In fact, the mother reportedly told the principal that her little girl had become uncomfortable around the little boy.

Dollars to doughnuts says that little girl was coached by her mother into "becom[ing] uncomfortable around the boy.

Left to her own 9-year-old devices, she would have shrugged it off as an accident and a meaningless one at that.

The girl has been "coached" all her life by a hovering, neurotic, scaredy-cat mother, no special session required for this incident. Mom has been over-reacting all of the girl's life, and as children learn from their parents first and most-strongly, the girl has learned to be afraid of everything.

Well-socialized 9-year-olds would be rolling their eyes and looking for the first opportunity to get the hell out of the principal's office and go back to the soccer pitch for another game.

Next week the boy will be labeled a misogynistic little pig for refusing to play with girls

I have no problem with making the boy apologize to the girl for accidentally touching her.

As long as the girl then apologizes to the boy for pretending to be his equal.

Because we truly respect and understand women, let's fight for separate schooling, separate athletics, separate work environments, and just a separation of women from all the icky masculine things of the world. If we can just isolate men - with male schools, male athletics, male social clubs, male work environments - things will finally be OK for women to achieve self-actualization once they are separate but equal.

We teach the kids to report anyone and everyone who touches them there. But, because they're kids, we don't teach them why it's inappropriate that someone touches them there, simply that no one should.

So, they report any and all touches, like this little girl did. It was incumbent upon her mother and the principal, the adults in the room, not to overreact at this.

They seem to have failed. But could they dismiss this touch and still enforce the no touches rule going forward? Or did they do the right thing by informing the little boy's mother and rewarding the little girl for reporting the touch, inadvertent though it was?

Does the little girl even understand what happened; what firestorm she set off? Does she even understand what becoming "uncomfortable around the little boy" means?

I agree this was likely an accident. However.

I was raped by a female babysitter at the age of three. She made me fist fuck her. Yes, I remember the whole thing. I told.

Then a man my mother was dating exposed himself to me while she was picking up my regular babysitter. I told. Bye perv!

But by the time two boys I had grown up with started to molest and beat me up? I stopped telling. I was eight. It was the 70s.

Children need to tell and tell and tell and tell and tell and tell and tell. Hopefully most true accidents will be gently judged as such. But they need to have the freedom to tell that someone touched their privates whether it was an accident or deliberate.

Wouldn't you agree, you self described loud mouth bitch?

And why don't you try practicing actual journalism sometime, by, say, talking to the people whose viewpoints you don't understand instead of reading and regurgitating things you agree with.

You are raising zero children of any gender and do not in fact like them. I, on the other hand, was trying to teach my very handsy stepson that no means no the first time. It does not mean one more time. He also spun all the times he hit and shoved people as accidents, and just playing. His dad believed him. I did not, as much as I loved him. So Im not automatically believing the boy here. Ever been in that position? No? Then shut it.

This is one good reason to not have coed sports. Even in volleyball you can end up crashing into someone. Ping-pong may be the only safe sport. When girls have insisted on joining boys wrestling, many boys have insisted on not wrestling them and have forfeited matches--it is impossible to wrestle without being "inappropriate". In other sports like soccer it is easy for the boys to hurt the girls (hell, they hurt each other). People pushing for coed sports live in a world of ideas and symbols where actual physical people and real situations like boys and girls crashing into each other don't exist.
As to bitch lasagna's comment, mixing rape with boys and girls bumping into each other is wildly "inappropriate".

Okay, I'm not sure where this is directed, but I'm going to assume at Amy.

Wouldn't you agree, you self described loud mouth bitch?

And why don't you try practicing actual journalism sometime, by, say, talking to the people whose viewpoints you don't understand instead of reading and regurgitating things you agree with.

This is a blog, and Amy writes books and an advice column. I don't think anyone here would expect her to practice "actual journalism."

So, her blog is for "regurgitating things [she] agrees with"? Isn't that what blogs are for? She finds stuff and posts about stuff that she feels passionate about.

She allows dissenting opinions 99% of the time. I've disagreed with her on numerous occasions. And I think she's had to lift the ban-hammer perhaps twice in the thirteen or so years that she's had this blog?

What I'm saying is the discussion here is pretty open. If you don't like the topics, there is a links thread posted daily so you can always bring your own topics to the table and see if anyone discusses them.

I don't know how much more open-minded you expect her to be. And it's her blog, so you can hardly expect her to shut it. However, if you don't like, feel perfectly free to fuck off.

"I was raped by a female babysitter at the age of three. She made me fist fuck her."

This idiot just keeps getting idioter.

When boys today play soccer with girls they have to play differently than when they play it with boys. They have to check their male privilege and masculine toxicity and not have rape culture. Today's girls know they are equal to boys and are therefore entitled to win at least half the time, and if they don't they feel raped.

When I was a kid back in the 60's we boys usually played football with other boys, but sometimes we played it with girls. We played football with boys when we wanted to play football, and we played football with girls when we wanted to play with girls. BIG difference.

Back then girls understood that difference too, and liked it. Back then girls didn't think they were equal to boys in football, and didn't seem to care. They weren't playing football with us boys because they wanted to play football, they were playing football with us boys because they wanted to play with us boys. They knew we would play differently with them so as not to hurt them. I think that made them happy because they felt like we liked playing with them more than we liked playing football. Which was true.

Yeah, Bitch/Mousie/whatever says she has an office job, but she also says she's an artist who takes commissions. And, according to her, every guy in the world finds her irresistible. Presumably that lasts until they talk to her.

(Actually, I'm not convinced that "she" isn't a 14-year-old, doing the contemporary equivalent of calling phone numbers at random and saying, "Is your refrigerator running?")

Actually, I'm not convinced that "she" isn't a 14-year-old, doing the contemporary equivalent of calling phone numbers at random and saying, "Is your refrigerator running?")
Cousin Dave at December 8, 2017 11:26 AM

I’m guessing BPD

You are raising zero children of any gender and do not in fact like them.

This is always my favorite argument when it comes to the little rotters.

Going down that garden path, anyone who isn't a politician wouldn't be able to judge their representatives.

"This idiot just keeps getting idioter."

I give it a week before the alien abduction and probing comes out.

This idiot just keeps getting idioter. ~ Gog_Magog_Carpet_Reclaimers at December 8, 2017 10:50 AM

They usually do.

From the initial post - I wonder what happens should this lady take her precious daughter down to the airport to get on a plane, when the gloves come out?

And, bitchlasagna: how long are you going to be an angry victim? For in the "topper" category, I can actually introduce you to women who have moved on after two decades of abuse by an uncle now in jail for life plus several hundred years... for the truly gruesome crime the cops know about, and there have been others. Not kidding.

(It's part of the problem we don't want to think about in capital punishment arguments: the criminal breathes on, the victims know this, and there are many more victims than criminals in jail.)

Amy does not have to fail so that you can succeed. Nobody is allowed to force you to have sex today.

I have mixed feelings about the whole thing.

On one hand, I really miss much of the old attitudes that I grew up with: Namely: Shit happens. When you dive in a pool, someone could lose their drawers. A wave could knock your bikini top askew:rearrange yourself and move on. In those days of short, shorts, the package could spill out, especially if you were relaxed and laying on the beach.

During sports, there might be incidental contact. My gymnastics coach let me know that she would rather risk grabbing a boob if needed rather than letting us crash to the ground and risk paralysis.

In our town, there was a man sentenced to 10 years because he was wearing short-shorts in a drive through line and his genitals had spilled out one side and were exposed. It sure seemed like an overreaction to me.

On the other hand, some creepy business took place. I had no idea what was going on, but I may have been too innocent to report a true predator. If I had known the things that I taught my kids, I certainly would have reported him.

Kids were lining up to get tossed in the pool. My friend grabbed my arm and said let’s get in line. It’s really fun. A hairy guy about 30 was launching kids with his hand on their crotch. When he threw me, a finger was crooked. It stayed on the outside of my bathing suit, but it penetrates my body. It was so weird to me. I never knew that could happen. As far as I knew, I was flat between my legs, like Barbie. I had discovered my clitoris but not my vagina.

I didn’t get back in line but my thoughts raced. Was he doing this to everyone or just a select few. Was this part of the fun or were kids putting up with it so that they could have the fun of the throw. Was he “testing” me as the new kid from out of town without connections in the community?

Later I wondered how far he went behind closed doors if he did this in public. There were dozens of moms around. Didn’t this raise any eyebrows?

The good thing is that I didn’t know that this sort of behavior could traumatize me, so it didn’t.

Jen, depending on what decade you're talking about, maybe it was just an accident caused by HIS idiocy and/or naïveté. (Why not just hold a kid by an arm, plus a knee?)

Glad you weren't traumatized. Unfortunately, since it MAY have been deliberate, it should have been reported. Which is not to say that adults shouldn't encourage kids to be resilient both before and after the kids report it, whether that has to involve the police or not. There's nothing wrong with demanding a happy medium. Here's a 2015 thread, which includes a story reported by Lenore Skenazy:

"I Was Groped As A Teen, But I Forgot To Be Traumatized" (this also answers my earlier question about who exactly assaulted Amy)

http://www.advicegoddess.com/archives/2015/10/19/groped.html

Here's what *I* said:

I may have missed it somewhere, but let's not forget that just because WE weren't traumatized by a single event doesn't mean that the same person might do a lot worse to a future victim and we have a real obligation to prevent that by reporting what happened. In the same vein, when your housecleaner or health care worker steals valuables from your house that you don't miss until after their employment is finished, don't be "charitable" and let it go; what if that person steals someone's identity next or even worse?

October 19, 2015 5:46 PM

Well, I went to Lenore's blog and found a few comments that gave pretty much the same advice I did (by Kat and Anne). Haven't read any farther just yet, but another thing to remember is that male molesters today, unlike ones from 40 or so years ago, know perfectly well that any little unseemly thing they do, especially to a non-relative, will likely get reported to the authorities. Therefore, if such a man is reckless and compulsive enough to do such things anyway, he's not likely to stop doing them in general just because a kid's dad tells him to, while the barber may well have been different - but we'll never know.

October 20, 2015 10:10 AM

Lenona, you are absolutely right. If I’d ever heard of a bad touch, I would have reported it. I never told anyone. That is what gives me pause. If he was willing to do that in front of everyone, god knows what he would have done given the opportunity. Looking back, it was probably deliberate but I was 8 years old. I didn’t even know that I had a vagina. My parents encouraged me to handle things on my own, so I did. I’m not saying that it was a good thing.

There's a weirdness to this: "It should have been reported."

As if, by the speed-of-light grace of some trans-cosmic context of indisputably just authority from a galaxy far away using technologies of jurisprudence unknown to us, things would have been better for everyone.

Maybe.

But as I look back on the relative sexual sophistication of my midwestern childhood milieu, I'm not sure it's true. This was in the earliest 1960's, before electricity. And if you go back a half generation before my arrival on our darling little sphere, it gets much worse than that: The mother of one dear person in my life was sold to her adoptive family (as I suppose so many are even today, in one context or another).

But the general mentality of the guy on the street (or the cop on the beat) for such things, in my foggiest memories & understanding, was basically a blink-blink Huh? There are people who pester children? It was actually known that there were such criminals, but they were regarded as so monstrous that you wouldn't find them walking in daylight... Unless you were in some especially grim ethnic ghetto or hillbilly dale.

Nor would you have expected law enforcement or adult agencies generally to handle the emotions & concerns of an assaulted little girl or her family with any delicacy... And again, you probably couldn't today, either.

Sex intrusions are loathsome for many reasons, one of the greatest being that justice, and lesser forms of cleanup, are incredibly difficult to achieve.

I worked with a guy many years ago who acknowledged that he'd been sexually abused as a child, but he had no memory of it, so it never bothered him. And he was *remarkably* non-neurotic. This is in show business, you understand. That's almost unheard of.

Anyone with a story like yours who, like you, doesn't seem to be too cranked about it day-by-day, should probably not get too wrapped up in lost prosecutions for something vague (and perhaps unreal) anyway.

There are always people fully deserving of our genuine resentment.

I can introduce you to some if you want.

Unless hillbilly dale is a contradiction in terms.

Sometimes those people grow up and live at the bottom of the valley. Sure.

It's nice that people are waking up to the insanity of "progressive" gender agendas.

But you have to roll ALL the nonsense back. Including the "new norm" of coed sports.

But the general mentality of the guy on the street (or the cop on the beat) for such things, in my foggiest memories & understanding, was basically a blink-blink Huh? There are people who pester children? It was actually known that there were such criminals, but they were regarded as so monstrous that you wouldn't find them walking in daylight... Unless you were in some especially grim ethnic ghetto or hillbilly dale.
_________________________________________

You DO know that just because certain stereotypes were once commonly believed, that didn't make them true, right? Just as most rapists weren't strangers, then or now? The reason child molesters got away with what they did was that they have usually been smart enough NOT to target strangers AND to make themselves trusted community figures before they started targeting anyone. (This, of course, helped to make people mistakenly assume that molesters were far more rare than they were.) Not to mention that in the past, kids were not taught that they had any right to say "no" to any adult who was trusted by the PARENTS - such as a family friend, a relative, a teacher, a priest, or an employer. So they didn't disobey - even when that included the order "don't tell anyone."

Or, one might say, some stereotypes are 80% true and some are only 5% true, and it's important to remember which are which.

And again, leaving aside innocent doctor games or real accidents committed by middle-schoolers, what IS wrong with making sure ADULTS don't get away with doing anything worse? Just because so-and-so didn't do anything "memorable" with one particular child didn't mean other kids weren't more seriously victimized by that adult - or that we don't have an obligation to stop repeat offenders today. If it's unacceptable for CONVICTED felons to argue they don't even remember their crimes and don't understand why they have to stay in jail, it shouldn't be acceptable for people of any age not to report clear-cut assaults by adults.

Or any clearly violent assaults by teens or younger bullies, of course.

what IS wrong with making sure ADULTS don't get away with doing anything worse?

What is wrong is that according to social research women commit the majority of crimes against children and yet somehow everyone always thinks its guys.

I got no problem with kids telling when they think something weird is happening, what pisses me off is people ignoring them when they tell them it was a woman doing it

"Unless hillbilly dale is a contradiction in terms."

Country music recorded on Edison cylinders.

Luj, from what I can see, there aren't too many cases, anymore, of cover-ups by the media when a female teacher rapes a student. Or beatings or tortures committed by mothers, for that matter.

I also remember that Newsweek pointed out in the 1990s that women can be molesters too. So the media have been working on that issue for a long time.

"I never told anyone. That is what gives me pause. If he was willing to do that in front of everyone, god knows what he would have done given the opportunity. Looking back, it was probably deliberate but I was 8 years old. I didn’t even know that I had a vagina. My parents encouraged me to handle things on my own, so I did. I’m not saying that it was a good thing."

Jen at December 9, 2017 2:50 PM

I was 7, almost 8. 9. 10 before I knew that he knew what he was doing, even though by the second incident I knew it was "bad touch." It took me so long to figure out, because he was doing this in broad daylight, while other people were in the room; because I only saw him a few times each year; and because he was my second favorite person in the world. He broke my heart. He broke my heart and when I asked a parent to explain the inexplicable, after a visit to a child psychologist I was left with the undefined term "grooming behavior."

My heart broke again and again every time I had to take a birthday or a Christmas gift from him to keep up appearances; every time I insisted I needed more space between me and the family pedophile meant asserting what I knew to be true, to the adults who didn't want to deal with telling his wife her husband was a pedophile, didn't want to deal with... everything. It was easier for adults to treat me as if I had made the mistake, or to grant that even if I was correct, there was "no point" in telling his wife.

None of the adults in my family system saw anything wrong with expecting me to take a birthday gift and a Christmas gift from a pedophile as if he had not taken my hand and pressed it onto his crotch on several occasions. None of the adults in my life responded in a way that honored the magnitude of the betrayal and the heartbreak - I had to carry this so that it wouldn't be more awkward for everyone else. That has f#cked with my head and my heart even more.

I was 18 years old when I freed myself by writing to his wife and telling her that her husband was a pedophile. I haven't heard from most of that side of the family, since. That was 25 years ago. I'm still furious about what I was expected to subsume as a child, so that adults would not have to deal with adult transgressions.

Jen, I never thought I would write these words - you should *not* have reported what happened. As an 8 year old child your safety was the most important thing. You had good instincts, and you followed them - job well done.

Nothing in your experience gave you the language or the concepts to communicate what had happened. In light of this, what are the odds that your culture - family, school, larger community - would have known how to respond in a way that would have protected anyone?

A lot of these ham-fisted responses are from school administrators - the accountability doesn't require soul searching at home, doesn't shine a light under the beds of the preceding generations, the targeting and the follow through happens with officious obtuseness.

In the era when you were only 8 years old, it would have been so easy for an uneasy adult to turn the uncertainty back on you, to say "are you sure? maybe he meant to ____" and without waiting for your response, make up some alternative explanation for the invasive touch. With one dismissive conversation, the world of a child can feel far less secure.

I think the fact that you weren't given the language for reporting what happened suggests that your community did not give such a young child an opportunity to report such behavior with any power. You had good instincts - you stayed away and protected yourself. You might have saved yourself twice over.

Thanks, Gog for nothing the insanity of the "fist" comment. Been writing a medical expose, so I'm not around here much.

Bitchlasagna reads my column in the Pacific Northwest and drops toxic turds here reflecting her irrationality. She posts anonymously, though it took me about five minutes to find her picture, full name, and her knitting on Flickr.

She appears unhinged, to say the least.

PS No three-year-old is capable of "fist-fuck"ing a person.