Just trying to make you think about the full range of consequences of this type of thinking. It is not such a short step from protecting young women from imagined depredations to veiling them and keeping them locked up behind closed doors, separate from the rest of society.
Oh. And as you well know, most of the depredations happen behind those closed doors inside the very family that is supposed to protect them. Our system fails young women, but going after fifty year old men who email young women on the internet is not going to make women any safer. There is only one thing that will make women and girls and boys safer: education. We have to talk about sex openly and we have to get detailed and we have to teach our kids what is right and wrong in specific ways. Hiding from it doesn’t help.
Education empowers and makes it possible for people to say “no!” We can say it to fathers and priests and whoever we want to if we know that it is possible for them to do wrong things. People who want to keep children ignorant may do that with a good heart, but they are making it possible for abuse to continue. They are protecting the abusers when they say children should not be educated about sex. It is very sad. But once again, so-called “common sense” is wrong.
I know people wish I would go away so that I would stop pointing out so many inconvenient truths. Or hell. Maybe I’m wrong. But it’s still wrong to assume you know so much without checking out whether it is true or not. I raise these questions because I have children, too, and I suspect that what we assume is true is wrong. I ask that people provide data, not assumptions, as the basis for whatever it is they think. Of course you wish I would go away. I make you uncomfortable.
I will not apologize for that.