Cite?
No.
So… we had a different girl over and they had a blast. The party was today and the other kid from the OP didn’t show up.
Look for age & sex of perpetrator tables. Women lead slightly in abuse against children.
Good to hear. Not surprising the other kid was a no show, with your ding-a-ling wantonly dangling about without female supervision.
The claim was for “acts of violence” and that data is not specific to abuse but for all “maltreatment.” 61% of the maltreatment in those reports is “neglect” not “abuse” and not "acts of violence. Indeed most neglect and abuse (over 80%) is committed by a child’s parents and just over half (53.6% in the most recent of the examples you gave) of the time it is the mother. These reports do not inform about acts of violence by gender of perpetrator at all and do not support the claim made.
OTOH in addition to the article I already cited there is the fact that for abusive head trauma
Among injuries that cause death
The claim that women are much more likely to commit acts of violence against children is simply not true. A fact that is all the more notable given the greater absolute number of hours kids are with women than with men.
Of course going by the statistics if anything the Mom should be concerned about ever leaving her daughter with her husband or with herself as statistically fathers are the most likely perpetrator of fatal or potentially fatal violence against kids and mothers the most common source of neglect and abuse put together. Obviously using these stats to justify their prejudices would make no sense at all.
Glad to hear the party was fun! A shame that her friend is having her social life restricted by her parent’s irrationalities, but not your problem.
I think that the parents not wanting their daughter staying overnight at a house without a mom on the premises might not have anything to do with fear of molestation. Maybe their daughter is a momma’s girl who would not feel comfortable going to a man if she becomes homesick or has a belly ache in the middle of the night. Most moms are going to be more soothing and, well, motherly than a dad. My daughter always had a hard time at sleepovers, and I would have been hesitant to have her spend the night with a man that she didn’t know more than an mom that she barely knew.
For that particular citation it isnt specifically about violence. It is, however, aout fatalities, and should certainly be relevant to who paranoia over thw ewelfare of one’s children should be directed towards.
This: https://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/cb/cm11.pdf#page=69
Also shows that neglect causes most fatalities (over 70%) and often overlaps with abuse (which is also over 40%).
This study shows that women commit a rather large majority of child abuse, or really you could just look honestly at any statistics on the issue, rather than desperately reaching for anything that will reinforce your angelic perception of women.
I honestly think that might be the worst cite I’ve ever seen on the internet. If you’re trying to prove that men are more likely to commit acts leading to the death of children, very poor effort.
Firstly, the study is not of abusive head trauma as most people will think of it, but specifically of “shaken baby syndrome”, which very probably doesn’t exist and is notorious for leading to miscarriages of justice. The identity of the perpetrators then rested on the suspicions of medical practicioners, who unsurprisingly seem to have been unreasonably likely to trust the bereaved mother. The probative value of this study in determining who perpetrated these crimes, which probably didn’t actually happen anyway, is zero. It’s such a bad study I wouldn’t wipe my arse with it, in case I ended up wiping more shit on than off.
That explicitly looks at children in homes with one biological parent and one unrelated adult in Missouri. You’re really reaching.
No, that is extremely offensive. She’s basically accusing you of being a molester/child rapist merely because you’re male.
If I had a daughter and she wanted to sleep over at home of a friend who had a single dad I’d want to meet said dad, but I don’t subscribe to the notion that all men are rapists due to having a penis.
Anecdote isn’t data, but of the half-dozen girls I knew about in high school who were sexually molested by their fathers every single one of them was in a two-parent home at the time. Having adult vagina around doesn’t stop child rape. Lack of adult vagina doesn’t cause it.
Friend’s mom is a judgmental sexist bitch.
The study collected data from reported incidences to CPS and studied trends in “maltreatment,” which covers everything from basic neglect to (physical/sexual) abuse. It’s an interesting cite, but only indirectly supports the notion that it’s just as dangerous, or even more dangerous, to leave your child with a mother v. a father. Unless you fear that either will neglect your daughter to death on a single overnight visit.
It’s possible that that’s the case but then it’s highly unlikely that she would have said “I’m sure you understand”. Because there isn’t a meme in our culture that many children have physical or mental reasons why they would urgently need the help of an adult during a sleepover, but only if said adult is female, so the OP would not be assumed to understand.
Of course, it’s possible that said problems include issues so delicate that the caller would imply molestation possibilities as an extremely awkward cover in order to not have to mention the other (urinary) issues, but that’s really unlikely compared to the simple explanation of having the standard anti-male paranoia of American culture.
The other possibility is that molestation was so far from their minds that it never even occurred to them that they were implying such a thing, and they were “sure he understood” that a girl needs a woman around in case she gets scared in the night or to supervise her bath time or whatever. I can actually see a situation where a very routine-oriented family assumes that there will be bathtime and bathtime must be supervised, so how does a single man do that? Just skipping baths may not have occurred to them.
If he already knew this couple and if in every other way they had shown themselves to be sensible, polite, socially competent individuals, I’d suggest he give them the benefit of the doubt, simply because a casual accusation of being a potential child molester is so . . . rude . . . that it seems unlikely and would require extraordinary proof if the couple were otherwise known to be normal. It’s the kind of social gaffe that is so severe that people ought to be confronted with it, just so that if they were misunderstood, they have the opportunity to clarify their meaning.
But he doesn’t know this people, so who can tell? Maybe they are that rude. Maybe they are just clueless. It’s literally impossible to determine, so it’s probably best to just write them off.
Then I’ll ask the implied question explicitly, since you ignored it last time. You appear to think stats on men in prison are not just relevant to the discussion, but somehow speak for themselves (“Let’s just say…”). Why is this? Are men the only group we can use prison populations to characterize, or are there a few others?
I don’t get the horror at being thought a potential child molestor. There’s a big difference between potential and probable. People frequently express shock at the discovery that their own spouse or close relative has molested children, and if it is common to be unaware that someone seemingly well-known to you is molesting children, what hope is there of any real confidence in someone you barely know NOT being a child molestor?
The single adult may logically be slightly more likely, because there is no need for the existence of a complicit second adult or the work/risk of concealing one’s activities.
Worrying about child molestors lurking on every corner isn’t my thing, but trying to protect a kid from being molested is not that awful. People hear a news story or two and get a distorted idea of how that translates to actual risk. Look how many people fear that their children will not be safe on a school bus and instead drive them to school, placing them in statistically greater risk.
I had several sleepovers where there wasn’t an adult woman around (wife was temporarily absent or my friend’s dad was a widower); the biggest trouble I can recall is my BFF’s brother being an ass but he did that without sleepovers too.
The idea that a hale 8yo needs supervision to bathe would never have occurred to me, but then, the idea that the bathing of a child must be supervised by a same-sex adult wouldn’t have either. There go 99% of my brothers’ childhood baths!
Put me in the field of “parental composition by number and gender is irrelevant”. If I didn’t know the parent(s) at all I’d want to meet them and make sure they were aware of any potential pitfalls (allergies, food peeves, daily meds); I also wouldn’t let a child visit anybody without me until (s)he knew that “different houses have different rules”.
blindboyard, Are you even reading any of these things?
Looking exclusively at fatalities due to abuse and neglect that cite is very clear: over 78% were caused by one or more parent, and yes mothers alone or together slightly more often than fathers alone or together. Other than parents the largest single group of perpetrators are male.
But yes absolute numbers statistically that study supports the idea that the people the parents should be paranoid about leaving the kid with is one of themselves, mother a slight bit more so than father.
Here’s quotes for you to look honestly at from that cite you just provided:
Not quite supporting a claim that women are much more likely to committ acts of violence against children. In fact an honest look would see it shows that such is not true.
Shaken baby syndrome as mechanism of abusive head trauma of infants and children probably does not exist? Hoo boy. Okay, I guess the fathers and male caregivers who admitted to violently shaking the kids in that and in this study just lied.
As to your last “read” and criticism of the cites I provided, stating that it:
Huh? Really READ! It did no such thing. It did find an association of greater risk for kids in such households. It found that among all children who had fatal injuries caused by a parent or caregiver there was an over-representation of those households which contained an unrelated adult and that most of the perpetrators were male.
The claim was made that women are much more likely to commit acts of violence against children. That claim is bullshit. My calling out bullshit has nothing to do with any angelic view of women. It has to do with a distaste for people making shit up, even when I am the same side of the discussion as them.
One thing that’s clear is that children are safest with strangers. Organize a community kid swap at once and exchange kids weekly to remain unfamiliar.
This is what is meant by “it takes a village.”
There were an awful lot of birthday parties without fathers when my kids were young. It wasn’t an unwritten rule so much as practicality- the parties without fathers were held after school rather than on weekends. But not allowed to attend a party where the father was present? Nope, not even one mother who was truly obsessed with fear of molestation didn’t do that- because, you see, that child was allowed to go nowhere without her mother or grandmother present. No matter how long or how well that woman knew the parents, the child couldn’t attend a 2 hour birthday party at McDonald’s without one of them staying.
Wow, it happens that much?
Glad that someone picked up on that!
Truth that most of us parents are horrible at figuring out what to worry about. The risk of a child being intentionally harmed while visiting another person’s home, male or female’s, is insignificant. But it is an item that is outside of our control so concerns us more, just like many of us worry more about airplane trips than driving.