11-6-2010 Australia:
ONE sunny morning last week a 55-year-old advertising executive - himself a father - was walking to work when he came across a toddler wandering by himself, just 10m from a very busy main road, with no guardian in sight.
Where's your mummy?" he asked the small boy, who didn't respond and kept walking towards the dangerous thoroughfare.
Against his instinct, the man did not pick up the boy, for fear of being accused of being a paedophile abductor. Instead, as the child kept moving towards danger, he called to a lady in a nearby shop to ask if the boy was hers.
She ran outside and chased the toddler down. In the commotion the mother emerged from a nearby shop, apparently unperturbed.
But the man was angry.
"What would have got her upset is if I had picked the boy up when I saw him, which was my first instinct," he said, recounting the story a few hours later.
"If the child had walked on to the road and been killed, I would have had to wear the guilt for life ... Men have been reduced to (failing to protect children) when they see a child in danger, just for fear of being labelled paedophiles."
In hundreds of different ways every day the same scenario is played out, reflecting a profound and largely unspoken shift in the way decent men view small children. These are just ordinary men, fathers, grandfathers, brothers and uncles, who have been been made to feel like criminals around children, and obliged to suppress the natural healthy instinct to protect the most vulnerable members of society.
In the same way, you can understand why men using the change rooms at a public swimming pool in a northern Sydney suburb last week might have been concerned about the presence of unsupervised young boys undressing nearby. Afraid of being falsely accused of being paedophiles, several men complained to pool management that they felt uncomfortable undressing in front of the schoolboys, in an increasingly febrile atmosphere in which even the mildest accusation of sexual impropriety can be ruinous.
So the boys were banned from the change rooms of the aquatic centre and reportedly had to travel back on the bus to school in wet bathers.
Nobody comes out of the story feeling better about themselves, but who can blame the men for wanting to protect themselves from vexatious complaints? It has happened before.
One of the many heartfelt comments from men responding to a story of mine last week detailed the experience of "RM" when he took his four-year-old niece and two-year-old nephew to a playground and saw a little girl hurt herself.
"I was talking to her, asking if she was OK, which one is her mum, etc, only to have a woman (who turned out to be her mother) rush up and yell 'What are you doing'? Thankfully, another mother there came to my defence." RM was critical of the mother, who had left her child unsupervised while she went across the road for a coffee.
In the UK , a tragic case a few years ago highlighted the dilemma that men are finding themselves in such situations. A truck driver saw a two-year-old girl wandering alone along a village road but decided against stopping to see if she was OK, for fear of being accused of bad intentions. The child drowned in a pond and the man lives with the guilt.
Much of this modern paranoia is due to revelations of child sexual abuse over the past decade, and increased knowledge of the predatory activities of convicted paedophiles such as the late Robert "Dolly" Dunn, which have made parents hyper-vigilant.
I remember as a reporter covering the shocking paedophilia revelations of the Wood Royal Commission more than a decade ago, feeling suddenly over-protective towards my toddler son in the supermarket, wondering if there were lascivious intent behind the innocent smile of a male shopper. The natural interest and regard between older and younger males became verboten.
MOTHERS began to worry about allowing their small boys to go alone into shopping centre toilets, and the sight of anxious women loitering around male toilets, eyes glued on the door, became disconcertingly commonplace, as did the phenomenon of women bringing sons as old as eight or nine into female bathrooms.
It was a sad but understandable shift in attitudes towards men. Now they were all suspect.
We have seen the consequences for families in the tragic story this year of a mother jailed in Amsterdam for kidnapping her young son and spiriting him out of Australia because of her apparently mistaken belief that her husband abused their son.
Once the seed of doubt is planted, there's no telling how far it can go.
Previously there was a widespread societal denial that such foul behaviour was even possible, and certainly not from seemingly avuncular types such as "Dolly" Dunn, a kindly faced former teacher who took a special interest in the problems of his young charges.
But the sort of public squeamishness about acknowledging paedophilia had conspired to allow past cover-ups and deny victims natural justice. In some cases, even mothers of victims refused to believe such wickedness was possible, thus compounding the crime with their tacit approval.
It was a deliberate decision by clear-eyed judges and prosecutors such as Margaret Cunneen, SC, who prosecuted Dunn, to make explicit the true nature of paedophilia.
This month, in sentencing the unspeakably vile paedophile David Shane Whitby to 26 years in jail for the rape and sexual abuse of eight children as young as 14 months, District Court Judge Peter Berman declared that, distressing as they were, the offences should be detailed explicitly and publicly as a warning of the need to be vigilant.
"I've never seen one human being treat another in such a vile, disgusting manner ... " he said.
"There are people like Mr Whitby in the world and it is necessary to describe the evil that people do because as Shakespeare reminds us, 'the evil lives after them'."
The pendulum needed to swing in the direction of disclosure in order to strip paedophiles of the cover of our ignorance. But demonising men won't prevent child abuse. In the interests of children, we women must force ourselves to reclaim the notion of male innocence before guilt.
The male protective instinct, after all, is one of the most crucial safeguards of childhood. ..Source.. by Miranda Devine From: Herald Sun
Read More of Article...
Article Summary only...
