The fact that SOME people accept a thing, promote a thing, practice a thing, does not mean that it is societally accepted. SOME people sell their children. That does not make it societally accepted.
But you, who weren’t there, know more than I, who was. Carry on.
This is such an interesting subject! We now know that human brains don’t completely mature until mid/late 20s. Huge physical changes are going on in teen brains that pretty much guarantee judgment cannot be at its best. I don’t think we’ll ever get to the point of banning sex until our mid/late 20s :lol::lol::lol::lol:, but who knows? (I’d defy anyone to enforce it though…)
That was not my experience. I got my first credit card in the mid/late 70s. Had a very good job and was supporting my writer husband. Did not need his permission to get the card. However, in spirit you are not wrong. While I didn’t need my husband’s permission, the CC company wanted my parents to guarantee the card. I flatly refused and made ugly noises at the CC company. They gave me my credit card.
Where wasn’t I?
Ok, so let me ask you - why do we need safe sport if all along society knew it was unacceptable to have sexual relationships with minors?
We know for a fact that parents knew with Nassar and we know that many knew with GM (whispers etc.). Why did society not out these beasts before?
What was their silence? What do you call that? You WANT to call it an aberration but the statistics do not bear that out. 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 6 boys are molested. (https://www.d2l.org/the-issue/prevalence/).
My math is poor, but that’s about 12 million kids, 700,000 annually. That’s a LOT of kids, and a LOT of perpetrators.
40% of those are reported (so that’s 280,000). Only 55% of those get even followed up on by CPS, and then far fewer are taken to court. Although 80% of those taken to court are convicted - huzzah! That tells me that it’s not the court system failing these kids. It’s US. It’s parents, it’s friends, it’s teachers (only 25% of which have adequate training as mandated reporters).
This PDF is chock-full of our failures as a society - http://www.d2l.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Statistics_6_Reporting.pdf - and it was worse in the years leading up to now.
Far far worse!
Do I blame the perps, absolutely. But I also blame US. As a society. We’ve turned a blind eye for years and people don’t do that because they are bad people. They do it because the societal costs are great. There are ingrained beliefs about what you do and don’t interfere in (see Bluey’s post) there are concerns about taking kids away and putting them into foster care (see the pdf I provided before about people’s attitudes after the McMartin cases).
I was absolutely around for the 80s and 90s. You’re telling me it was better in the 60s and 70s? I call BS big time on that one.
In 2003, I tried to buy a car as a single woman. First, I had a heck of a time getting help at the dealership. Then the first question was “are you married, because we won’t talk to you until your husband is here”.
I left the dealership and never came back.
I visit another dealership now pretty frequently, as I have an e-car and need to charge it. I’ve spent many an hour wandering around the lots staring at cars and not a SINGLE rep has approached me. I thought that was pretty funny in this day and age, so I tried it at different lots - now keep in mind, I’m married, female, and generally speaking look respectable (although some days after barn work you just never can tell). I STILL can’t get anyone to help me. I should be an easy mark at a car dealership but I’m not - because of outdated beliefs about wearing the pants. My husband goes alone and I have to go rescue him before he buys a car.
I know this is a total side note, but things haven’t changed that much.
A friend who is in a 12 step group sometimes goes to woman only meetings. She said that she is the only one in any woman only meeting she’s attended that was not raped, or sexually abused in some way. There are lifelong repercussions.
I have slogged through this entire thread. I have many thoughts but want to touch on this one. It’s easy to blame people who knew. Far easier than the perpetrator. Why I never spoke up was because it wasn’t my story to tell. I heard the whispers but had nothing concrete. It wasn’t until later that some of my friends confided in me when we became adults. At that point it wasn’t my story to tell. At that point there was no recourse because of the statute of limitations and it would have been he said she said/he said he said.
Of course I told my friends to speak up and that I would be right there with them. But again, it wasn’t my story to tell. All I could do was support my friends and when asked about trainers warn people and suggest better ones. I’ve always been a nobody in this sport and never cared if people started whispering about me because I told people about what I knew and heard.
But we don’t all have to agree in order to solve the problem. You and I are not ever going to agree on this semantic point. I will never agree that “silence is acceptance” of sexual predators, child molestation, and rape. And you have made no indication that you agree with my interpretation of the semantics.
But that is not an obstacle to solving the problem. In fact, I think SafeSport and the increased awareness of these issues in sport following the Larry Nasser case go a long way toward preventing future issues whether the fundamental problem has been societal acceptance (as you believe) or the dynamics of power, wealth, and social class (as I believe) or that women and children have been historically viewed as property with few/no rights (an excellent point made by someone else).
Awareness of the problem (and recognizing that it is indeed a problem), the creation of a safe and anonymous reporting system, and a system that has a proven track record of eliminating predators and abusers from the sport will, I believe, go a long way toward preventing future issues no matter what you think the underlying cause might be.
One thing the anti-SafeSport crowd is overlooking is that SafeSport (unlike the criminal justice system) doesn’t just protect children. It also protects the reputation of trainers who may have been falsely accused, because the investigation (unlike criminal proceedings) is not carried out in the public eye. Forget criminal conviction; there are a LOT of people out there who honestly believe that if a person has been arrested he or she must be guilty of something. Being arrested on charges of child sexual abuse will permanently destroy a person’s reputation even if the charge is later proved to be completely unfounded. But with SafeSport, if the investigators conclude there’s insufficient evidence to justify a sanction, the only ones who know a charge was levied are the investigative team, the accuser(s), and the trainer. The trainer’s reputation in the world at large has not been ruined.
Since fear of ruining an innocent person’s reputation is one of the many reasons people are reluctant to report suspected abuse, this aspect of SafeSport ought to be more widely appreciated.
This sport (and most others) NEEDS SafeSport. It may need a few tweaks, but it fills a necessary role.
Never did I say it was better in the 60s and 70s. Did not say that. I have merely argued, and will continue to argue, that it was never “accepted”. (Your word.) People dealt with teacher/child rape more quietly. But they never accepted it. It was not accepted societally. That does not mean that individuals did not accept it. But “some” is not all or even most.
Nor am I arguing that shining a spotlight on the problem isn’t better than keeping it quiet and dealing with it privately. It is far, far better. Children and parents have soooo much more information available now. They have more avenues for action. It is 1000 times better than when I was a teen. But I will stand my ground on saying that it was not “accepted” back then. Because it was not. Again, I was a teen in the 60s, which is the period mentioned in the GM controversy. That is the only period of which I am speaking. I am not making claims for the 80s or 90s because I was not a teen then.
As near as I can see, social costs are still great.
As far as music and videos and little girl models - imo, that is another discussion. I’ve always seen that as a knee-jerk reaction to women’s lib, an effort to put us back in our proper places, to infantilize us once again. (After all, most of the people in charge of those industries were/are men.) But that is my own opinion and I have no problem with people not agreeing with me.
Ok I obviously lived in a different world,Savannah and Atlanta and Staunton Va and Berkeley in the 60s and 70s and 80s and 90s cause sex with underage children was reported and prosecuted. (And credit cards? Hell in the 60s in college in Va Rich’s in Atlanta sent me my unsolicited card followed by American Express. My parents never were notified. )
And how do I know about sex crimes? In the 70s and 80s and 90s I tried hundreds of cases in Atlanta That was 1/12
/'of all felony cases in Fulton county’s cities and county. I got 1/12 of all the murders and rapes and child molestations etc during those years. I took the kids to chuckie cheese and to meet the judges etc. And as the first woman hired by the DA, I made sure I put child molestors in prison. Where,btw,my defendants who committed other crimes,exacted additional punishment.
idahorider’s post is good. Quit arguing about olden times. The assaults on children were handled then as they are now. And btw unless GW is senile now, he hasn’t changed. I tried guys who had completed their sentences and reoffended.
Actually, I believe that those three things are intertwined to cause the tacit societal acceptance, which is why we have a much higher rate of prosecution of African American individuals who commit the same crimes than the powerful white men.
I think we’re vehemently agreeing.
I do think a touch of a matter of semantics but I do stand by my word. More quietly is not an excuse. Just like “not voting for a Nazi” doesn’t let the germans of that time period off the hook. They stood by and watched it happen. Sure some may have sheltered Jews, but they still let it happen.
It normalizes predators. That a society would do that in a knee jerk response to women’s lib is something we can agree on (after all, the rich and powerful men in charge have a lot to fear from us women 
) but the net effect is normalizing the sexualization of children (mainly female). Do I believe that the men who put out that crap do it because they are predators? Not necessarily in the same sense that I view the perpetrators as predators, but they are predatory because they see the sexualization of young girls as a means to an end, and either don’t believe or disregard the harm done.
Again, my main reason for belaboring the point is not to be right (good lord, I would have let it go pages ago), but because I’ve been so vastly misunderstood as standing with the predators because I’m talking about the way things were and to help people understand that silence is not acceptable.
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Actually, I don’t think that’s true. I listened to the whole Believed podcast, and there was only one set of parents profiled who were told a tiny bit of what he had done to their daughter and didn’t report to law enforcement. Even they took their daughter to a therapist who felt that what she said wasn’t reportable. They were close, longtime friends of Nassar, pressured her to recant and she did. I don’t think they “knew.”
I am sure there were other parents who were told something who didn’t report or take any action, but I don’t think we “know for a fact” that any of those parents knew and understood that their daughters were being abused. Indeed, there were several that helped their daughters report to the police who were blown off as “not understanding” his medical procedure. It was quite a while before the right detective got the right report and started putting pieces together, and then the case truly broke on him because they happened to serve a search warrant before the garbage truck came that day.
Nassar was extremely slick and came off as the girls’ protector again and again.
Exactly. I have no idea why anyone thinks it would be “better” for an accused trainer to have the investigation start with an arrest, or why they think dealing with the criminal justice system is going to be easier, better, more convenient, or fairer than Safe Sport.
But I’m thinking they’re the same people who said that the accusations against Jimmy Williams were unfair since he wasn’t alive to answer them, and who are now curiously ungrateful that this mistake has not been repeated.
As a survivor, the “silence equals acceptance” topic is a tough one for me. Do I think people really heard or saw abuse and decided that it was acceptable to them, and did nothing? No, I know that most people would not think it’s OK to molest or rape a child. However, the psychological effect that people’s silence and inaction had was to make me feel insignificant. I felt and sometimes still feel like my safety and emotional well being was the last thing on anyone’s priority list. The image of our perfect little family was the important thing.
It took me 4 years to gather the courage to tell my mother what was happening to me. She expressed disbelief. Maybe I misinterpreted what really happened. Her brother was married, he wouldn’t do those things with his niece. I was excused from family events that included the sick f*ck, but the fact that he had molested and raped me wasn’t acknowledged until almost a decade later. One night when my mother was drinking, she admitted that he had molested her when they were kids. They had just moved, and her brother was the golden child to her parents. She had no friends, no trusted adults, so she stuffed that down and pretended it never happened. We’ve had a handful of discussions about it in maybe 30 years, and we’re close now. I think we mostly avoid the topic because there’s so much pain for both of us. I’ve forgiven her for what she did to me by not accepting what I told her, because I know what she went through, and I know she stuffed that down so deep for so long, that speaking up and wrecking her illusion of the perfect family was just too much at that point for her. Her denial of her own abuse got her through that, and she reacted the same way to mine. I get it.
The thing is, even knowing what I do now. Even accepting the psychological turmoil my mother went through… and even though I have forgiven and let it go… I was still wronged. I still felt insignificant, marginalized, like the adults that were supposed to keep me safe KNEW what had happened, and yes, had accepted that this was OK with them. If it wasn’t OK with them, then why didn’t they f*cking DO something?
So we can say that just because people are silent, doesn’t mean they accept the behavior, but the effect on the people who are being or have been abused is to make them feel like they’re not worth speaking up for, that whatever people are getting from that trainer, doctor, clergy member, whatever image that person has is more important than the physical and psychological well being of a child. Whether that’s the person’s actual intent or not. that’s the message the inaction and silence sends.
Funny, after reading all the posts on this little sidetrack (accepting, different back then, etc.), I was starting to believe that perhaps my view was quite biased on this topic, due to my personal family dynamic (ie, my mom not believing me regarding the incident with our creepy neighbor). So thanks for your post. It makes perfect sense to me. And I’m sorry about your brother.
I think, if anything, this whole thread has promoted critical thinking in many readers. Which is a good thing. I think many Americans (young and old) have become lazy when it comes to certain topics/situations. The art of debating, critical thinking, curiosity, questioning things, etc. is being lost. Not sure why that is.
One thing I know for sure, is that the pros who immediately jumped on the I stand with GM bandwagon, will find the longer they wait, the more painful it is to jump off. But better to jump off regardless of how much it hurts, than to just stay on for the ride while it goes over the cliff…
wow,the editorial response is so ignorant. She thinks GM was banned without being told, never mind having the opportunity to present his side. OR she totally knows the truth and is lying to spread falsehoods i applaud Kate Vosbury
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