That is just stupid. But there is no level of bureaucratic stupidity that truly amazes me anymore.

Compound the fact that they consider him a danger, they moved him away from his pregnant wife. One has to wonder if she bothered to raise a fuss over this, or if she just sat back and stayed silent?

The worst part of this, is that it isn't uncommon for airlines to have this policy.

'cuz after all, you wouldn't want to move the kid, y'know, closer to their parents.

What is most breathtaking is the utter lack of common sense. I hope the guy wins, because this IS discrimination based on gender. The steward acted in an irresponsible way in doin this, because it makes more sense to move the kid in any case, if they aren't sitting with their parents, because they are the floater.

So they ask a stranger couple to seperate for one kid. Why didn't they ask Mom or Dad to move and the kid could then sit with one parent.

Still this is a silly rule!

I hope he wins. The presumption that men are all sex offenders shows that they know nothing about the statistics surrounding this issue. Past time a certain bigoted airline got a wake up call, and a message needs to be sent: we're not going to tolerate being presumed sex offenders.

hm. that is remarkably stupid. above and beyond the obvious stupidity of assuming every guy is a child molester, even stupider is how, exactly, is anyone going to molest a child unobserved on an AIRPLANE? there's like, a foot of space between the kid and the people on the other side of the aisle. not to mention the wife sitting right there. not to mention all the people who are pretty much constantly walking back and forth to the restroom. good golly.
side note, it wasn't the steward's fault, necessarily. he may very well disagree with the policy, but he doesn't make it, and if he doesn't enforce it, he loses his job. i don't know about you, but there are very few policies i'd be willing to lose my job over.

I e-mailed BA to see if this was their policy, which incidentally is nowhere to be found in terms and conditions. This, in part was the response;

"This procedure is not meant to cause offence to our male passengers, nor is it meant to imply that all men are a danger to children. It is there as a precaution in the best interests of the welfare of our young passengers flying alone and will also protect male passengers from being the subject of false accusations."

At least they seem to concede that children make false accusations, a big move from the "children never lie" stance. The problem with this is, is puts female passengers at risk from false accusations, something BA overlooked.

I fly a lot for business (1k with United). On a coast to coast flight (true story) I was seated next to a young girl (maybe 10). Her parents were in the row in front of me with their younger child. So I have my laptop out doing my reports and the young girl next to me is drifting in and out of sleep. She falls asleep and leans over on me and continues to sleep like that. I had to do a lot of one arm typing cause my other arm was a bit pinned. I, though, wanted to just let her sleep. The dad eventually looked back and said "oh I'm sorry about that". I said "no worries at all. I wish I could get some sleep like that on a plane myself". I can't say I thought he was looking at me suspiciously at all. I thought I was doing a nice thing. It's unnerving to read this article and see that some people must have looked at me as a creep. Just the way it is......

Any society that looks at any man and sees a potential molester is irredeemably repressed to the point of being pathological. And any business that would effect a policy like BA's toward half or more of its passengers is not very smart, either.

If I were his pregnant wife, that plane would still, today, be on the tarmac.

I would have dared that steward to tell my husband that he had to move his seat. There probably would have been a story about a crazy woman being escorted off the plane for causing a scene Ivana Trump style.
What I want to know is what was the parents reaction to all of this? Why didn't the parents arrange to have thier kid seated with them?! You know, planned ahead. Why were the parents not asked to switch seats with their kid if it was that important? Why was the kid not asked to move since apparently he is the one in danger? *insert eye roll here*.

If I were his pregnant wife, that plane would still, today, be on the tarmac.

Amen. That would be me, as well. I hope the guy wins his lawsuit.

Unfortunately this policy came from a climate of sue happy people. There have been incidents of children being molested on planes though only a few. The airline is trying to protect themselves not really the men. A better policy would be to have a row for just these kids. I thought it was a policy for unattended minors to sit with airline personel anyway.
My former in-laws asked if they could fly my daughter down to them. My daughter is 12. It was only a 3 hour flight, my daughter is very mature for her age so I said yes. The airline she flew charged me a fee for her being and unattended minor assured me that my daughter would be sitting where the flight attendants sit. I didn't request this out of any fear of her being molested. It was offered to me and I accepted to increase my daughter's comfort in flying alone.

Statistically speaking, children who are victims of sexual abuse know their abuser. If anything, BA should separate children from their parents. But then, this isn't about reason is it?

He won't win. He won't even get far. The Brits as a whole are much more comfortable with obedience to authority in the name of some good or another, and they have a much weaker tradition of individual rights and protections from intervention with those rights.

Of course, I thought there was NO WAY Scott Brown would win, either.

While I am completely outraged that a) BA is looking at every man as a child molester b) they are too stupid to leave the kids with their parents (where they should be, if there is a parent on board - common sense FAIL) and c) don't realize that women can molest children too, the flip side here is that I *really* don't appreciate the notion that just because I have two X chromosomes *I* want to sit next to the kid.

I don't. This villager is not interested in babysitting someone's kid for free on a plane, especially if there's a parent on board.

> If they find a man next to a child
> or teenager they will ask him to move
> to a different seat.

I'm the bitter bachelor of Amy's blog, and if they make it a window seat or maybe first or business class, and throw in one of those little plastic bottles of red wine (the kind that make your nose itch under the breeze from the overhead nozzle), I'm like totally cool with this.

Think whatever you want of me, so long as you observe reasonable boundaries, OK? Your tragically misbegotten appraisal of masculine nature is not my problem to fix.

> This villager is not interested in
> babysitting someone's kid

I love that.

____________________________________________

Oh, and by the way: Thank you, Gretchen.

We all knew this day was coming, didn't we? The first year of the Obama administration only cost us ten trillion dollars! Seekers, we are not children. Cast your memories back, just three hundred sixty seven days ago, when a huge swath of the American public sincerely believed that Obama was going to suspend the laws of gravitation and so forth. Isn't it nice to see this come to an end?

Isn't it fun to have been right?

Even so, y'know, people should remember how twisted the racial mentality in Massachusetts can be. If some wounded but thoughtful lefty wanted to write an article exploring the implications of skin color in the changes which the Party is experiencing, I'd like to read it.

Nonetheless, Massachusetts gave us Dukakis, Kerry and now this. I'm starting to think they were never good for as much as Democrats had always presumed them to be.
____________________________________________

Back on topic--

> A better policy would be to have
> a row for just these kids.

No no no, a thousand times no.

We've covered some of this. We've covered some of almost everything.

Wounded but thoughtful lefty? How about those super geniuses, Olby and Fineman? OK, forget thoughtful. (I know this isn't what you have in mind, but it's just so amusingly moronic.):

OLBERMANN: The Republicans and the Tea Partiers will tell you what happens tonight with Scott Brown tonight, whether he wins or comes close, is a repudiation of Obama policies, and surely one of Obama’s policies from the viewpoint of his opponents is that it’s okay to have this sea change in American history, to have an African-American President. Is this vote to any degree just a euphemism the way state’s rights was in the 60s?

FINEMAN: Wow, that is a good question...

FINEMAN: Maybe not in Massachusetts, but maybe in some places, there are codes, there are images, ah, you know, there are pickup trucks, uh, you could say there was a racial aspect to it one way or another.

OLBERMANN: What were the Scott Brown ads, though? Every one of the Scott Brown ads had him in a pickup truck.

FINEMAN: That’s why I mentioned pickup trucks. I mean, my mind goes back to Fred Thompson down in Tennessee.

I'm some sort of a triple threat: Tennessee, Thompson voter, and that litmus test of all racists, a truck. I really hope they keep yammering on like this, because it's been incredibly helpful to conservatives.

> How about those super geniuses,
> Olby and Fineman?

I specifically excluded them! Har!

"Maybe not in Massachusetts", the guy says. That's just nuts. Maybe Bostonian leftydom is all about naked-emperor delusion.

Also, "Pickup trucks".

That's "pick-em-up trucks", Crid. Because, y'know, if you're going to be a crypto-racist, ya gotta learn the code.

I thought you were all for profiling?

Nicole, Even if we take your point, Fineman (whom I've never heard of) wasn't talking about profiling of lawless players. His was a complaint about a consumer preferences. This was social climbing disguised as political insight. He wants the world to be that simple: No one who drives a PICKUP TRUCK could ever be as racially enlightened as we are up here in Boston.

(Yes, I'm posting that link again, even though it's completely inadequate: "Boston police searched for suspects matching Stuart's description of the assailant." It's my understanding that they stopped, frisked and intimidated almost every single black man in the city over a period of weeks. I've never understood why there wasn't a race riot in response, even before the whole thing was exposed as the clumsy scam of an abject murderer.)

So anyway, comments like that aren't about the best-sense appraisal of others. They're about Fineman's need, and the need of many liberals, to imagine themselves capable of reading the souls of distant individuals on scant evidence... It's about being condescending. And it has overtones of resentment towards genuine masculinity, the kind expressed without shame in Tennessee and elsewhere in the South...

...However, I had a friend, a beautiful woman from [ahem] the south side of Chicago, who nearly died when her coupe collided with a deer. I have a picture of her standing next to the very, very large pickup truck she bought afterwards... She'd resolved to survive the next encounter with as little risk as possible.

There is a certain class of American, the kind of person who appears on cable TV talk shows a lot, who thinks that pickups are stupid, as are their stupid owners, the plumbers. And then the toilet backs up, and they call the plumber, and they want the guy to have all the parts that he needs when he comes over, because, 'y'know, they're paying full price and the stupid guy doesn't deserve it....

I thought you were all for profiling?

NicoleK,

Sure. The next time that scary looking guy with his pregnant wife gets on the plane, let's make sure we profile him.

The Middle Eastern guy with the bomb in his pants, nah.... let's leave him alone.

The solution to the problem is to always have the child sitting next to his parent if possible, or within sight if for some reason it is not possible (e.g., the parent is traveling with three children). I don't want to sit next to someone else's kid if I can help it, and if I'm stuck doing it, I want the parent around to exercise some control over the kid. If the parents and kid are within view of each other, and the parent is paying attention, no one is going to molest the kid. Problem solved without profiling.

But that said, if getting the kid next to his parent entails moving a guy away from his pregnant wife, I'm fine with that. Someone might have to move away from his/her adult traveling companion to make that happen, and they should suck it up. I've had to sit separately from my traveling companion on tons of flights. Boo fricking hoo. They're grown-ups. They'll live. Unless the wife physically needed her husband next to her for some reason, I have minimal sympathy.

But although I think the airlines should focus on getting the kid next to his parents rather than on keeping him away from allegedly evil men, I've got to play devil's advocate with people's points on the profiling issue. It's true that only a small percentage of men are child molesters. But child molesters, as a class, are overwhelmingly male. Similarly, very few Middle Eastern men are Jihad-crazy terrorists. But Jihad-crazy terrorists are overwhelmingly Middle Eastern men. Judging from previous comments, lots of you who are up in arms about profiling men as potential child molesters would like to see the TSA concentrate their pat-downs on high risk middle eastern men instead of low-risk grannies. And I agree. But they're both profiling based on a stereotype of who and who is not higher risk.

As a lawyer, I predict the dude loses his lawsuit.

Even if he does, it won't much speak to the morality of the matter.

But child molesters, as a class, are overwhelmingly male. - Gail

That becuase women who molest arent molesters. They are 'lonely', or 'confused', or 'in need of psychiatric evaluation', but somehow they are never molesters.

And a large number of the 'molesters' on the websites are teenagers who had sex with thier teenage girl friends.

"I thought you were all for profiling?"

Even if most child sex offenders are men, it is silly to base profiling solely on that and nothing else. i.e. they should base profiling on a range of variables and risk factors including gender but not only gender.

Also, there is a big difference between profiling and entrenched discrimination in the application of policies across the board. For example, if the police know that a crime is far more likely to have been committed by a man then of course this should be taken into account when working out a profile and investigating likely suspects. But does that mean every man should then be discriminated against or maybe subject to random searches or the like?

It is like comparing a police department profiling a criminal suspect as being more likely to be black with segregated bathrooms and white-only parks.

This one shows why I am here in Mexico. The entire Anglosphere is clinically insane. When I walk down town little girls come running out for their forehead kiss, while their mommies beam at the old foreigner who thinks their sweet, little daughters are absolutely precious.

In the US you can not only get arrested for talking to a child, but also a felony charge for LOOKING at a child.

Any man who isn't at least working on a plan to Get The Hell Out deserves everything which happens to him.

> their mommies beam at the old foreigner

Different scheme of justice entirely. If you did misbehave, or they just thought that you had, the family probably wouldn't check with the authorities before taking action.

Gail,
There was a time when most rapists were black too, or at least that's what the lynch mobs believed. Here's a quite recent example of what Looj points out goes on all the time:

http://toysoldier.wordpress.com/2010/01/20/woman-rapes-boy-almost-200-times/

Different scheme of justice entirely. If you did misbehave, or they just thought that you had, the family probably wouldn't check with the authorities before taking action.

Different assumptions on who's responsible for evaluating character as well.

The yuppies don't want to be judgmental, so they demand that the government determine people's character for them. But governments aren't equipped to do such things, and come up with across-the-board things and the yuppies just dutifully follow, and we end up with the common wisdom that "all men are potential rapists".

The best response ever given to that was "And you have all the equipment to be a prostitute, ma'am."

"There was a time when most rapists were black too, or at least that's what the lynch mobs believed."

True. But there's rather a large difference between moving someone to a different seat on a plane and lynching them! And since it's a blanket policy applying to 50% of the population, the dude isn't really being singled out. It's an annoyance, like most of the things the airline industry makes us do.

(Just to reiterate -- I'm not defending the policy; the policy should be simply to seat the child with the parents and move whoever -- male or female -- needs to be moved.)

Luj -- there are statistics on the child molester thing. Women very rarely sexually molest a child. They account for about 5% of molesters. I'm not saying women can't be child molesters, and I'm certainly not saying all men are molesters. I'm just saying that by and large, molestation is a crime that is generally committed by men.

By the way, I fell asleep on a ten hour bus ride in Croatia once and woke when the dude next to me touched me inappropriately (definitely not accidentally). I made a big uproar (bus driver didn't speak English and he either didn't get it or didn't care), and I moved my seat. I'm still a bit wary of dozing off on long trips when I'm alone. So, hey, I get why someone might worry about their kid being molested on a plane. But the answer is, sit near your kid and keep an eye on him. (And the answer for me is to stay awake!)

"Women very rarely sexually molest a child. They account for about 5% of molesters."

Read an interesting article on this recently ...

http://www.philly.com/inquirer/world_us/80979057.html

Nationwide, about 12 percent of youths held in state-run, privately run, or local facilities reported some type of sexual victimization, the Justice Department found in the first report of its kind. The rates varied widely among facilities.

...
About 10 percent of youths surveyed reported abuse involving facility staffers, and nearly all those complaints were against FEMALE staffers. About 2 percent of the reported abuse involved other young inmates.

Although advocates said the level of abuse wasn't surprising, the prevalence of sexual abuse by staff, particularly WOMEN, was shocking, said Linda McFarlane, deputy executive director of Just Detention International, which fights to end sexual abuse of those who are detained.

Longer version: http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2010-01-07-juvenile-prison-sexual-abuse_N.htm

I know I'm WAY late to this thread...hey, I was at work all day. But wow, this is disgusting. Like, wow. It kinda makes you reluctant to even head to the airport without, like, the direct phone number to the CEO of Whatever Airline programmed into your phone.

And Crid, "the bitter bachelor of Amy's blog"...that's why we all love you.

> But there's rather a large difference
> between moving someone to a different
> seat on a plane and lynching them!

And there's a large difference between being shot in the head with a rifle and being slapped by a meter maid, but decent guy shouldn't have to deal with either.

Besides, when you throw in the humiliation, the inconvenience, the arrogance from a service vendor to whom you've paid no small fee, and (last in this list!) the removal from a pregnant wife, I think tolerable conditions for public commercial transport have been obviously exceeded.

And any number of lawyers might take it as a contingency fee, even those not disposed to such billing.

The thing with profiling is you take a person and split in threat versus non-threat category. The problem is that the profiling here is incomplete and half-assed. They took one criteria and left it at that.

Good profiling takes a look at multitude of criteria. Okay is man he gets moved to possible threat list. But whoops he is with wife who is in next seat - threat level goes down. Taking a superficial look at him of his clothes. Business suit with briefcases versus a shirt saying I like MILFs. Threat goes up or down. Race of man in conjunction with child.... Proximity of parents and other people to child. See is that bureaucracies love absolutes. Either and ORs. OR they try to ignore it and be fair.

The profiling for the airplane should go like this...

1. Is person part of a threatening group.

MeganNJ: Interesting article. I'm not sure whether that suggests that sexual abuse by females is more prevalent than other statistics show or merely that the kinds of women drawn to careers in juvenile-detention centers are more prone to sexual misconduct. Also, what are they considering sexual misconduct?

MeganNJ: Interesting article. I'm not sure whether that suggests that sexual abuse by females is more prevalent than other statistics show or merely that the kinds of women drawn to careers in juvenile-detention centers are more prone to sexual misconduct. Also, what are they considering sexual misconduct?

It isn't entirely clear ...

The survey showed that 10.3% of youths reported the sexual contact was with staff, compared with 2.6% who reported sexual victimization by other youths. In nearly half the incidents with staff, youths reported having sexual contact as a result of force.

The study sets a wider definition of sexual contact than rape, Beck said. Nonetheless, "these are all things that in the outside world would be considered violent or, by definition in law, they are illegal," he said.

Forced, violent, illegal.

With any luck it won't be long before some mouthy 'male steward' with an agenda cuts loose on an undercover air marshal. Now that's must-see TV!

Gog, we appreciate your thoughtful scenario, but it's much more likely that it would get hushed up... The airline would strong-arm the feds or vice-versa.

Besides, we've never EVER heard of these 'air marshalls' doing anything. Ever. At all. They're the Keebler Elves of the transport trade; sure, everybody's HEARD of them, but no one's ever seen one. None of them have ever made a mistake, and none of them have every done anything right, either.

"They're the Keebler Elves of the transport trade"

So you're suggesting that (a) the government doesn't keep legions of highly-trained agents flying around and around and around and around in economy class, just waiting for something to happen, and (b) the magically delicious choco-mallow graham crackers that countless Dungeons and Dragons geeks have fattened and pimplified themselves with come from some sort of FACTORY.

What sacred cow will you barbecue next, Crid? Have you no shame?

You're upset about the spelling, right? But my childhood wasn't about westerns.

No, the craziest thing about this policy is - it is not a policy. It is only a guide. Air New Zealand claim to have this policy too, but believe me, if the only way they can sell that last ticket is to put a guy with a child, the 'policy' goes out the window. So this poor guy got humiliated for nothing He was treated like this for something that is up to their discretion, read: the airline could do it without losing revenue. 'Unaccompanied' in Air New Zealand's policy means that the parent is not on the plane - at all. This means that you, a male, can be seated next to, say, a child in coach, whist his or her parents have a nice sleep in 1st class. Providing the parent is somewhere on the plane, Air New Zealand say males are fine. Also, both Air New Zealand and BA say that they do this in response to parents who ask that their child not be seated next to a male. So what happens if some racist says: "do not seat my child next to a black person?" Will the airline obsequiously comply?