Nope.
One person.
Not even in the slightest.
Dude, just because someone is female does not mean they are automatically going to be victimized every time they turn a corner.
If you mean what you seem to, then no, it’s not prudent.
I assume that you’re not just arguing for a parent’s right to be vigilant in a general sense. Since you’re saying that the people in this thread don’t get it, I infer that you think the kind of specific complaints here are out of line, and that the posters should have been more circumspect with others’ children. That, for example, Ace309 should tell the kids hanging around his mat that they’re not welcome there. That Hodge should have ignored the child and talked to the mother instead. That Sampiro should have told the kid to put in his own battery pack. That Larry Mudd shouldn’t have read a book near other people’s children. That Kalypso should . . . do what, exactly?
You’re a reasonably smart guy. I bet you know that, for a time after 9/11, many, many Americans decided to to drive rather than fly for fear of being the victim of a terrorist attack. I’m sure you also know that the likelihood of another attack against an airliner was pretty small, and that the likelihood of an attack against any one particular flight was statistically insignificant. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you also knew that thousands of those Americans who decided to drive instead of fly died in auto accidents as a result of that decision. No doubt they thought they were just being prudent, but they were making a regrettably common error: humans have a tendency to fixate on very unlikely, sensationalist threats, even if it means ignoring much more likely, but mundane, threats.
I think you’re making this mistake. Reprimanding people for the kinds of interactions with children people have mentioned in this thread carries with it a real cost. It causes unhappiness – sometimes persistent unhappiness – in those who are reprimanded, and I strongly suspect it fosters in the child being “protected” an unhelpful distrust of his or her fellow citizens and a tendency towards anxiety. Now, what you seem to propose would indeed be prudent if you were a grizzly bear and your daughter a cub – in fact, I have no doubt that many of the parents who snap at strangers for interacting with their children compare themselves admiringly to a mother grizzly.
But men are not bears. Men are social animals, and the community in general has a role in your child’s life. Or should, at least. When we send the signal to other adults that we suspect they want to rape children, it cuts off to some degree a kind of interaction that should exist, and when we cut off that completely natural influence on children’s development, it has an effect on society. I have no idea what that effect is, but I doubt it’s good.
Sure. I am deliberately overly suspicious. That’s the side where I want to make my mistakes.
Nor am I with my child. But it happens from time to time, just as it does with you and the creepy guy on the bench.
Probably, he’s a perfectly nice guy who doesn’t deserve the cold put-off. But, something about him is making you send a signal to him. If he is a nice guy and you offend him unjustly, so what? He’ll deal with it. As a nice guy he’ll respect your position and not try to invade or do anything else to make you uncomfortable.
If he is a problem, you are sending him a warning.
It’s a win-win for you. It makes sense for you to err on the side of caution.
it seems that what you are describing is exactly what I’m talking about. You don’t do it with everybody, do you? Me neither.
Probably, if you’re out somewhere and a guy approaches you, you will at some point send out a signal that let’s him know that you welcome the contact or that you do not. If he does not respond appropriately you will send out a stronger signal. Right?
this is what I’m talking about.
Sure. Let’s say on a scale of 1-10, a 5 is the perfect level of carefulness. I’m shooting to be a 6.5. I want my mistakes to be on the side of offending nice people and coming off as an overprotective jerk. I can live with that.
I couldn’t live with the consequences of a significant error in the other direction.
Sorry, meant to address one more thing:
There’s an extent to which this is about you. Humans have a powerful capacity for self-delusion in the face of what brings pleasure, and it brings pleasure to be the hero of our personal little dramas. It especially brings pleasure to be the savior of one’s own child, and for that reason you will never be able to tell whether and to what extent your mind is creating its own villains (be they strangers who have triggered your spidey-sense, or seven year old predators).
Damn right it bothers me that I cannot go to see a G-rated movie by myself without being stared at by theatre managers and looked in on by ushers during the movie itself. It bothers me when I have to leave the bench by the playground, where I am reading a book and minding my own business, when children come over to play on the swings. It fucking bothers me when I have to throw away all the experience I’ve got as a Brownie leader(I took 12 girls by myself to Disneyland three different times-try topping that!). It bothers me that I cannot talk with anyone under the age of eighteen on the bus.
Moving thread from IMHO to Great Debates.
Then, might I ask in context of the thread (this ended up rather off topic)…are you comfortable with your daughter interacting with male teachers? Male librarians? Guys in grocery stores? At what point do you feel comfortable with someone interacting with her in the long term (the teacher or librarian scenario as opposed to a random passer-by)? How reliable do you consider your ‘ESP’-type sense to be? As someone said earlier, the majority of sexual harassment-type or molestation scenarios involve someone the victim knows well, not a total stranger. How do you react to this?
And while it is probably a question with no definite answer at this point, at what age do you foresee yourself or another adult educating your daughter about how to deal with these situations herself, and at what age would you consider her largely able to take care of herself?
If we were to go about this logically, since more molestations are done by someone the child already knows, would it be wrong of us to eye you with suspicion when you are out with your child, Scylla?
The answer, of course, is that it would be wrong to look at you as a potential(or current) child molester without a damn good reason.
As he has already stated, he doesn’t care what you think. His world. His rules.
Note that in the following post I may sound like a bastard, but I actually mean these in the friendliest way possible:
If you don’t have a threat detector you have a pretty good approximation of one, considering your (reasonable) fear going through a bad neighborhood with a wad of cash in your pocket. It will feel pretty much the same way, you don’t need to treat everyone with suspicion because to anyone with three functioning braincells suspicion should be patently obvious except in the most practiced <insert random form of abduction or abuse here>ers. Sure, you should make sure your daughter is safe, but you seem to have an incredibly arbitrary set of rules. If I don’t look for you it’s because I don’t particularly NEED you for the interaction. I’ll look for you when your kid starts crying or needs a band-aid, if she steals my baby cousin’s[sup]1[/sup] toy, that’s between my cousin and her, I’m there to act as a mediator to mitigate biting and poopy head comments and you can feel free to jump in if needed, your consent is not needed for me to make my child politely ask for his toy back. If I want to take your kid for a walk of course I’ll ask, and you’re damn RIGHT to be suspicious if someone randomly takes your daughter into the woods, but you don’t need to be a hawk to see that, and as a failsafe your daughter probably knows to say “no way!” anyway. It’s not like you need to be ready to suddenly spring into action, the chances of a pedophile grabbing your daughter forcefully, running, and not getting stopped by anyone are ferociously less likely than a subtle yet detectable method of getting taken, which you obviously have the skills to detect.
In short, you don’t need to “send signals” to mediate every interaction, you just need to know how to read the signals if and when something comes up, because the volume of harmless people is so large the chances of every single one following your “rules” are slim. It would be much easier and much less stressful to sit back wait for someone to try and do something, than to have a set of rather arbitrary “checkpoints” with all this “he sends a signal that says” stuff. Because pretty much anything that will immediately hurt your daughter will probably be able to immediately hurt you too, or will be too fast for you to prevent, and no amount of signal reading is going to prevent those from happening. In other words, anyone with a strict intention to punch, fondle, or shoot your daughter will do so and you’re not going to head it off, and I think we can both agree the guy who does it will be beaten by about a thousand furious parents reducing the chances of it happening. Anyone trying to lead your daughter into their van can be head off before they do it, and I trust you’ll be able to detect something that obvious. 
Also, about the rape talk. It may be good to at least tell her “if someone wants you to play with their private parts tell them no and come see me” if you don’t want to make her afraid or go into detail. It would at least give her a course of action when she is caught alone. Think of all the free time you’ll have when you can enjoy yourself at the park and know your daughter can tell the strangers to shove it! 
(I have a feeling I said SOMETHING very stupid or offensive in there and I apologize preemptively.)
slight hijack
Have times really changed or were my parents just way underprotective? As long as I told my mom or dad I was leaving I could pretty much go anywhere in the neighborhood, including the woods behind my friend’s house as long as I was with a friend (in fact all my friends had this rule including, my 3 year old older than me male friend, my two male friends in my grade, my two female friends in my grade, and my teenage female babysitter who lived down the hill from me, not that the latter accompaniment came up often, as I was like, 5), and I could even go unaccompanied to my friends house four streets down as long as I went straight there. Because they uh, trusted my own judgment and trusted my friends to know where and how to get help if I got hurt. Pretty much the only time I was watched was a casual glance when I was in my backyard if they happened to be passing by the window and when I was in an unfamiliar place (more for fear of me getting lost than anything). As far as I can tell, I’m not dead yet. So what, was I just way underwatched or was that normal 10-15 years ago?
unhijack
[sup]1. Yeah I don’t have kids, but my little cousin, around the same age as your child is just as dear to me and I’ve been granted the title of surrogate adult guardian if her mom’s not there.[/sup]
Zsofia, responding to your OP, yes, it has reinforced my misanthropy. Take a grain o’salt with that,just as I will with “everybody assumes”.
I look like Santa Claus, the American version though mesomorphic. Kids invariably have reaction to sighting either blurting out Mom!It’s Santa! or smiling and staring.
As a person who hopes for and promotes a civil society I respond with a smile and probably twinkling eyes.
Seems white mothers under the age of ~40 respond with a glare which I think rude. Older women aren’t so bad but there’s the sexual tension of coevals to cloud the interplay. I haven’t run into Scylla type guys, men mostly want to ignore and get on with the mission extant.
Black mothers don’t seem to do it, nor do Amish. The latter kids stare not because of the Santa thing but rather the moustache.
Scylla, you are training your daughter to live her life as if she were always walking through a bad neighborhood with a wad of cash in her pocket.
How did you feel walking through that neighborhood with that wad of cash? And do you really want your daughter to feel that way all the time?
I’m recovering from back surgery and have to walk a bit during convalescence. The other day I went for a walk around a public park across the road from me. I was walking slow and every woman with a child went on the alert. I could feel their tension grow as I approached. One woman who was walking ahead of me actually grabbed her child to her and stopped and let me walk by, looking at me all the time, no smile just a look of intent. It pissed me off to the extreme.
Can I not walk in a park that I have known all my life without having to worry about scaring all the panicky bints around me? What must the kids think?
As are people who see your attitude. And we don’t care that you don’t care about that: we’ll hold our views of you regardless whether you care about it or not.
So you called the cops, who have the training and experience to deal with suspicious behavior, right?
Serioulsy, a cop has the authority to approach someone acting hinkey and demand some answers, and a veteran cop can read a lot of signals in the response that emotionally involved civilians would miss. If he has reasonable cause, he can search their person and vehicle. Best of all, he doesn’t just self-congratulatorily “protect his own” and let the predators “go looking for easier prey.”
Wouldn’t it be horribly ironic if they were both so obsessed with Perv Watch that they forgot to look both ways before crossing the street?
When you look at the mortality charts, automobiles and accidental drowning are the really significant risks. Bicycling and skateboarding are up there for injuries. And then when you get to late adolescence – suicide joins the pack.
That’s what gets me about your posts Scylla.
I’ve argued this with mothers, too.
You’re putting all your risk eggs in one basket.
While i’m pretty much unbothered by your protective attempts (certainly apparently less so than a lot of people, anyway), I do disagree with this statement. Later on, you say;
To my mind, predatoriness requires the same kind of understanding of things that would also instill suspicion in someone. Your mind boggles that some people believe prepubescent means neuter, yet you say that your daughter is incapable of understanding such things herself, at a year older than a seven year old boy.
I’m not trying to say that a seven year old can’t ‘play doctor’ as others have put it, or even express interest in doing so. But I would say that such things are at that age “innocent” to an extent that predatory behaviour is not; that the lack of understanding and knowledge at that age denies that such behaviour is predatory just as it denies a full understanding of anti-predatory behaviour.
My wife worked as a child abuse caseworker for many years. She has a lot of experience showing that when a father seems overly concerned about their children being sexually victimized by other people the chances that the father is abusing the child is much higher. This is confirmed by all of the people in her office.
She’s not certain if the fathers are projecting his own pedophiliac tendencies on everyone, or if they think by acting very protective it will deflect suspicion, but word to the wise, if you’re ever being investigated for child abuse ixnay on the “everybody’s out to rape my kid” meme. Harping on it won’t be doing you any favors.
“Why should you be concerned if the government wiretaps your phone or looks at your internet logs? You don’t have anything to hide, right?”
I have been shaking my head at a lot of the statements that have been made in this thread. Because I am not a parent I have experienced the people that are just like Scylla who assume that a friendly male who likes kids is automatically a predator.
It irritates me that I cannot always enjoy a day at the park with my nieces because my presence makes someone suspicious. Women steal children too but because they are equipped to be mothers they are off the hook. Its ridiculous to consider the explanations that people find necessary before they believe that someone actively caring for and watching children is not a threat to their own. I especially don’t understand why some parents think its necessary or appropriate to run up and yank their child away when their kid approaches and engages me in conversation.
While I can understand some of Scylla’s reservations about strange men, I think that the over generalizations are ridiculous. How do you feel comfortable sending your child to school and camp? I worked in a preschool for several years and I was not the only male teaching assistant (ok, so there was only one more). When I worked at daycamp I had groups with all girls for most of those years because we always had more female campers than male campers and we usually have less than a handful of male counselors. What happens when she goes out for a sport? Lots of men coach women’s sports.
I hate that attitude of all-encompassing fear because it has always made it difficult for me to do my job or enjoy the company of my nieces. I should not have to flaunt my numerous background checks and childcare credentials in your face when I’m on the playground with my family. I also don’t think that I should have to explain why I am running around a park at 7 in the morning.
Actually being a parent doesn’t change the general trust level much, IMO.