How do we stop boys who become drunk being labelled as sex predators?

But up thread you can see posts saying things like “boys who are assaulted are mostly assaulted by other men” and “women do it but not so often” whereas research has shown that this is not the case.

Both men and women abuse children. But often abuse by women is seen as something the boy will enjoy. A Mrs Robinson experience. Another poster referred to girls feeling a boy as “doing it for a laugh’.

While we persist in thinking this is something that just men do, or that few women do, we ignore what is really happening. Perhaps because of our own experience or because it fits with other agendas, such as the fight for equality.

Do we want to stop abuse? Then we have to tackle the whole problem. Men and women.

It's fairly difficult to find statistical breakdown by sex in terms of offences, it doesnt correspond with other statistics I have seen.
I do wonder what the motivation is. I think from what I remember that in terms of child neglect for example women are a much higher percent of perpetrators, I wouldnt pretend that wasnt true, or go round saying but not all women.

Peasblossom

Wel, I know most of you aren’t going to want to read this and most of you will dismiss it because it’s not what you want to hear.

University of New Hampshire: survey results at the 2006 International Congress on Child Abuse and Neglect.

‘In the USA, Canada, Mexico, India, China, boys of upto 18 years suffer slightly higher rates of sexual abuse than girls. In other countries such as England and Australia the rates of victimisation of boys and girls up to 18 years were identical.

Sexual abuse of boys tends to be subtle and coercive. 95% of the aggressors were female acquaintances of the victim

It is not male only aggressors.

Wow that’s uptodate. Also not seeing definition of ‘sexual abuse’ or anything else that allows for any critical evaluation of this piece of ‘research’

Trisher most of the online debates on this subject take 'not all men' as read, but if it makes you happy we can all add that to our posts. I think you seem to have fallen for the trope that all women who raise this issue hate men but there you go.

But there were quite a few boys I was quite interested in.

I was wondering, are girls who have never been groped going to feel they are unattractive in some way. I'm trying quite hard to find an incident in my life when anything happened and the only ones I can remember are when I was quite interested in the boy in the first place. I know I am capable of giving off quite strong "keep your distance" signals to anyone so perhaps that's why. Or maybe I've just always been a hag.

Wel, I know most of you aren’t going to want to read this and most of you will dismiss it because it’s not what you want to hear.

University of New Hampshire: survey results at the 2006 International Congress on Child Abuse and Neglect.

‘In the USA, Canada, Mexico, India, China, boys of upto 18 years suffer slightly higher rates of sexual abuse than girls. In other countries such as England and Australia the rates of victimisation of boys and girls up to 18 years were identical.

Sexual abuse of boys tends to be subtle and coercive. 95% of the aggressors were female acquaintances of the victim

It is not male only aggressors.

I'm sorry but I completely disagree this all boys/men abuse women. If that is so it means your father, your husband, your brother and your son is doing it. Does anyone want to come on here and admit that? I doubt it.
I fully agree that the situation in schools and parties is different. As far as schools go I think the issue is probably closely linked to bullying and few schools have managed effectively to deal with that for years. It is by no means confined to either sex and those who stand out for one reason or another are subjected massively to it. I think for boys it frequently results in real physical attacks or injury, if it's boys doing it and more complicated put downs and insults and sexual aspersions if girls are involved. It is no less damaging. Girls are subjected to physical attacks which involve groping and other sexual incidents. But don't imagine girls don't do things to other girls because they do. I think it's a vast mistake to seperate sexual incidents from other issues because in doing so you dismiss the whole ethos of the school and what is really behind the problems. Which is to do with privilege and expectation in private schools, and size, inequality and under funding in state schools. Behind both of course is the inability of any parent to accept their child may be involved in anything.
But the drinking and parties is something every parent could do something about, particularly at 14.

I think there are different things going on here that are linked but not the same issue.

Kids at a party getting drunk is not ideal, but it happens, and I think that some of the stories are about situations where both parties have behaved regrettably and wake up with dim recollections. Accusations can start flying if one party is getting comments from friends, or parents find out. In these cases, I would say that alcohol education is the way forward. I don't think I would ban it altogether, as I think people need to learn how to handle it in a safe environment. If the first time they drink too much is somewhere unsupervised, then problems are more likely to arise. I'm not sure that in these circumstances labelling a 14 year old a sex offender is helpful.

The situations that are being reported as happening in schools are a different matter. Presumably everyone involved is sober, and it seems from the reports that a frightening number of girls are suffering abuse and inappropriate behaviour. In these cases, it is clearly attitudes that need to be changed. Boys need decent role models, who can get across messages about respecting women, understanding boundaries and so on. I also think that children of both sexes should be taught from an early age that they have autonomy over their bodies, and can say no to being tickled, kissed or whatever and expect to be respected. In this case, there should be serious repercussions for offenders, maybe backed up with courses in observing boundaries, self-control, and similar.

Having said that, I think that things are moving in that direction. I saw a video of my (Great) nephew the other day. He was playing with the dog, who was licking him (all good natured). My nephew was laughing at the dog, and then got sick of it and said 'I don't consent to this', at which point my niece moved the dog away and that was that. My point is less about the dog than the fact that at the age of six he knew that he could stop doing something that he no longer wanted to do, and had the vocabulary to express it. If that sort of thing is taught in schools, children will grow up with a lot more agency than our generations had.

The quotes didn't work on my last post. It was in reply to Yesterday 21:55 trisher

I wonder what you think Trisher? You seem to be determined to allow boys to sexual assault women and for the woman to then be blamed. If I ended up with an assault charge against me because I had dissolved my inhibitions in alcohol then more fool me. Are you suggesting that if murder, theft, etc, is committed when the victim or perpetrator is inebriated, they should be seen as a lesser crime?

I asked my partner about why boys are like that, his reply - “because they can, there is no effective regulation or penalty.”

He is older than me and left school in 1965,

“ It was an ordinary high school, discipline was firm as well as teachers school prefects supervised us all, harrasment of girls did not exist!, ever, occasional bullying was always reported by the prefects. Penalties ranged from detention in break times to six of the best from the deputy head, for me the fear of dad finding out about misbehavior was more of a deterrent than the cane.”

He continued

“Think of it in terms of driving a car, without speed limits many more would drive dangerously, the limits are enforced by police and with cameras, penalties accumulate, ultimately a ban. Every driver knows how they should behave on the road, just as every boy knows how he should behave, without effective supervision it’s only going to get worse. Dont blame the children, blame parents, teachers and education authorities that allow it to happen, without effective supervision nothing will change.”

My own 4 sons behaved reasonably at school I was never called in to get a dressing down, although I worked full time I was a scout leader and all the boys did their time as scouts. No doubt if I hadn’t put a lot of time into parenting one or more would have gone feral, which you see more and more of.

My thoughts too Gagajo. I think boys are taught that they are the important ones all over the world.

And it's even harder to admit to being raped or assaulted as a boy/young man because of the implications that you are weak/not a man.

The numbers, however, are in the minority.

I have talked about this with my husband and he thinks it's rare enough for men to remember a single incident where as a young man you are inappropriately grabbed or touched. Obviously you won't remember each incident if you are abused repeatedly by a paedophile - but I can't possibly count the number of times as a young woman I was touched or grabbed "casually" on a bus, in queues, in clubs and so on.

But the boys that are being assaulted, Vegan, are often assaulted by other boys/men. I'm not saying women never do it, but it is not anywhere near as often.

So. Is it genetic, or learned behaviour? I honestly think it is learned. Normalised. Boys do it. Talk about it. Other boys learn it is OK, no consequences and go on to do it. Our societies TRAIN them to think it is perfectly OK, normal, to act on their sexual impulses with non-consenting partners.

To be honest, given that kind of social and cultural 'training', it shows boys and men that don't act this way in such a great light. We really ought to look at them, to see how they managed to either avoid that socialisation or to resist it.

vegansrock - definitely true.

Those who say “but boys get assaulted too” must recognise its a daily occurrence for girls and women- it’s not an even playing field.

i think most girls and women have had to endure multiple sexual assaults and harassment.

trisher

Gagajo My hypothesis is that if ALL men knew sexual assault would automatically result in a (for example) 10 year prison sentence, the amount of sexual assault would massively drop.
Much the same ideas were around in the 18th century when taking anything even a handful of bread to feed a child resulted in deportation to the colonies and guess what? People still stole things.
No matter how terrible the crime automatic jail sentences for any thing are wrong, because sometimes the accused person is innocent.

That is because people were stealing food to live, trisher.

No one NEEDS to assault someone.

Currently, the situation is that most women suffer some sort of sexual assault in their lives. That means that there are a LOT of sex predators walking around, freely. Yes, innocent people getting jail is wrong, but bloody hell. What we have at the moment is legalised sexual assault.

I agree Lolo81 it starts with the little ones.
And boys in some families are waited on in a way that girls never would be.
It's a power and control thing I feel. That and a sense of entitlement.

As a young woman I got into scrapes of my own making - but I also got into scrapes that were most definitely not of my making. I was able to tell the difference.
Women and girls do know the difference (as someone said earlier regarding her own life and experience).
If this is so, boys and men should know too. It's too easy to say they didn't.

Boys are also subjected to abuse. It's not a one-way thing. And the abuse of boys is just as serious.

trisher

The tea video describes one person being unconscious and presumably under the influence of something what if the tea maker is also under the influence?

I'm not quite clear trisher whether you are trivialising the message in the video or trying to make it fit your narrative? The central issue is consent and it matters not a jot whether the tea maker is under the influence or not. No means no. Someone very dear to me has had her life ruined by this very scenario. It never goes away.

And attitudes that say “I wish so much wasn’t made of all this” are part of the problem.

Consent is easy to understand, looking at a human without objectifying them should be an easy thing to achieve.

Boys and girls will undoubtedly look at each other and flirt - but if all of our children understand consent then it will make society in general a better place. If one party doesn’t welcome the attention, that’s it - story over, no more unwanted attention.

Telling girls in primary school that boys who play chase and pull on their pigtails is a signal that they like them is a classic example of how boys and girls have in the past (and for some children it still exists) been taught that women should be chased and pursued, men should be agressive in that chase. It’s disgusting.

trisher

Let's face it claims of assault are getting much more frequent so whatever has been going on isn't working. Perhaps it's time to start rethinking it.

That could be a good thing though trisher. It doesn't necessarily mean the numbers are going up; it could, and I hope does, meant it is becoming more a crime blamed on the perpetrator than the victim and more unacceptable. Laws help but so does the attitude of society.

My 14-year-old grandson has been a bit worried by some of the things the girls in his class have been saying about the boys. He hasn't really explained but I gather that the girls say the boys are looking at their bodies. He says that a few of these girls used to be his friends but now he doesn't want to bother with them. He is a kind and gentle boy (yes I'm biased) but he doesn't want this kind of thing going on and I think it actually worries him. I just wish so much wasn't made of all this and if only we could rid the internet of porn. I feel so sorry for youngsters today as I think a lot of them are confused by what they read and see both online and on TV.

PippaZ

trisher

Becuse NotSpaghetti if both parties are incapable of proper judgement why is the emphasis on one party to take absolute responsibility leaving the other to be free to claim they were not responsible? Isn't responsibility at some point shared?

So we are both drunk and you physically attack me with your fist. Why would I share the blame? You are not supposed to attack people or does it change because of the instrument you use to do it?

PippaZ So we are both drunk I start play wrestling with you and there is a period of pushing and shoving. You raise your hand and it catches my nose as I come towards you. I then pass out. I wake up and accuse you of assaulting me, because my nose is sore. Is it true?

Let's face it claims of assault are getting much more frequent so whatever has been going on isn't working. Perhaps it's time to start rethinking it.