We know what he did because a panel of experts after an 18+ month investigation determined conclusively that George Morris had committed sexual misconduct with minors. That’s more than enough info for most of us.
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It wasn’t the fault of adult amateurs that Morris allegedly continued to molest folks. It was the fault of those in charge. They are the ones who KNEW. I dare say most trainers, judges and association big shots knew.
The adult amateurs are bearing the burden of the inaction and the looking away of USEF/AHSA/USET/WHATEVER and its ruling class.
Saying the AAs should have stopped Morris is crazy talk. Even if one had tried they would have been sued, ripped to shreds and blackballed.
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USEF has nothing to do with Safesport. If you have an issue with it, take it up with Congress. The Protecting Young Victims from Sexual Abuse and Safe Sport Authorization Act of 2017 passed both houses and was signed into law by the current president in 2018. Even leaving the NGB doesn’t completely exempt you from the requirements of Safesport, as there are provisions which apply to organized amateur/junior athletics even when unaffiliated with a NGB.
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To answer your questions. I don’t have first hand knowledge of George Morris raping anyone. I did not at the time. I’m 31 years younger than he his, female (not his cuppa tea) and lived on the opposite coast with no money to show in the circles Morris did then. All that is why I did nothing to stop it. I just can’t be painted the hypocrite that you’d like so that you can resolve our disagreement via character assassination of me.
And I believe you when you say you didn’t know Morris was a rapist either. But neither of us need to know. Instead, SafeSport investigated allegations. That decision was appealed and then reconsidered by an independent arbiter over the course of 2019. You can google all this history to check it out for yourself.
As you well know, there are reasons other than Morris’s (or many, many other sexual predators’) innocence that accounts for their not having been convicted of the crimes they are alleged to have committed. Even worse, anyone paying attention for the last half century is well aware that there are reasons other than predators’ innocence that formal charges are not even brought. The justice system has an abysmal record when it comes to supplying fairness to victims of sex crimes. This is the second time I have explained this point here and now we are in disagreement about history, not opinion. So if you don’t think that my view of history is correct, then you’ll have to gather facts and support that claim. But you can’t refuse to look at that history and then argue that anyone not in jail is de facto innocent.
Furthermore, and again, your ignorance (or mine for that matter) of what happened or how those close to the perp and victim didn’t nail him to the wall, then and there, are irrelevant. We are not the arbiters of what happened At All.
To bring up the problem of parental supervision and to offer your superior, eagle-eye parenting within the context of your argument for having SafeSport not curtail Morris’ access to his preferred kind of sexual prey, is, in fact, to bash the parents who failed to live up to the standard you say works for you. After all, your implied line of reasoning goes, can’t we just get parents to protect their kids from exploitation so that I can have a pedophile teach me? It’s unfair that I should be limited because someone else won’t take the kind of responsibility for their kids that I take for mine.
It’s truly wonderful that your kids have never been exploited. But surely you’d agree that protecting children who didn’t win the parenting lottery is to be valued, right?
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People who think it could never happen to their kid should read up on what Nassar did. It is scary stuff.
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Yes, the shirt lady. At least that was my thought when I read it.
Sheilah
This! It’s our leisure time—how about the organizations grow some balls and background check, character check and test and license trainers!
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And this is part if the problem with SS: it is so badly done that most don’t understand what it is, where it’s from or what it does.
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I’m not even an active usef member and so didnt take the training but I know where to look up safesport info and the basic gist of the regulations. It’s not that hard.
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Well… I think you and Steinberg have a naively rosey picture of the justice system as it serves to either prosecute or deter pedophiles via examples of their being held accountable. And that means that you guys are logically obligated to prove that the justice system offers sufficient protection that that class of victims before you can ask us to worry more about adults who wish to make their living in this particular profession. If you don’t do that, it means that you prioritize the interests of horse trainers who wish to make money from members of a club over those of children hoping to remain safe from known pedophiles. And, have others have pointed out in this thread, trainers are not getting the short end of the stick, nor being made vulnerable. Rather, pros and their clients don’t need to be part of the USEF. But pros who follow SafeSport protocol such that they are not alone with children and thereby become vulnerable to false accusations that stick, gain an advantage.
If today’s trainers are unhappy with this limitation, they can ask their mentors of the last generation who knew more than your average USEF member about what their colleagues were doing why they allowed that to stand. It seems to me that no one thought they’d get caught. No one was directly responsible for stopping this form of exploitation. And now pros similarly don’t want to get involved with anything bigger than making their own living. So which people within our industry, exactly, care enough about protecting children from it’s bad actors?
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So now USEF amateurs have been given a different way to stop predators: They can refuse to patronize them. They always had that power but for, as you say, the risk of being sued, ripped to shreds (whatever that means) or blackballed. Thank God SafeSport gave these helpless adults a basis for protecting children when they were otherwise so powerless.
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It’s very clearly laid out on their website and their process is clear and easy to follow. Not sure why it’s hard for anyone to understand. An awful lot of the people venting about it on line in support of George admitted they hadn’t actually visited the SS site or familiarized themselves with how it works.
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@eggbutt Thank you for sharing this article. So much to contemplate, does not deserve a one line response.
I really appreciated your thoughts on Barisone original thread. I think it’s hard to reconcile feelings when your mentors fall. Morris for me is a case in point. My horses have greatly benefited from his pedagogy.
Hope you are well.
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No, adults were not powerless. I saw an arrest made in the 80s at a breed show. But the predator was not in a protected ruling class.
The point that you missed is that the upper eschelon all knew. The judges and officers of the associations involved all knew. But now it’s being played like it’s the responsibility of the AA to stick their neck our when those higher ups sure as heck never did.
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It takes some people over 2 hours to complete the course and they still don’t understand it. With the amount of discussion over what it means, it is obviously poorly done. It does have a negative impact on the industry, despite the protections it offers.
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I know that no adults were ever powerless, other than by choice. (I mean, for a full-grown-ass adult to step back and allow one of the most heinous and taboo of violations to happen to a child? WTF? And yet it happened more often than not for all of the trotted out fears of exclusion that you listed.) And I did get your point about the upper echelon knowing. Those folks are adults, too, and so enjoy sufficient power to do the right thing for children. That’s why I’d redirect Mr. Steinberg’s ire to the pros who came before him to allow this rot to fester in his industry to the point that the public could smell it.
To be clear, the rot was not unique or perhaps the very worst in horse showing.
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Comparing this course to the one you mentioned-- one about (racial?) discrimination in the work place-- could it be that those issues have been litigated and discussed more openly and for a longer period of time so that the issues involved are far more familiar and seemingly clear to everyone? That is to say, the authors for your employer’s training module and those taking it have a shared vocabulary and set of concepts that not quite so much remedial education needs to be done? And, of course, the stakes are higher in the work place, so while the same person will bring their attention and A-game to doing something required for employment, they feel put upon to have do the same (albeit to protect kids from sexual exploitation?) in their fun hobby.
Meh, I think folks ought to ask what being and adult means and in there somewhere, find the protection of children worth their time and attention.
And every movement that hopes to spread understanding of the perspective and plight of a group with minimal power to a group that has enjoyed the lion’s share of power has a really tough uphill battle in the beginning. So today, no one would have to school you in the taboo nature of the N-word. Not so in 1960, right? And kinda not so for hapless Joe Biden who steadfastly could not understand why the term “boy” had the connotations it did for black men and why he had to do anything about the his unintentional insult he delivered.
And yet, now in the present (still), when we discuss the rights of women to enjoy autonomy over their body that men have enjoyed forever, that’s not just granted with the same speed that we acknowledge our history of racial discrimination and our efforts to distance ourselves from it.
When we get to that third powerless class being discussed here-- children-- who are finally enjoying a tad more consideration, folks push back against that since they might lose some of their usual carte blanche freedom and convenience in the process. I think they might consider a longer stretch of history, see where they are in this particular historical moment with this issue and not thumb their chests quite so hard about being right. That’s because being right and enjoying privilege or unfettered freedom are hard to parse out in the beginning of a movement where one has to grant power and fairness to people unlike them, and with whom they were previously unconcerned.
I just think we are in a particular moment of history and it seems clear to me which side of that ethical people should be on. If I have to give up some of my privilege so that a child doesn’t get sexually molested, I’ll happily do that. But many, many people in this discussion on the other side are in Joe Biden’s spot. They think of themselves as good people… and they are as far as they know. But never having spent much time in the position of powerlessness, they fail to consider the world from that side or they are not adept at it. And they get pissed when anyone asserts that they need some schooling. The assertion is not objectively wrong. But it is unaccustomed for someone who has enjoyed so much privilege for so long.
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I have repeatedly said I think SafeSport doesn’t offer the protection it claims to those who most need it. We, as a society, absolutely need to do better. I don’t think SafeSport is good enough yet.
And it’s pathetic that it took an action of Congress to get something done.
I was lucky to grow up around very trustworthy individuals around whom I was frequently left without adult supervision. There were typically other kids around, and there was no reason to suspect any of these trustworthy individuals. But if they had been grooming me and not deserving of trust, I do not know if anyone would have been aware of the signs. I instinctively rebel against the thought other kids will be prevented from having the barn rat, innocent, lifestyle I was lucky enough to have when younger. However, I feel protecting that innocence is more important. I would be fundamentally the same person had I not gotten to spend those extra hours with horses. Being molested or raped changes everything for someone. I have to stop my instinctive reaction to look at it that way. Not what was my experience, but how does abuse affect victims? I suspect as a victim of abuse, and based on how he phrased the article, that taking the leap from thinking about how he gets to coach to how that treatment affected victims is something Jeremy perhaps didn’t want to take yet.
Then there is the Constitutional aspect. Because SafeSport is created by Congress, are results of it which haven’t satisfied legal standards for conviction allowed to attack our freedom of association? This is truly just a mulling of that which I’d be curious to hear the thoughts from some legal experts on. If it is a violation, can this put SafeSport as a whole at risk, opening up all those who have come forward for protection in greater danger?
I don’t think anyone should support GM, and I think his abusive insults should have been enough to stop his fandom. I had zero clue he was a molester but still wanted him out of the sport because of his openly abusive behavior in clinics.
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[QUOTE=netg;n1056
I don’t think anyone should support GM, and I think his abusive insults should have been enough to stop his fandom. I had zero clue he was a molester but still wanted him out of the sport because of his openly abusive behavior in clinics. [/QUOTE]
Agreed! And it was not until recently, as I’ve stated before, that he has adopted and taught some dressage principles, and I hate his well promulgated crest release.
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Quite well, except for a nasty case of the flu! Thank you! Hope you are well also!!
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