One week the lesson was on inappropriate touching. I know this because both kids spent the next month inappropriately touching everybody they met -- with some very humorous results.
Of all the things that have changed in the last 40 years or so, this thing we've done where we've trained everybody to be afraid of each other is probably the worst. Every day parents are bombarded by statistically highly-unlikely events that they take to be commonplace. It's made an awful impact on the fabric of society. Very sad.
People should be presumed innocent unless proven guilty, not the other way around. The modern western society would have us think otherwise (and not only for child molesting, see CCTV, airport screenings, ...).
We have prosecutors convinced they have discovered a hidden evil and that it is more widespread than people like to think. They sometimes have children as witnesses. They have false confessions from the accused. And we have bodily investigations of "secrete places" either to confirm that sexual abuse has taken place or the devil "knew" was familiar with the accused. And we have bizarre stories of strange practices, which are credulously believed.
It is like there is some universal process going on here. Communities require these expressions of hidden evils. And if you doubt the veracity of these claims then you are suspect too.
I don't think this paranoia is a new phenomenon to human society. What changes is the topic, but not the underlying need we have in human society for these expressions.
Examples of Witch Trials.
Apart from the fact that dolls of adults with penises are rather unusual and likely to produce an odd reaction - the same logic suggests my nieces are being abused by the lion from Lion king.
The more dangerous it is to deal with kids (because of potential legal consequences), the less people want to deal with kids.
End result: childcare (formal and informal) is getting more expensive, potential parents have less children or don't have children at all.
At 20 you are an adult of some sort, and have been for some time. The only problem I see in the story is you don't act like it.
I didn't have a problem with saying I didn't handle the situation like an adult - at no point did I contend that I did. But we were taking as much responsibility as we could feasibly handle, this just went above and beyond what we were prepared for.
So I hope you understand when I take exception to you suggesting that we didn't take on enough responsibility. This organization was filled entirely with people who wanted only to help their community by taking on additional responsibilities.
You could argue that we were irresponsible to take on such roles if we were unprepared, but there was nobody else stepping up to help out. This was in a town of 40k college students, most opting to spend that saturday morning getting some extra sleep or nursing a hangover.
So when you say it's "funny to see people who have such a different idea of what they are responsible for," I say "Yes. Yes it is."
Where did you take on responsibility? You went in to a situation where responsibility was required and when even the slightest hint of responsibility was necessary you said "I am not responsible, I am not even an adult". When you were clearly responsible and clearly an adult. Helping other is admirable. Flipping out and disclaiming responsibility at the slightest hint of trouble not so much.
But a few minutes in, Ellie decides he's done reading for the day. And for one reason or another, he jumps up out of the bench seat, pointing an accusatory finger at his tutor. His English wasn't super clear, and he wasn't being very loud (thank god), but I did catch "touch" and "special area."
The two of us are frozen in horror. What can you say but "I... b... no..."? Ellie maintains this outrage long enough to really get some good satisfaction out of the looks on our faces, and then he relents and just starts laughing at us.
What if someone walking by had heard? We were in a partially exposed church basement kind of area, so it's not unheard of for random people to be walking by - and the cry of abuse stirs the indignation better than most anything else - so there was a really good chance that something really awful was about to happen.
But it didn't.
So the question was, what do you do now? We tried to impress upon him never to do something like that again, but he clearly didn't grasp the full potential force of his actions. We were like 20 at the time, and ill-equipped to deal with children on this level, so we probably should have relayed the event to an adult of some sort, but we were too worried about how it would be perceived, so we just moved on.
Neither of us stopped volunteering because of the incident, but I'll never forget the sinking dread of that instant, that's for sure.
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/e7l16/i_work_with...