Poll of the Day > How do you feel about male baby-sitters?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Im gonna go ahead and guess Yellow is now done with the topic after post 45.

I see nothing wrong with men being babysitters.

I dont think its wrong to not want to hire a male baby sitter.

Well, adjl has already done work in this topic, so there's not much more for me to add. I will just toss these on the pile for reference:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6463078/

Lots of interesting (and somewhat sickening) factoids there, but the one that I want to highlight is that two separate analyses of several hundred male students at two universities both found that of those that had suffered sexual abuse as a child, 78% reported a woman as the perpetrator. Admittedly, the sample size isn't great (total number of abuse victims from both studies is 81), but it does highlight the issue that there is a substantial undercount of female abusers.

adjl posted...

It's a little more than that. It's an attitude that reinforces restrictive gender roles for both men and women, with consequences that go quite a bit further than a teenage boy having to work at mcdonalds instead of babysitting the neighbour's kids. It keeps men out of ECE, which means most boys don't get male teachers until middle school, which not only reinforces the idea that child care is "for women" (if you spend your formative years never seeing a man taking care of kids, you're inevitably going to think it's not normal), but also contributes significantly to the overdiagnosis (and subsequent overmedication) of ADHD in young boys, which can translate into poorer long-term academic outcomes and higher rates of criminal activity later in life. For that matter, it's even got smatterings of the same pearl-clutching fear that leads to trans women being assaulted for trying to use the "wrong" bathroom, which I hope all of us agree is bad.

At its core, this is a question of saying "I'm not comfortable with hiring a male babysitter," but rather than questioning why that discomfort exists and whether or not it should, he's just latched on to whatever statistics he can find to support it, ignored the context or the magnitude of the actual numbers, and called it a day. That's not good critical thinking, as evidenced by the obvious disconnect between "I'm not saying a majority of men are abusers" and "I would never hire a man as a babysitter because of the risk of abuse." Acknowledging and avoiding inappropriate generalizations at an intellectual level while continuing to act on them in practice is just hypocritical.

And this is a good summation of the issues I have with this discussion.

The assumption that undergirds the "I would never hire a male babysitter" viewpoint is that men are abusers until proven otherwise which, I shouldn't need to say, is extremely sexist. It would be like someone saying, "Oh, I'd never hire a black person as an overnight security guard for my business! What if they stole something?" - it's dressing up bigotry in the mantle of "can't-be-too-careful!" concern, while thoroughly abusing/misusing statistics to boot.

Moreover, as adjl mentioned, it really does have real world consequences. Men are being pushed out of the childcare sphere and that's to the detriment of kids - boys in particular. Any profession benefits from having a diverse array of voices to offer experiences and opinions; homogeneity is almost always a cause for concern. It's why there was and is such an effort to get women into STEM fields, and the current situation in the education profession is no less acute.

At present in North America, ~70% of all teachers are women and that number jumps to over 90% when talking about early childhood educators. That's a downright catastrophic imbalance, and one that has consequences felt throughout the field. I personally don't think it's a coincidence that the relative rates of boys' and girls' graduation rates track strongly with the gender balance of educators. Back when boys represented the majority of graduates, educators were mostly male; as women became the majority of educators, girls' graduation rates surpassed boys' and the gap has continued to widen ever since (in fairness, this isn't the only factor and I'm not even sure I'd say it's the main one, but I do believe it is a factor). Boys' graduation rates have been stagnating and even declining in some regions for decades, yet there doesn't seem to be any great push to try and address it or even acknowledge that it's an issue.

When boys see almost all women in educational settings, it reinforces the notion that education is feminine and stupidity is masculine (a trope that has been omnipresent in pop culture for years and is only now starting to be toned down); the lack of male role models in a school setting can help foster the impression that both childcare and intellectual pursuits aren't something men are supposed to do. As well, with fewer male voices doing program planning and setting curricula, the risk arises that the material becomes unintentionally tailored to learning styles more accessible and interesting to girls. We've known for years that girls and boys have different learning styles (boys tend to excel with more "hands-on" learning, applying concepts to jobs and tasks, where girls tend to do better with a more structured, conversational approach to learning); having men help plan and structure how classrooms work and what material is covered in what way will help keep boys more engaged and give them a better shot at making it to graduation.

This situation sucks for everyone. It sucks for men who are told, explicitly or implicitly, that childcare is "women's work" and they're not welcome; it sucks for the women who then have to take up the slack and do all the childcare work themselves; and it sucks for the kids who are robbed of good childhood role models.

darkknight109 posted...

Lots of interesting (and somewhat sickening) factoids there, but the one that I want to highlight is that two separate analyses of several hundred male students at two universities both found that of those that had suffered sexual abuse as a child, 78% reported a woman as the perpetrator. Admittedly, the sample size isn't great (total number of abuse victims from both studies is 81), but it does highlight the issue that there is a substantial undercount of female abusers.

I will also add to this and say that I'm not trying to claim that the gender distribution is actually 50/50 or that there definitively isn't a disproportionately high risk that any randomly selected man is sexually abusive. That could be the case. It probably isn't actually 96%, because that's ridiculously extreme, but it could be. I can't rule out that possibility. Instead, I'm trying to impress that any numbers you see are inconclusive. Regardless of gender, sexual assault report rates carry an extremely high level of uncertainty due to how hard it often is to verify reports and how frequently it goes unreported. You can still identify some trends and use them to guide mitigation efforts, but you cannot draw sufficiently strong conclusions to justify statements like "men are four times more likely to sexually abuse children," and you especially cannot use that statement to justify "I won't hire a male babysitter because of that."

If there is reason to believe that data is inconclusive, be very, very careful about drawing conclusions from it, and in fact try to avoid doing so unless you genuinely have no other choice. In this case, child sexual abuse statistics are too inconclusive and describe too small a percentage of the population to use them to draw conclusions about which gender your babysitter should be, so don't. Instead of relying on inconclusive statistics and broad generalizations (which will do very little to actually protect your kids), choose your sitter based on the individual screening criteria you're already planning to use (interviews, background checks, your chemistry with the candidate, the kids' chemistry with the candidate, etc.). If it feels weird to hire a dude, try to identify and separate the weird feeling that comes from violating deeply entrenched gender norms (we can talk all we want about recognizing problems with restrictive gender roles at an intellectual level, but having lived them all our lives, it's still feels weird to go against them) so you can make sure whatever's left over isn't a more personal bad feeling about the guy (which is a valid reason not to hire him). Don't fall back on a questionable understanding of how to apply statistics to justify the weird feeling.

darkknight109 posted...

The assumption that undergirds the "I would never hire a male babysitter" viewpoint is that men are abusers until proven otherwise which, I shouldn't need to say, is extremely sexist. It would be like someone saying, "Oh, I'd never hire a black person as an overnight security guard for my business! What if they stole something?" - it's dressing up bigotry in the mantle of "can't-be-too-careful!" concern, while thoroughly abusing/misusing statistics to boot.

Exactly. This is fundamentally identical to saying "I'm not saying that all black people are thieves, but statistics show that they're more likely to be, so I'd never hire a black person for a job where they'll be working unsupervised," which I shouldn't have to point out is an abhorrent attitude. The actions of a tiny subset of a population - even if that tiny subset is statistically significantly larger than analogous subsets of an alternative population - should not be generalized to the entire population and used to justify discriminatory behaviour.

Really, that's the bottom line here: Just don't prejudicially discriminate against people if you don't have to. Men, women, black, white, straight, gay... It doesn't matter who. In matters of individual judgement, judge people individually.

adjl posted...

I will also add to this and say that I'm not trying to claim that the gender distribution is actually 50/50 or that there definitively isn't a disproportionately high risk that any randomly selected man is sexually abusive.

adjl posted...

If there is reason to believe that data is inconclusive, be very, very careful about drawing conclusions from it, and in fact try to avoid doing so unless you genuinely have no other choice.

I mostly agree in that, from what I have seen, the data is simply too thin and too unreliable to draw precise numerical conclusions. That said, I don't think that's the same thing as saying the data is truly "inconclusive" - i.e. that no conclusions can be drawn from it at all. Based on the materials I've reviewed (years ago now, so I apologize for not having sources on hand), there seems to be an overall consensus that:

1) There is a significant dearth of research on female abusers.
2) The number of female abusers is wildly undercounted, and they are much less likely to be reported, charged, or convicted than men.
3) Even accounting for that, it seems that men are overall more likely to sexually abuse children.

On those points, at least, criminologists have fairly high confidence.

As mentioned earlier, the most common number I saw put forward was around 40% of sexual abusers of children could be women, but that's not a number I would hang my hat on - even the researchers who wrote some of the reports I reviewed stated that such numbers were an estimate at best and there was significant potential for error. That the number of female abusers are being significantly undercounted is a common finding and has high confidence behind it; exactly how much they are being undercounted by is much more of an open question.

As both of us have mentioned, however, this is something of an academic point, since your screening process for childcare should be more involved than "Do you have a penis?". Carefully vetting your babysitters and teaching your children about sexual abuse, how to recognize it. and ensuring they feel safe to tell you about it if they are experiencing it will do far more to protect them than any sort of sweeping generalizations on which demographics make the best babysitters.

Cacciato posted...

Im gonna go ahead and guess Yellow is now done with the topic after post 45.

Yes, we've said everything we need to say. I say literally every single official outlet, and authority is probably more correct than his Gamefaqs ass standing alone on this weird take, and he disagrees and says there is an even 50/50 split of men and women pedophiles with, if anything, a paragraph of cherry-picked data and conjecture. Kill your darlings please.

I'm sorry I've done a terrible job arguing or was too edgy while absolutely hammered last night. Doesn't change the fact that this is very silly to me while adjl debunks the center for exploited children and national sexual abuse help lines.

Yellow posted...

debunks the center for exploited children and national sexual abuse help lines.

but that's not what he's doing

now you're hung over lol

2 sides:

1) Don't hire teenage boys, they will rape.

2) Let's be more proactive.

Yellow posted...

. I say literally every single official outlet, and authority is probably more correct than his Gamefaqs ass standing alone on this weird take, and he disagrees and says there is an even 50/50 split of men and women pedophiles

adjl posted...

I will also add to this and say that I'm not trying to claim that the gender distribution is actually 50/50 or that there definitively isn't a disproportionately high risk that any randomly selected man is sexually abusive.

Translation: "I didn't actually understand that what I read was dismantling my willingness to take statistics out of context without thinking critically about them and not an effort to prove that the proportion is different than what these statistics suggest."

The lesson you should take away from this is not that there's an even 50/50 gender split of child sexual abusers, but that you should avoid drawing and especially acting on conclusions from inconclusive data if you can avoid doing so. You can, in this case (and should, given that the statistics in question apply to maybe 1-2% of the population you're trying to judge with them), so basing your decision on such inconclusive statistics is poor decision making. Sometimes, intellectual honesty means recognizing that you don't have an answer. That is an acceptable intermediate between "I can't prove what I believe" and "I guess that means I have to believe the opposite."

The secondary lesson is to actually evaluate the sources you cite to make sure they've properly backed up their claims, because not a single one of your links - official authorities or not - did so in a publicly visible way. That's just a big oops.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

https://www.jstor.org/stable/23717437

Here's one. Want another?

Yellow posted...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/23717437

Here's one. Want another?

and your solution is to keep reinforcing it

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

I can understand it.

Literally every statistic, study on sexual abuse, points out that it is more men than women. This isn't even remotely contested anywhere. Is it suggested that women are underreported? Yes. But to say we have to assume 50/50 is just a complete conspiracy.

Also I'm not going to be gaslit into thinking that none of you were arguing that it was a 50/50 split.

https://www.reddit.com/r/TooAfraidToAsk/comments/t8o6z1/are_men_more_likely_to_be_pedophiles_than_women/

Sexual abuse Research focusing on perpetrators of child sexual abuse is extensive compared to other forms of abuse. Evidence overwhelmingly indicates that the majority of child sexual abuse is perpetrated by males (ABS, 2005; McCloskey & Raphael, 2005; Peter, 2009). In a US study examining the characteristics of perpetrators in substantiated cases of child abuse and neglect (US DHHS, 2005), 26% of all cases involving male perpetrators were associated with sexual abuse compared to just 2% of cases involving female perpetrators.

Who cares if it's a 50/50 split or isn't? Even if it's a 20/80 split, you're still playing with odds by believing that your kid is going to be safer with a female babysitter. Even if it's a 2/98 split.

Yellow posted...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/23717437

Here's one. Want another?

Linking an actual study is a good step, but without the full text available it's hard to critically assess the methodology or any other aspects that dictate its credibility. Off-hand, though, here are a couple issues:

• It's asking solely about sexual interest, not anything about acting on that interest
• It's self-reported, which is generally going to result in data that's skewed according to prevailing social ideas, particularly being filtered by any attempts the respondents make to rationalize their feelings instead of admitting to them (in the case of female sexual abusers, it's been found in studies to often involve thinking more in terms of loving the children than wanting to have sex with them, which I would expect to translate into a lower willingness to self-report sexual interest)
• Being self-reported also means prevailing societal attitudes of "males are supposed to enjoy sex, so they can't be sexually assaulted" are going to interfere with respondents reporting on being abused themselves

None of this conclusively means the figures don't represent the true proportion, but it does mean that they - like most specific numbers around sexual assault - need to be taken with a grain of salt because there are a lot of factors that could be skewing them. As Dark said, most people that have studied the matter in-depth agree that men are probably more likely than women to commit child sexual abuse, but the exact magnitude of the difference is largely unknown and that makes conclusions that rely on there being a significant difference invalid.

Yellow posted...

But to say we have to assume 50/50 is just a complete conspiracy.

We assume 50/50 as the null hypothesis. That's not a conspiracy, that's how hypothesis testing works: To test whether or not there's a significant enough difference in the observed data to infer that there's some kind of causal element creating that difference, you compare your experimental results to what you would expect if there were nothing going on (the null hypothesis). The gender distribution in the overall population is close enough to 50/50 that that is what would be expected if there were no gender difference in sex abuse rates.

Yellow posted...

Also I'm not going to be gaslit into thinking that none of you were arguing that it was a 50/50 split.

You're welcome to quote where one of us did that. All the posts are still there; there's no need to feel like your recall abilities are being challenged.

hangover o'clock

Yellow posted...

But to say we have to assume 50/50 is just a complete conspiracy.

I take it you don't understand what a null hypothesis is?

ReturnOfFa posted...

Who cares if it's a 50/50 split or isn't? Even if it's a 20/80 split, you're still playing with odds by believing that your kid is going to be safer with a female babysitter. Even if it's a 2/98 split.

Exactly. This is why proper vetting of a childcare candidate is more important than what said candidate jots down in the gender column on the application.

Whether or not men are more likely to be abusers doesn't negate the stone-cold fact that female abusers are out there applying for these same jobs. It's beyond strange to me that someone would advocate for hiring a candidate while allowing their gender to supercede their qualifications.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]


I'm guessing it's an awkwardly-worded way of suggesting that I'm trying to push a narrative with no basis in reality.

That's fair.

Maybe if I comment again hell come back and tell you.

Most babysitters I had were female, but some were male. I don't recall ever disliking a male babysitter, but I certainly hated several female babysitters. I wouldn't say they were abusive, just obnoxious or scary. Considering the sheer number of female babysitters I had compared to male ones, it statistically makes sense that the worst ones were female. The opposite is also true: my favorite babysitters were female. It also helps that as a heterosexual boy, I found several of my female babysitters attractive. Being attractive awards you bonus points, which isn't something male babysitters could get. Even then, my favorite babysitter wasn't attractive. She won solely because she was kind and sweet.

There's a professional male babysitter living on my street. He's been babysitting babies, toddlers and elementary school kids full-time for over 40 years now. He's very well liked in my neighborhood. He's often seen walking with a baby in a stroller and toddlers in tow. Among the babysitters congregating at the park overseeing the kids playing, he's the only male one. He's very kind and passionate about his job. I was never babysat by him, however.

I've rarely babysat kids myself. It's not something I've done for strangers, but friends and acquaintances. My younger sister did it significantly more often than me. Although I've only done it on a few occasions, I always took the job seriously. My approach is to entertain the kid and do activities with him/her.

I mean at this point I basically need to type out an essay so get your popcorn ready

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

I mean to address this entire topic where 5 people have been arguing against me I need to write an entire paragraph replying to everything

Or maybe we just say I misunderstood someone somewhere, academic terms and such, I don't really even know where our disagreements lie, and we can call it a day

Yellow posted...

I don't really even know where our disagreements lie,

Mostly in the thought process of "men are more likely to sexually abuse children, therefore I'd never hire a male babysitter." Specifically:

• The level of uncertainty inherent in sexual assault statistics and especially in statistics about the gender distribution of perpetrators means you cannot quantify that difference conclusively enough to decide whether or not it's significant. In turn, this means those statistics are not a sufficiently conclusive basis to make that decision, which in turn means you should not make that decision unless you have a more conclusive basis
• Across the board, discriminating against all members of a population based on the actions of a tiny subset of the population is a bad thing, even if you can conclusively identify a statistically significant difference in risk level. It causes considerable harm and does significantly less to mitigate the issues you're worried about than pretty much any other countermeasure would

I love watching men fight their way out of their deserved reputation of being a predator among the human species lmao

Jen0125 posted...

I love watching men fight their way out of their deserved reputation of being a predator among the human species lmao

What have I done to deserve a reputation of being a predator?

adjl posted...

What have I done to deserve a reputation of being a predator?

Unfortunately, born a man. Bum luck. Better luck next life.

Jen0125 posted...

I love watching men fight their way out of their deserved reputation of being a predator among the human species lmao

Except not all men are predators, so why would people who arent predator deserve the reputation of predators

Jen0125 posted...

Unfortunately, born a man. Bum luck. Better luck next life.

So the fact that I've made a point of being a kind and respectful person who would never even remotely consider hurting somebody for sexual gratification counts for nothing?

I don't know if you think you're improving the world by being a sexist piece of shit, but you really aren't, any more so than racist pieces of shit, homophobic pieces of shit, or anyone else who lacks the cognitive function needed to move beyond prejudicial discrimination can claim. You might wanna work on that.

We all have our societal crosses to bear. Better luck next time!

Jen0125 posted...

We all have our societal crosses to bear.

That doesn't excuse actively making other people's crosses worse for no reason. Especially in a case like this, where pushing men out of ECE actually exacerbates the problem (among other adverse effects for both men and women). If you've been unable to work through the androphobia that your various traumas have induced, that's fine because that's all you can be expected to have accomplished, but limit that to guiding the decisions you have to make to feel comfortable in your own life. Don't present it as being anything more broadly justifiable than a personal neurosis, because that doesn't help anything.

It's very simple: Don't prejudicially discriminate against people unless you have no other choice. That applies across the board, regardless of which population you're looking at or what historical wrongs that population has committed. That doesn't preclude recognizing disadvantaged populations or problematic statistical trends and working to correct them, but it does preclude treating everyone that looks like the problem as part of the problem, because that just makes things worse for everyone.

Hey adjl, when you have the lived experience of a woman in a man's world I'll listen to what you think will make society better lmao let me know when that happens. I have no choice but to be prejudicial because you never know what man is a predator. Sorry that hurts your delicate sensibilities.

Jen0125 posted...

I have no choice but to be prejudicial because you never know what man is a predator.

See, how valid this is depends on the context in which you're making the assumption and what you do with it. Avoiding situations where you'll be alone with strange men? Sure. Pre-emptively stabbing every man you see in the dick? Not so much (to choose an extreme we can hopefully agree on). There's a balance to be struck between ensuring that you protect yourself and have a safe environment, and pre-emptively hurting people regardless of how likely it is that they'll do anything to interfere with that.

Refusing to ever hire a man as a sitter 100% leans too far in the latter direction. You do in fact have other choices than to be prejudicial in that case: background checks, interviews, references, the subjective experience of how he interacts with you and your (hypothetical) kids, teaching your kids to recognize abusive behaviour so you can nip it in the bud if it does happen and ensure no other kids ever get victimized... All of these things not only mitigate the risk of hiring a sexually abusive man without categorically excluding large numbers of innocent men, they're things you should already be doing to mitigate the (probably lesser, but still non-negligible) risk of hiring a sexually abusive person of any other gender. Not only do you not need to make assumptions based on gender, you're taking a considerable risk if you assume you're safe just because of the applicant's gender, which really just takes assumptions out of the equation entirely.

Again, if your personal traumatic experiences mean you aren't comfortable with the idea, that's fine. I don't have the experience to be able to empathize with that, but I understand that that's not something you can just get over because somebody says you should. No amount of intellectual reasoning is going to make you feel less uncomfortable, and that discomfort isn't invalid just because you can't logically defend it. But there's a world of difference between saying "Due to my personal trauma, I'm not comfortable leaving a man alone with my kids" and "men are more likely to be predators and therefore shouldn't be hired as babysitters." The former is what you need to do to feel safe and comfortable. The latter contributes to a culture of more rigid gender norms that have far-reaching consequences (including reinforcing rape culture by normalizing the idea that being sexually predatory is just boys being boys).

I'm not reading any of that lol. When you have to live a life not knowing if any given man is going to harm you then you can talk to me about men being predators.

I mean, I also live a life not knowing if any given man (or woman) is going to harm me. Such is the nature of random chance.

Jen0125 posted...

Hey adjl, when you have the lived experience of a woman in a man's world I'll listen to what you think will make society better lmao let me know when that happens. I have no choice but to be prejudicial because you never know what man is a predator. Sorry that hurts your delicate sensibilities.

I've been sexually harassed by men and women. I obviously recognize the disgusting prevelency of men doing so far more. I've had my ass grabbed by men, I've had a women jump on me, latch on and shove her tongue down my throat. I've also been emotionally abused by both men and women.

I don't think anyone is acting delicate here, and I frequently don't think adjl needs to go into detail (watched it many times, lol, especially with all of us). I think he differentiates the rationale well - it makes total sense if someone has personal trauma and makes that choice. I just think it's so sad that folks don't see it as possible to give young boys and men the emotional tools they need to respect women and children. I loved babysitting and I'm sure lots of other young boys do too. I grew up with loving older male cousins who were great babysitters.

I would love for parents to give boys the emotional tools they need to not fall in predation. But in general, they don't. And I don't trust men until there's a culture shift. Does that hurt your feelings as a man? That's too damn bad. Your feelings don't outweigh my need for personal safety.

i won't argue more. just glad i grew up with a healthy group of friends that didn't have abusive dudes in it. sorry if i pushed against anything traumatic.

Jen0125 posted...

I would love for parents to give boys the emotional tools they need to not fall in predation. But in general, they don't. And I don't trust men until there's a culture shift. Does that hurt your feelings as a man? That's too damn bad. Your feelings don't outweigh my need for personal safety.

No, it doesn't hurt my feelings! It's fair enough. Toooootal goofy assumption, could be totally wrong. But I feel like it's worse in the states. obviously even worse state by state.