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Maybe men shouldn’t be shamed every time they stick their head up to get involved. There are all kinds of stories about men being assumed to be a pedophile for the crime of taking his own child to the park. Men don’t dare to volunteer to work with kids because again, the meme of “any male showing interest in kids is dangerous” means that the male who gets involved in scouting is assumed to be grooming.
I have definitely heard the rules the scouts maintain for youth protection --- no one-on-one contact, two adults at all times, for example --- described as protecting both the kids and the adults.
Yes, that's what they say about the Pence Rule as well, which exists for the exact same reasons.
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"Men are afraid of being called pedophiles" seems like an insufficiently powerful explanation. While it may explain some fraction of why men volunteer less for boyscouts, it's almost certainty downstream of why men volunteer less in general, which in turn is downstream of whatever combination of factors leads to less male involvement in communities/pro-social activities/the male loneliness epidemic in general. I have a hard time believing that pedophile-accusation-risk is the reason why men commit suicide and abandon their children more often, but conversely I can imagine a satisfying explanation for suicides and absent fathers also being applicable to the problem of why men don't lead boy scout troops anymore. "Men are afraid of being called pedophiles" isn't false, but my gut instinct is that it's noncentral. Actually, the link I posted seems to hint at the real causes by looking into the crosstabs-- men with children and/or bachelor's degrees volunteer at much greater rates than single and/or uneducated men. Given that men are facing rising rates of singlehood and falling rates of education, I'd look in that direction for the true causation. Just don't make the mistake of fingering whatever most flatters your beliefs as the problem... you might not be wrong to blame misandry, or anti-intellectualism, or whatever your personal bugbear is... but a lazy epistemology isn't going to convince anyone of your point, and won't do anything to get the issue fixed.
A three percentage point gap may be statistically significant, but I don't think it's very interesting or notable. There's an eight-point gap in labor force participation rate, and one full-time-volunteer wife with a working husband can get a lot of volunteer hours. Heck, with a gap that small it could be something as banal as different responses to the same activities as men and women have different standards.
Male spaces get disrupted and socially attacked. Even if whatever comes out the other side is just as good (very doubtful), the transition still causes people to leave. Also, women have the opportunity to join both women's-only and gender-neutral groups, while men only have the second set.
That is the most visible part of the issue, but it's not the only one. You have to go through the anti-pedophile screening, take the anti-pedophile training, follow the anti-pedophile procedures, be conscious of pedophile-adjacent actions...and finally work at the organization with a reputation for pedophilia. It just doesn't seem that attractive.
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I think there are two related reasons: one, motivation dies quickly after becoming mired in bureaucracy. Someone who is highly motivated to provide a mentoring opportunity for a group of boys might not be able to find the drive to complete more than a single form, let alone typing up paragraphs of baloney. Same thing hampering science IMO.
Second is legitimate fear of liability. Even if you jump through all the paperwork hoops, even a minor accident can easily result in years of expensive legal wrangling, even if you ultimately win. Insurance against this is expensive and yet scourge bureaucratic hurdle to doing anything.
As usual, if you want to make the world a better place, first kill all the lawyers.
Again, this sounds like noncentral, reasoning-backwards stuff. Women don't like bureaucracy either. Men tolerate liability when it comes to other pursuits. Other countries and organizations have varying levels of both but still face a surplus of male suicides and lack of male mentors. Without rejecting your premise that bureaucracy and liability are onerous, I find myself unconvinced by the argument that they must therefore be the principal causes of our crisis of masculinity.
The fact they're the only class with the power to deal with it (because the moral hazard is in their favor) but are doing fuck-all about it is the fundamental root of the problem here.
Men gave up their power to unilaterally dictate terms to women in relatively peaceful ways. Until women figure out they have to do the same- until they fully embrace the fact equality is a solved problem, as men did so many years ago- this will continue, but the fact they're on the high side of those gibs makes this unlikely.
Liability being financially ruinous because reasons (that are tangentially related to the above core) doesn't help things either.
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Nobody tolerates liability unless they can insure it away, and that means accepting the constraints the insurance companies put in to prevent actually having to pay a claim.
Yes, because you have a reason in mind (in general terms, that men, in some way, suck), which is wrong, but is the only reason within the Overton window.
Don't put words in my mouth, buddy. I'm not part of some sort of anti-man conspiracy; my position is that basically no one (including myself) should have the epistemic confidence to have a position.
Speaking very broadly, I suspect the problem is less about actual costs and more about opportunity costs-- basically, I think that most men just have better things to do than volunteer given their goals and incentives. I think I would enjoy volunteering for boy scouts, liability and bureaucracy (and the risk of false accusations) be damned. But I'm trying to get myself in position to secure a wife and kids, and to that extent the best uses of my time are earning money, getting fit, and seeking legible status. Optimizing for the intersection of those things and also enjoying my life generally leaves me focused on working, working out, and trying (so far, futiley) to get published. And I'll have to keep focusing on those things indefinitely because suddenly letting myself go wouldn't be a great recipe for keeping a wife and kids.
But to the extent that all the things I said are true, and generalizeable, I know I'm still not reaching the bottom of the issue-- I'm not getting to why these opportunity costs exist. And even discovering that wouldn't necessarily suggest which actions could or should be taken to mitigate them. I could make suggestions, but no matter how hard I tried for apolitical neutrality they would probably flatter my interests and goals in particular. So the problem remains intractable, and everyone who says otherwise without addressing the full complexities just makes more convinced that no one really knows what's going on.
If you insist on using your own state of mind as if it were evidence, prepare to have the contents of your mind interrogated.
As for the position that no one should have epistemic confidence to have a position, if that were to be universally adopted it would mean either throwing up ones hands or trying things at random. But in practice, that position is only deployed against certain positions -- usually but not always positions that imply a change should be made -- and so it is not the neutral agosticism it would appear.
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There must be other reasons. I sincerely doubt the average man is that paranoid about false accusations. Most people assume that tragedies always happen to other people, not themselves and I don't see why this should be different for accusations of pedophilia.
Internet commenters tend to be a lot more anxious than ordinary people and thus you see the false accusation points a lot online. But "internet commenters" is not exactly the group I would imagine as volunteering to quite literally touch grass regardless. So the answer should probably be found elsewhere.
Do microplastics and hormonal inversions count? Lol. I’m slowly beginning to think there just ‘might’ be something to that…
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Doubt isn't an argument. It's part of American culture, and has been for a long time now, that a man interested in interacting with kids other than his own (and sometimes his own too) is probably up to no good.
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I agree that this is an issue. Another problem is that any child you've worked with can accuse you of wrong doing and cause you a world of problems. The accusation can be made years later. In some jurisdictions, the statute of limitations for such a claim is 30 or 40 years.
Given that (1) 1-5% of the population is batsh*t crazy; (2) there are a lot of activists, lawyers, etc. out there with an incentive to urge people to pursue these sorts of claims; and (3) our society has very little concern for the rights of men qua men, it doesn't seem like such a great idea for a man to do any activity which puts him in contact with large numbers of children.
I agree, but I think there needs to be some balance. As one person suggested, one solution could be to focus on recruiting married couples to be den leaders.
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Any group that is well-known to need supervisors for children is going to attract paedophiles, because paedophiles have two brain cells and follow incentives like the rest of us. So some fraction of each intake - what fraction I have no idea - genuinely are going to be paedophiles unless you use a criteria like marriage that is pretty good for excluding that.
I'm usually in team 'Let's shame men less' but in this case I see why they're careful about unattached men who want to work with children.
There’s a question I’d never considered until now: is marriage actually a pretty good criterion for excluding pedophiles? Logically, it would make sense, but anecdotally, I seem to hear more stories of married men sexually abusing children (often their stepchildren) than single men. I assume some of that is simply due to ease of access to children, but I don’t know if that’s the only factor. That said, most of the married guys seem to abuse girls, not boys, which would be less of an issue in an all-male Boy Scout troop.
Aren't most cases of child sex abuse carried out by the mother's non-married partner?
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There's also a disturbing number of moms pimping out their daughters to their partners to "sweeten the deal".
This... New Jersey man... that @ToaKraka posted about a few months ago is likely on the Mount Rushmore of capitalizing on such a thing:
I could only imagine the seethe toward you (the general "you") that would be triggered if you posted this story on /r/Stepdadreflexes.
However, in this case the mother claims innocence. Although, what else is she supposed to claim:
Getting cucked by your girlfriend's stepfather or stepfather-figure has got to be one hell of a villain origin story.
Only course open to you at that point is to sleep with her mother and assert dominance.
Also, good old-fashioned eugenic sterilization would fix this. As you mentioned in that thread, it makes zero sense for capable, civilized attorneys to be out-reproduced by these lowlifes. Only progressive taxation and the welfare state can achieve such an unnatural outcome.
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FWIW, the only people in my time in scouting who gave me "pedo-ick" were a married couple who were volunteering on behalf of their nephew, and who claimed to want to stay involved even after he left the program. It wasn't anything in particular, just physiognomy/vibe plus the oddity of being so into volunteering while having such a personal remove. I was very glad when they did not follow through and I never saw them again.
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