? Or by the culture of the catholic organisation which protected the abusers for so many years? That would depend on the jude performing the analysis wouldn't it? It is not a straw man because the current system of age of consent covers such an act already. So how would yours?
And I also note you said "amended with scientific" which is impossible. You admitted there was no way to objectively determine, and a scientific analysis would be objective.

Actually, while I agree that there should be a definite age of consent, FBM's system would be similar to many we have for other laws. For example, in the UK it is illegal to carry a fixed blade knife without good reason. However, it is up to a jury to decide what constitutes good reason, on a case by case basis. In other words, you can't be sure if you're breaking the law at the time, only retrospectively. Likewise, with crimes such as indecency, the definition is "what a normal person would regard as indecent" (ie. a juror). It's not illegal to walk around naked in the UK, but it is illegal to cause offense by doing some thing indecent (ie. being naked in public). You can't be sure if you will cause offense or be reported to the police and appear in front of a jury; which also means you can't be sure if you're actually breaking the law at the time you perform the act.

There are lots of other examples like that in many of our laws (often due to the necessary non-specificity of laws).

[Drewish]

Let's bring this high minded conversation down a notch.



Oh also, 1,000th post!!!!

[Pappa]

Let's bring this high minded conversation down a notch.



Oh also, 1,000th post!!!!

No derails here.

[Drewish]

Woops, thought this was in the pub. My mistake.

[Rum]

Woops, thought this was in the pub. My mistake.

Grats Andrew!!!!!!!!!!...from a vet.

[Rum]

I simply saw the system doing much more harm than good. I also saw managers and ultimately legislators not actually thinking about the kids but about covering their own arses. Currently I see the professionals working in this area leaving in droves. Even with high unemployment they can't recruit people because the system (not the work itself) is so mind bogglingly complex. Every step a child protection social worker takes now is prescribed and part of a process with incredibly constraining timescales. There is next to no room for professional judgement and/or human intuition. The system relies on the procedures being totally thorough and allowing for any and all eventualities. When circumstances don't fit the procedures and somethign goes wrong then the 'inspectors' come in like a ton of bricks and find someone to scapegoat.

The 'olden days' were not an ideal time of course but I would argue that we now live in a far more dangerous time for children and not for obvious reasons.

Rum, I spent years in SU involvement working with kids who'd been through the rescue system, I've ranted to the point I lost my job about the system but in the end I realised most of the rants were rubbish. I'll try to explain what I mean.

I simply saw the system doing much more harm than good. I also saw managers and ultimately legislators not actually thinking about the kids but about covering their own arses.

I agree that fear of court can be a massive problem. I had a great line manager who told me to worry more that my actions were justified and less about being in court because if I ever was it's the former that keeps a person safe. I agree that this is not reflective of the culture in social care where covering arses is at the top of too many minds, but that has happened because there is so much legislation. So why not blame the legislation? I did, for a long time but as I worked I got more aware of intractable problems like (in the late 90's and early 00's) that there were hosts of Looked After teens out of education because schools would not accept them, I learned when booking a venue NOT to say they were kids in care or it would always be fully booked, I learned that no council dare criticise foster carers for fear of losing them, I learned that without making it illegal to treat these kids like a pestilence that's what the same public who will the next day crucify a SW worker did. There's even a edict to allow teens to TAKE reasonable risks to counter the arse covering in the NCS. I would chew off my right arm for the problem to be as easy as just changing the big organisations but it's not, they're screwed whichever way they jump and that is why workers are leaving in droves. Workers know that you can't remove every kid, they know there aren't the places to put them, they know that splitting all but the worst of families leads to more not less harm - but when they make a mistake they face a public that wants to blame rather than accepts it's US as adults who just don't offer homes. It's more than just not offering our own homes, I've seen people with placards outside kids homes (with the kids newly moved in inside) wanting the new home shut or moved away from their street.

From nurseries to care workers for the elderly privatisation is now the name of the game, driving down costs in a market where there are too few workers in the first place. Nurseries were supposed to check CRBs and references but they didn't, in droves they hired people without either and without qualification checks, so much so Ofsted was overwhelmed and did turn a blind eye. I'll be the first to admit neither references nor a CRB mean a person won't abuse but hell it is preferable not to hire someone done twice for GBH! Care workers are also hired (occasionally) without proper checks but worse still in a competitive market companies are hardly chomping at the bit to report when they have to fire a worker for abuse- it makes them look bad. The law gets silly because we have lost the ability to hire and fire, the simplest basics of common sense are changed by low rates of pay, high staff turnover and competition.

Every step a child protection social worker takes now is prescribed and part of a process with incredibly constraining timescales. There is next to no room for professional judgement and/or human intuition.

I have a feeling that our viewpoint may conjoin when you say this because I agree (I have never been a child protection worker BTW but worked with many). Where i THINK we differ at the moment is that you blame the laws and rules and I blame the cheap ranting that leads to the laws and rules. I've been so angry for so long that wherever you have a group of people talk about child abuse there is such absolute consensus, and yet still there's not enough foster carers, still without laws saying schools MUST take kids in care they won't, still people campaign not to have kids homes near them, STILL a FC I know who goes to our childminder faced a petition to disallow her adopted Down's son from getting on the school bus. I don't believe it anymore - I think the ranting is about saying the problem is somewhere else and has NOTHING to do with actually solving it. I've watched many of these new rules and laws come into force and while they might stink so did the context in which they arose. So I'm blaming the majority who never own up in discussions like this, the people like myself who don't have a foster child, the people penning petitions to block a kid from the bus, and the hypocrisy of on the one hand talking about protection while on the other calling some of the children who need it most (teens) animals. Solve those problems and there's half a chance with the rest. If as a society we don't start to care and protect our children in real life the laws will get ever more daft - but hey ho at least it will be someone else's fault.

The 'olden days' were not an ideal time of course but I would argue that we now live in a far more dangerous time for children and not for obvious reasons.

Because of the work I did I came into contact with a lot of SW coming up for retirement. For my part I believe them that here was no golden era. I know someone talked about whether the uk had got better since Victorian England, but I doubt that too, once sex tourism is taken into account I'm not sure that bonking the poor kids has really dropped much.

I think if anything has left these problems so intractable it's our own hypocrisy, it's the knee jerk bonding process of pitchforks at dawn coupled with a NIMBY approach to actually looking after, or even accepting the presence of, other people's children.

We have PMed a bit on this so I won't repeat what I said there, but a small (and encouraging) point/correction. Looked after kids now must be offered a school place and it happens. In my authority we have a hugely tough target and we meet it.

You may well be right about there being no golden age. However we really have no way of knowing either.