I want to offer up a potential process that would curtail most sexual abuse situations and create more employment opportunities for female coaches. Using simple math: Women should coach the girls and men should coach the boys.
Most pedophile incidents are heterosexual in nature, therefore segregating the sexes could probably reduce instances of sexual abuse by 90%-or-more.
For those kids that want otherwise, then implement a no one-on-one policy. I would like to see swimming clean itself up to the point where it becomes the de facto sport to send your kids into. Currently it is not and is probably the least certain in regards to the potential for sexual abuse.
From the L.A. Times:
An Orange County swim instructor has been sentenced to 16 months in state prison for sexually assaulting two teenage females he met through coaching, authorities said Tuesday.
Todd Robert Sousa, 39, co-owned and taught classes for a swim school that offered lessons for children and adults, according to the Orange County district attorney's office.
He was accused of assaulting two 15-year-olds at an Orange County hotel in September 2009, prosecutors said. He had sex with one of the victims after she turned 16.
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5 comments:
Pedophilia knows no gender bounds.
Not sure I agree with this statement and not sure it would be legal either. Wouldn't it make sense using your logic that all children under the age of 21 should be taught in segregated schools? Surely there are more cases of sexual abuse in teacher-student relationships. Shouldn't there be supervised visits between opposite sex family member visits? Most kids are abused by someone they know, many times a family member.
I agree that there are issues, but I think that common sense on the part of athletes, parents and coaches plus guidelines about appropriate on and off deck contact should be followed and can control most assault issues. You just cannot protect everyone all of the time and extreme measures don't justify everything. See the Patriot Act for a justification of my last example. Not picking a fight, just being a realist.
Patriot issue is right...
I appreciate the peer review. I am not saying to make it law but if I owned a swim club business I would implement that policy.
I suspect swimming has proportionally more sexual abuse issues than most sports or even the public school system.
Pedophiles are neither gay nor straight. I am with you when it comes to finding a way to make this madness stop, but what's going on is as old as the ages. It's that we can only talk about it in society now. A book I can recommend is called "The Trauma Myth" by Susan Clancy. It's controversial because so many understood her premise to mean that sexual abuse isn't traumatizing, and therefore "not that bad," but that is not what she says at all. That it's not traumatizing immediately is actually one of the sneaky traits of of sexual abuse. So many victims don't even realize what's going on, either because they might like the perpetrator or they're too young. Abusers are very good at tricking their victims into believing it's some very special relationship. This is what makes it so sick. Many victims don't realize what's happened until years later, well into adulthood.
All it takes is an adult -- of any gender -- to win the trust of children and adults alike, and you've got the potential for disaster. So what you're describing certainly might make people feel better, but you're actually creating a potential scenario for even more abuse.
The fact that these girls' friends reported told and adult -- and better still, the adult did something about it -- is a very good sign! People used to sweep all of this under the rug.
The Zeitgeist is changing and it is my beliefs that the heads on pike are the reason
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