I was also reminded of one actually pretty hilarious story. Where the context doesn’t start out as funny.
Anyway, when my biodad was pulling his stalking and harassment shit after the divorce, he was still afraid to lay a finger on her. But, he couldn’t resist running his mouth. And he could really come up with some vile shit.
So, my mom sometimes totally lost it, and made herself easy to paint as a Crazy Bitch. Knowing the people involved, this is not surprising in the least.
But, that worked a little differently on one occasion.
When he drove an hour again for the opportunity to harass her at home, just because. So, she went down to talk to him at the street rather than have him causing problems at the house in front of me.
So, he sat there behind the wheel of his car, and the conversation of course progressed to where he started cussing her and just generally saying vile stuff.
And she ended up taking the bait, lost it, and reached through the window to slam his head against the steering wheel. Bounced it off there several times. With the idea of shutting that horrible mouth.
Not the first time something like that happened, and not the last. But, he kept coming back and baiting her anyway.
He didn’t call the cops or anything (ever), so she didn’t think that much more of it.
Until she got a call from my uncle a couple of days later. He could barely talk for laughing.
Apparently, this guy Johnny he had gone through school with had oh-so-casually run into him, and asked if she were seeing anyone. And if my uncle thought she might be interested in going out with him.
Because Johnny lived across the street, and he had watched the whole thing. And she really seemed like his kind of woman!
She never went out with Johnny, though. And I don’t think the 5 or 6 year age difference was that relevant. Though I doubt she would have had the same set of troubles dealing with him… 🙂
My biodad did try to hit my mom once, a couple of months after they got married. They were arguing about something, and he swung at her. That was in the kitchen, so she pretty much reflexively picked up the closest thing: a big heavy stoneware mixing bowl. And broke it over his head.
She was also a good bit bigger than he was (as he kept getting nasty about), and she knew how to fight. He was afraid to try anything like that again.
He was also physically afraid of pretty much her whole family, for the same reasons. They just wouldn’t tolerate that shit, and he wasn’t a very popular guy after a while anyway, with the ways he would talk to people.
They stayed married for about 12 more years after that incident, until I was 6.
That didn’t mean that he wasn’t still abusive. He just had to get less blatant and sneakier with it…and save the physical abuse for people he thought he could get away with hitting.
(I didn’t get it until after the divorce, when she and other relatives who would have disapproved weren’t around. My stepbrother got a lot worse, on a regular basis, as a much safer target. I witnessed more bad stuff than I personally got there. The emotional abuse was still the huge problem. Probably for J. too.)
And that definitely doesn’t mean that the person can’t be dangerous, as discussed in one of the first links (here). They might actually be more dangerous, in a sneaky and more likely to get away with it sort of style.
In that particular case, he didn’t grow up in a household where any of that abusive behavior was treated as remotely acceptable. And his own family were shocked when they found out he was treating people that way. He still managed to pick it up somewhere. 😐
But yeah, it can be harder to recognize mainly verbal and other emotional abuse as Real Abuse. It’s a lot more obvious when somebody is beating on people they’re supposed to care about.
I also grew up hearing a lot of endorsement of the classic Iron Skillet Method of dealing with abusers. Not only does that often flip over into victim blaming, it doesn’t even necessarily work. Even if the person is afraid to lay a hand on you after that.
I really do wish it were that simple sometimes, to get abusive patterns of behavior stopped. It really isn’t.
You can bet I also learned to fight, and not to tolerate any attempts at physical violence. That doesn’t really help if you’re dealing with other types of abuse or predatory behavior.
the wave of harassment allegations leads to amusing levels of tension in the discourse about whether men are “inherently” more aggressive or high libido
warm take on this discourse
“wider distribution” hypothesis applied to sexual harassing behavior – small number of “super-harassers” responsible for majority of harassment, mean level of sexual harassment is relatively low, women more average, therefore most super harassers are men
So I know this study is from 2002 but it’s kind of the seminal study on this sort of thing. Also all of this information was collected from men who had never been caught as rapists, so that’s fun. Also:
A majority of the undetected rapists in this sample were repeat offenders. Almost two-thirds of them raped more than once, and a majority also committed other acts of inter-personal violence, such as battery, child physical abuse, and child sexual abuse. These repeat rapists each committed an average of six rapes and/or attempted rapes and an average of 14 interpersonally violent acts. Within the universe of 3,698 violent acts that the 1,882 men in this sample were responsible for, the 76 repeat rapists by themselves accounted for 1,045 of that total. That is, representing only 4% of the sample, the repeat rapists accounted for 28% of the violence. Their level of violence was nearly ten times that of non-rapists, and nearly three and a half times that of single-act rapists.
The evidence that a relatively small proportion of men are responsible for a large number of rapes and other interpersonal crimes may provide at least a partial answer to an oft-noted paradox: namely, that while victimization surveys have established that a substantial proportion of women are sexually victimized, relatively small percentages of men report committing acts of sexual violence (e.g., Rubenzahl & Corcoran, 1998). In this sample of 1,882 men, 76 (4%) individuals were responsible for an estimated 439 rapes and attempted rapes.
So you know that thing where there’s someone in your DND group or intramural softball team or book club who you don’t leave alone with new members, or members of a particular gender, or who someone warned you about when you joined, or who a bunch of people have creepy stories about? That’s Spiders Harvey. This is a thing that happens.
Hey-o, another problem is that Spiders Harvey tends to isolate victims so they can’t talk to one another and realize they weren’t alone. With literal Harvey Weinstein this has started to break down, but this is true in your life as well.
Have you had a creepy interaction with someone in a group you’re part of? Talk to other people about it. Ask if it’s happened before. Report it to the group leader if you have one.
I had no idea that a dude in my social group who kept pressuring me into touching him and calling me a bitch when I wouldn’t had groped other women until I blew up about it and stories started coming out.
I had no idea that the dude who shot upskirts of me was doing it to other women in the group until I found his website where he had published the pictures and I saw two of my friends there as well.
There’s this intense pressure not to talk about this stuff, this feeling of “I don’t wanna rock the boat” or “I was stupid, I shouldn’t have let this happen to me” or “God, it’s not serious, relax, don’t be so uptight” but holy shit please talk about it.
As much as it fucking sucks please talk about this shit, tell your friends, tell people around you, and believe people when they tell you that something has happened to them.
If a creepy fucker in your friend group has groped someone and gotten away with it they’re probably going to do it again. And again. And again. Don’t let them. Tell someone what has happened, believe people when they report a problem, keep an eye out for sexually abusive behavior, and boot them the fuck out if it’s clear they’re a Spiders Harvey.
Everything is awful. Keep yourself safe.
Australian journalist Tracey Spicer called for reports of harassment in local media and received reports from 500 women naming 65 men, so that’s a solid 8:1 ratio even before you consider that probably half of those women were naming Don Burke in particular.
So you know that thing where there’s someone in your DND group or intramural softball team or book club who you don’t leave alone with new members, or members of a particular gender, or who someone warned you about when you joined, or who a bunch of people have creepy stories about? That’s Spiders Harvey. This is a thing that happens.
…no, I don’t?
Every time I hear about this kind of thing in the news, I wonder what hell groups other people are members of.
Places where I’ve specifically seen this be a problem are: newsrooms, hacker conferences, the philosophy wing of my college humanities building, D&D groups, a loose group of regulars at a coffee shop, kink groups, the local industrial and goth scene, a high school art group, comic shops, maker spaces, DC/2600 meetings, aaaaand roller derby (actually you know what, all women’s sports I’ve ever been close to that have men coaching have had this issue with some of the coaches in the league).
I think that’s it.
Do you want some theories? I have some theories!
A) Let’s be controversial right of the bat – this shit is more prevalent in geek spaces. Geeks are more used to feeling powerless and less aware of (or give lower priority to) social norms. This allows abusers to take advantage of people who are already unsure of their standing in the group or in their lives AND take advantage of the “I dunno, maybe this is normal, this doesn’t seem TOO weird” line of thought for somewhat off-kilter behavior.
ALSO MOTHERFUCKERS AND I HAVE A SERIOUS ISSUE WITH THIS – Geeks are unwilling to ostracize members of the group (at least overtly). That’s why some of this shit gets extremely toxic: if you speak up about someone hurting you you are being bad and mean and they just don’t understand social norms, why are you trying to exclude them? Gross. Gross gross gross. So sometimes what you’ll see is someone repeatedly just “not understanding social norms” until the people hurt by this leave the group for their safety, which allows the abuser to stay, and the surrounding folks who don’t want to ostracize anyone can safely say they didn’t push out the abuser over “drama” and the other people chose to leave and weren’t forced out.
There are comic shops and game shops that I don’t go to because “that’s just how he is” and “you have to be patient with him, he doesn’t socialize a lot” and “well we can’t just make him leave, he’s been around forever” are phrases that get thrown around too much.
B) This shit is extremely difficult to get rid of in casual groups that don’t have a formal hierarchy.
But we’re egalitarians, but it’s a meritocracy, but it’s not fair to have one leader.
I don’t care, write yourself some bylaws. The issue I’m currently having with 2600 meetups is rooted in this. No one is in charge, the meetings are open to the public, and we don’t have a posted harassment policy, so no one has the authority to say “hey, this abusive person is banned.” If you try to bring it up to the group as a whole (“hey, this person doesn’t listen when women specifically tell him not to touch them, let’s not have him around”) you get the “maybe he doesn’t know social boundaries” thing and a lot of wishy-washy dithering about how a ban would be enforced and nothing ends up happening. And then I have to be the asshole who says out loud in front of him and new attendees “hey, don’t be alone with this guy, and if you don’t want him touching you make that clear” and it’s building to a fight and I fucking hate it.
A long time ago I was on a board for a college group and we had to remove an elected member (it was a journalism group and we discovered that the norcal VP had plagiarized several of his articles, a clear violation of our ethics). Up to that point there had been no policy in place for how to remove someone but we had a hierarchy in place so that we could write a rule and vote on it and create a policy for how to remove someone and what they could be removed for. It was *such* a fucking relief.
Some makerspaces I know have a bit of a hierarchy, with keyholders having more say-so than regular visitors, but getting rid of (minor, like just groping not rape) abusers is damn near impossible in something like a D&D group or a book club where everyone casually gets together and no one wants to be the dick who says “you gotta go, you’re a problem and we want you out.” It’s *hard* to pull a Mean Girls in a casual context. It’s incredibly difficult and counter to all of our socialization to look a person in the face and say “we decided we don’t want to be around you anymore, don’t come back.” That’s hard to do when breaking up with a romantic partner, it feels even worse to do it to someone who is basically an acquaintance. There’s a level of intimacy there that makes it difficult to have that conversation in a group that otherwise isn’t very intimate.
C) Having a harassment policy or code of conduct in a group is vital to getting rid of people who do this shit.
So for a very very long time the DefCon code of conduct was “don’t be a dick.” That’s it. That was the whole code. Seems like you’d have a lot of leeway but it’s broad enough to be useless.
Because otherwise we should have used it to ban Cap’n Crunch decades ago. “Don’t be a dick” doesn’t include things like giving teen boys “energy massages.” Is a piggyback ride “being a dick?” What about asking someone to do pushups. What if the person asking you to do pushups is extremely famous in the scene and was foundational to creating the scene?
Cap’n Crunch was the very first thing I was warned about at my very first con when I was a wee little teen in 2005. He was known to be creepy around teen boys and young men even back then. Because I was a smoker I was assigned Draper Duty – if I saw John Draper talking to a teenager I was to go over and talk to the kid while smoking to chase Draper away. Draper hated cigarette smoke and it was the one surefire way to keep him from asking the boy in question back to his room for an “energy massage.” Boys who attended the cons were told to come ask me for a cigarette if Draper was bugging them.
That was in 2005. He finally got banned from DefCon this month. Proactively, before the con, of course, when there’s a ton of discourse about sexual harassment and how to respond to it.
DefCon says they couldn’t ban him before because they had rumors but no specific complaints against him. Their policy was nonspecific – it didn’t define “being a dick” well enough to include “rubbing your boner against teenagers while getting piggyback rides from them” as being a dick.
This was a policy that was so broad as to be useless (the current DefCon Code of Conduct isn’t much better).
So institute a code of conduct for your game nights. Put one together for your derby bouts. Buy hosting, put up a wiki, make sure the link to the code of conduct is easily findable and prominently linked on the homepage. And then enforce your code of conduct evenly. Woman who hugs people even if they say they’re not really into hugs gets the same warning as guy who “jokingly” blocked someone’s exit. Woman who feels like it’s okay to grab someone’s boobs gets the same ban as guy who feels like it’s okay to grab someone’s boobs.
D) Everything is awful and sometimes you can’t get away. (AKA why Shieldfoss’s statement can be read as victim blaming)
Every time I hear about this kind of thing in the news, I wonder what hell groups other people are members of.
Hi this has happened to me at…………literally every job I’ve had except my current job (which has different issues, like a boss who has threatened to fire me if I get pregnant).
At my last job I was sexually assaulted by a coworker (grabbing my ass in front of customers, holding me against a door demanding I kiss him) who “everyone knew about” and by my boss, the owner of the coffee shop, who two other employees then told me had approached them for sex (he got drunk after a breakup and as I was hugging him to comfort him he started forcing my head and hands onto his penis).
The moment I was signing my noncompete to work at my first real newspaper job my Editor In Chief introduced me to the paper’s film critic, who wouldn’t let me stand and instead held me in the chair and massaged my shoulders while greeting me (and I do feel that it’s pertinent to point out that I was 20 and this was a man in his 50s). For five minutes. While he looked down my shirt from behind. My boss obviously knew this kind of thing happened because *she watched it happen* but it was a reporter who told me not to stand next to the film critic at parties or staff meetings.
Now look. I am aware that this happens to me an unusual amount. From the informal polling of my friends I am aware that I have a higher-than-typical number of creepy, awful, assault-y interactions under my belt (if you’re interested in reading about revictimization this article itself isn’t great but links to several actually good studies – it’s all extremely sad and I don’t wanna talk about it). I’ve even been assaulted by women and queer folks and realize this isn’t an exclusively cis straight male issue (though yes, more straight men have done shit like this to me personally than other women or queer folks have).
What kind of groups am I hanging out with? Shooting sports groups and hackers and geeks and comic nerds and musicians and athletes and boring fucking office workers and coffee shop employees. I am hanging out with normal groups of normal people. That’s the really horrifying and upsetting thing about this avalanche of assault accusations, the dawning and ongoing realization that people who do awful things are normal and likeable and friendly and funny and they make things you like. Fun people who do things you like do awful things that would make you sick to your stomach.
It’s painful and awkward to tell a friend you’ve known for years not to come back to your monthly potluck because you heard that she touched someone inappropriately last month so instead whispers and rumors get started and suddenly a stair is missing. Everyone who’s been around knows to hop over it and you can have a good time, but new people have to be warned and there’s always the possibility that something awful is going to happen later.
What kind of groups am I hanging out with? Pretend that instead of spiders harvey or that random hacker it’s your brother you’re hearing the accusation about, or your mom, or your dad’s college roommate whose kids you were raised with and are best friends with, or your best friend, or your spouse. How easy is it to clean up the group when the problem is the person who founded the group, or is someone who has been coming for years but their accuser is a newbie? How easy is it to clean up your group when you like the person accused better than you like the accuser?
The film critic at my job who held me in a chair and stared down my shirt was someone who almost everyone thought was a perfectly nice guy. The employer who put my hands on his penis is a dad now and happily married and still owns a coffee shop where he’s adored by the people in that small town. The hacker who published photos of my ass and my underwear had provided security for conferences for over a decade and was trusted by the organizers of the conferences to help keep attendees safe – I was just some new chick stirring up trouble but he had helped them clean puke off their clothes and gone to their kid’s birthday parties.
This discussion came up a few weeks ago and I brought up the importance of making your own safe spaces and relentlessly policing them and this is *why* that is so important to me. I’ve never been assaulted in my punk band that is me and three other people, one of whom I’ve known for fifteen years. I’ve never been assaulted in the bi ladies art group that meets once a month and colors in the park. It’s goddamned amazing to know when I hang out with these little groups that I’m going to be safe and not scared at least for a little while.
But these aren’t the groups I get to be around all the time. The hacker scene has become a part of my job. Other jobs have been places where I’ve been assaulted. I thought derby would be safe but it wasn’t so I left. I thought D&D would be safe but it wasn’t so I left. I thought the comic shop would be safe but it wasn’t – you get the picture.
I’m sure @shieldfoss didn’t intend to blame victims of assault for making bad choices and choosing to be where assaulters are but that’s kind of how this “who are you associating with” attitude comes off because a) it’s hard to avoid rapists – statistically they’re more common than trans folks and folks with celiac disease and if you interact with enough people realistically you’re just going to be around a rapist at some point and b) sometimes it’s not a choice. Sometimes it’s your boss or your coworker or someone you have to network with in your field or a family member or the spouse of a family member who most people would honestly feel too awkward to challenge. I would *fucking love it* if you could say “Tom grabbed my ass and pulled up my shirt in front of customers, I’d like to make sure I’m not scheduled with him anymore” and not fear some kind of punitive change to your scheduling. It would be goddamned amazing if saying “James asked me to allow myself to get groped in front of witnesses because he didn’t believe me about my assailant” didn’t mean walking away from a group of friends you’d spent ten years building relationships because they think you’re just stirring shit.
There’s only so much you can retreat. There are only so many times you can back away. It’s tremendously upsetting to me that I’ve just accepted a certain amount of grabbing, catcalling, fondling, and attempted rape is what I have to put up with if I want to keep doing things that I enjoy doing (going to conferences, going to metal festivals, going to parties, going to monthly tech meetups) or keep doing things that I have to do (go to work, pump gas, buy groceries). It is exhausting and upsetting and I am so goddamned tired all the time.
(all of that by the way ties into the revictimization thing – you become resigned to it and get worse at asserting boundaries and accept that this is a part of life which is why some of you reading this may have noticed I’m something of a grind on this topic, gotta keep making the point that this is not normal, this is not something that you should accept, this is something to stand up and complain about even if that does mean you lose basically everyone you thought was a friend goddamnit)
I’m very happy for you if your friend group and all of your acquaintances doesn’t include at least one creepy person who just kind of gets overlooked. Keep up the good, work, exclude the creepy rapey people.
But please recognize that doing so is legitimately difficult for a lot of people.
When I was 10 I had a friend whose older brother was a child rapist. At 20 he’d been convicted of raping his step-sister and had spent time in prison for it. I didn’t know that at the time – I just went over to my friend’s house and we played in the pool and had sleepovers. Her parents never left us alone with him. They knew he was that missing stair, but he was their fucking son. They didn’t broadcast warnings or throw him out of the house, they just made sure he was never alone with his sisters or their friends ever again. And given my history I kind of wish I’d known about it so I could have made that choice myself but, fuck, I get not broadcasting that. I get trying to manage that secret and hiding that history.
That guy who put pics of my ass online? He gave one of the guys in the group his first car. He has worked with a dozen guys in the group and gotten at least five of them jobs. It’s fucking difficult to weigh “person who has been generous to me and helped me find work when I was in a tough spot” against “who is this girl again?” and I really do see why people go “well I don’t want him hurting people but I don’t want to hurt him either, we’ll just keep the problem from happening again.” In some ways it’s actually kind of admirable and I can respect that the people in that middle position are taking up the weight of trying to keep people safe and happy.
But, fuck, it doesn’t work and it sucks. It’s tacit approval, it’s saying “I’ll let you get away with it just this once” which just encourages them to get away with it again.
I’m going to say it again: everything is awful, keep yourself safe.
Please believe people who report abuse, please enforce your own boundaries, please recognize that some people have a difficult choice between “saying something about abuse” and “paying rent” and you can’t make that choice for them. And please, if at all possible, kick assault-y rapey people out of your groups, and support people who do the difficult work of saying “you aren’t welcome here anymore.”
Ugh. That became an awful lot of wordvomit. Not mad at anyone in this particular conversation, just so goddamned tired all the goddamned time.
That sounds terrible. It’s a completely different world to the one I live in where I know literally zero people who there are rumors about through my entire family, hobby groups and work environment.
I dunno, maybe I’m just a top tier introvert who people don’t tell things to but that
just
it doesn’t sound right either.
Maybe it’s a Scandinavia/America thing, where my boring bourgeoisie life just is not at any scale comparable to how things are in Average America but that sounds wrong too.
I definitely don’t blame anybody for ending up in these groups, you’re supposed to be able to just show up without ever worrying about hidden creeps, I just don’t understand how it happens because in my experience, groups don’t have hidden creeps.
I dunno, maybe I’m Good Groups Georg and my experience shouldn’t be counted.
I would fully believe that this is an America/other places issue, where Americans (unsurprisingly) assume everywhere else is like America.
I am not American: I don’t have a The Creepy One to point to in any of the groups I’ve ever been a part of, going back decades. There are socially inept ones who are ultimately harmless but have poor understanding of what is appropriate (but not in a touch-y, predator-y way), and I know people who have stopped going to groups because of that social ineptitude.
I’ve seen another post going around saying that, even if you’re a man and you don’t know about it, there is a The Creepy One, and the women just aren’t telling you about him, which strikes me as doubling down on this attitude.
Maybe it’s the type of groups that I move in (low number of women, but never uniformly men). In the queer spaces I’m adjacent to (but close enough to know the gossip), I know of people who are kept at arms length for various reasons, but not because of their being The Creepy One, more for being duplicitous.
I’m not sure how many Good Groups Georg you can have before it stops being a Georg and starts being the norm.
I don’t think that “geek spaces” is exactly it (and that the hacker cons are, by every account I’ve gotten of them going back for years, so rife with missing stairs I don’t get the impression that it could rightly be called a staircase) but spaces where people don’t think there’s an alternative. If this is the only [x] in driving distance, or the only acceptable social outlet around for [y] people, then leaving is that much harder (and expulsion that much more a nuclear option) Also, low status people are always prime targets, so social spaces for low status people are basically hunting fish in a barrel.
That’s also a prerequisite for bullying: the victim can’t leave, or is seriously discouraged from leaving, by forces outside the bully. In my own experience, bullying and sexual harassment are extremely close and somewhat overlapping categories.q
And, let’s be honest, the people who make a stink are usually either mentally unstable, making a power play, stupid/new and failing to understand that they’re trashing their own chances socially/professionally, or actually an outsider who doesn’t care.
“ALSO MOTHERFUCKERS AND I HAVE A SERIOUS ISSUE WITH THIS – Geeks are unwilling to ostracize members of the group (at least overtly). That’s why some of this shit gets extremely toxic: if you speak up about someone hurting you you are being bad and mean and they just don’t understand social norms, why are you trying to exclude them? Gross. Gross gross gross. So sometimes what you’ll see is someone repeatedly just “not understanding social norms” until the people hurt by this leave the group for their safety, which allows the abuser to stay, and the surrounding folks who don’t want to ostracize anyone can safely say they didn’t push out the abuser over “drama” and the other people chose to leave and weren’t forced out.”
This is absolutely a thing, and why I worry about some of the mental health/disability discourse on here. Yeah, it’s awful if your default instincts are “do these things that other people tend to find creepy and not know why.” But if that’s a pattern, sooner or later you might just have to go “people consistently don’t seem to like this. Maybe I should only do it around people I know very well who have told me it doesn’t bug them.”
Years of research have shown that spanking children is ineffective and potentially harmful. These facts have led the American Academy of Pediatrics to recommend, in a new policy statement published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, that parents not spank, hit or slap their children. This statement from America’s leading group of pediatricians, with 67,000 members, is an update to guidance they issued in 1988 that recommended parents “be encouraged and assisted in developing methods other than spanking” to discipline kids.
This new statement is especially significant because it reflects decades of critical new research on the effects of corporal punishment and because parents and educators put enormous trust in pediatricians for discipline advice –almost as much as they trust their own parents and spouses. So when pediatricians say not to spank, there is a very good chance that parents will listen. That is a good thing, because we need to stop hitting our children in the name of discipline. And yes – spanking is just a euphemism for “hitting children.” We do not allow adults to hit each other, but for some reason American society has decided it should be legal and even desirable for adults to hit children. We need to end this double standard and provide children with the same protection from hitting that is given to all adults.
The good news is that incremental change in norms is slowly happening. Hospitals across the country are implementing “no hit zones,” a policy that I have studied and advocated for, that do not allow hitting of any kind, including parents spanking children. City leaders in Stoughton, Wisconsin, and Madison Heights, Michigan, have made their whole cities into “no hit zones.” Just like no smoking zones, no hit zones are enforced through social pressure to change behavior, not jail time. Initiatives such as no-hit zones, especially if paired with education campaigns about effective discipline, are good steps to change the national conversation about spanking.
There are practical reasons to stop spanking. The main one is that it does not work. Some parents may say, “But it does for my child.” A child may cry and stop what she is doing in the moment, but numerous studies involving hundreds of thousands of children show that spanking does not make children better behaved in the long run, and in fact makes their behavior worse. It is hard for parents to see this in their day-to-day interactions, but the research is clear: We consistently find that the more a child is spanked, the more aggressive he or she will be in the future.
Spanking also teaches children that it is acceptable to use physical force to get what you want. It is thus no surprise that the more children are spanked, the more likely they are to be aggressive or to engage in delinquent behaviors like stealing.
Millions of parents have raised well-adjusted children without spanking. Kids thrive on attention from adults. Nothing is perfect, but telling children clearly what you expect from them and then praising them when they do it is the best approach to discipline.
In order to see reductions in spanking across our society, we need changes in the social norm that hitting children is acceptable. We already view hitting adults as not acceptable, so we just need to expand that social norm a bit to include children. Changing social norms may be challenging in regions of the country, like the South, or in some communities, like conservative Christian denominations, which have strongly held beliefs about the necessity of hitting children to discipline them. These norms can be changed, but it will likely take time and many conversations about our collective goals for our children.
The majority of us who were spanked by our parents think we “turned out OK.” Perhaps we did. But maybe we were lucky that our parents did other things, like talking with us about what behaviors they wanted to see us do in the future, that helped us develop self-control and make good behavior choices. Given the dozens of research studies demonstrating that spanking increases the risk of harm to children, it seems that we “turned out OK” in spite of spanking, not because of it. We can be the generation of parents who break the cycle of spanking and do better by the next generations of children. Let us teach them how to behave without spanking or hitting.
Just goes to show if you look long and hard enough, you can find a study somewhere by someone to prove what ever you want. Have to dig deep to find out who funded, why and what their hidden agenda is regarding this study and the desired results. There are equal studies to prove otherwise. One is how crime has risen since this thought process started several years ago. Also another study has shown that in those homes the kids have taken over and run the households.
You people are amazing, and not in a good way.
Some people are really out there thinking beating their kids is the way to cut crime rates.
@zelu4590 Got a link to that credible scientific study that says crime rates are rising?
Wait, no, you said equal studies. Got a link to that 50-year meta-analysis with literal hundreds of thousands of data points that says crime rates are rising?
I’d really like to see that, because it’d be at odds with literally all of the data.
Just goes to show the kind of actively-maintained ignorance and fear you have to live in to think that hitting children is how you make them good people.
A white man was throwing racial slurs at a Black FedEx Driver. He started Punching the driver, the FedEx driver punched him back one time, killing the man with One Punch.
He wont be indicted for the racist scumbags death either! Win!
Magnuson’s death from the fall was precipitated by “extremely poor health,” a medical examiner concluded, and the punch itself was not fatal, Senior Deputy District Attorney Adam Gibbs wrote.
Warren was within his legal right to challenge Magnuson’s “racist vitriol,” Gibbs noted, and said that Warren’s decision to confront Magnuson — rather than ignore him — was not legally significant.
Please keep up this energy of racists dropping dead on my dash.
I feel bad for the driver. Even though the guy was a racist, I’m sure he didn’t wake up that day wanting to kill someone. He just wanted to be left alone to do his job.
what the blue bloody hell is this? how on earth is that supposed be standard police practice?
Honestly if you havent seen this show/episode you won’t undertstand that child was something else smdh
It doesn’t matter how bloody ridiculous the child is. as the POLICE, you do not instigate a situation in which the child attacks you so you can then charge her for assaulting an officer or whatever else! That’s abuse of power. They have, or should have, training on how to deal with people who are being assholes. What has she taught the child, really? That the police are abusive fucks? Well yeah, they are. Have always been. And … what then?
Then how was the officer supposed to handle it? With a gentle “Ma’am, please don’t do that, that is attempted assault of an officer”? Yeah, cops can be brutal, no doubt, but this girl shouldn’t have gotten ramped up and swung. I could understand the fury if the girl was being complacent and cooperative, even if she was a little moody, then I’d say, “Hey, that’s unnecessary force, she wasn’t even a threat.” This girl in the .gif was being a threat, simple as that. If she didn’t want to get taken down the way she was, she shouldn’t have instigated the fight, simple as that. No one is going to care about her age, background, gender, whatever when she pulls the first punch. And fights, even when one side is getting neutralized, are not neat and clean like they are in the movies. It’s gonna be messy. That’s now and forever, fights aren’t clean and cute. The girl had to be a neutralized threat and that’s what happened.
I’m afraid I can’t agree. Professional security, let alone the police, are trained in deescalation techniques. The officer had a choice to escalate or deescalate, and the officer chose to escalate. The officer has the training, the officer has the power, the officer instigated by saying, “Hit me if you want to” knowing exactly what was going to happen next.
That’s straight-up instigation and entrapment on the part of the officer, who is doing pretty much the opposite (in terms of space management, body language, etc) of what is helpful to deescalate a potentially violent situation.
But I’m not even going to talk about that, because it’s already been said.
What I want to talk about is how absurdly, unnecessarily brutal and UNSAFE that takedown was. That officer has superior size and body mass on that kid; in the event that this really was an unsalvagable situation and the child was an immediate threat to self/others who needed to be physically restrained, throwing the kid into a steel bench is fucking unacceptable – that’s asking for some pretty horrific bruising at best, and a spine injury or broken bones at worst. If that child had to be restrained, the correct thing to do would have been to deflect the first punch, then use established momentum to spin her around and put her into a supine or prone position on that nice flat floor there. That would be a safe, minimally-violent restraint for safety.
But that’s not what happened here, and I can tell you exactly why. You, in fact, already identified it:
“fights, even when one side is getting neutralized, are not neat and clean like they are in the movies. It’s gonna be messy. That’s now and forever, fights aren’t clean and cute”
This isn’t the professional conduct of a person addressing someone in acute crisis, trying to deescalate the situation and maintain the safety of all involved parties, resorting to physical restraint only when absolutely necessary. This is a FIGHT. This is an adult figure with significant authority starting a fight with a kid.
The following may stray into Appeal to Authority: I work at a group home for kids who’ve been removed from their homes (usually due to abuse or neglect; these are kids with trauma histories) who can’t be cycled right into foster care because of violent behaviors that make them unsafe to themselves or unsafe to be in the general community. I used to work with the kids 6-12, and now I work with the kids 12-18.
Years I’ve worked in this field: six
Number of punches thrown at me: countless
Number of physical restraints I’ve performed: THREE.
Three physical restraints, in six years of work, across a population of over a hundred children of assorted ages. Because it is that easy to deescalate a situation – even one where punches are already being thrown – without resorting to physical takedowns, if you have very basic training in how to do so.
Words I’ve never said to a kid in crisis: “hit me if you want to”
This is not appropriate conduct. This is brutality.
And to answer your question here:
“Then how was the officer supposed to handle it?”
At the beginning of this video, when the kid is angrily running in place? Take a step back, stand in a neutral pose (hands at sides, feet shoulder-width apart, as little tension in the body as you can manage) keep a neutral expression on your face, and WAIT. Don’t say anything, don’t do anything, just wait. The kid will get tired of running in place and burn through their immediate panic energy/anger. They will reach physical and mental fatigue WAY before you do. Maintain your calm and composure, because you are a fucking adult with coping skills and can manage your stress in this situation. A kid often -can’t- because they don’t HAVE the coping skills you have.
And if you can’t, because you don’t have the coping skills? You have no fucking business being in a position of authority.
In 1919 at least 19 African American soldiers were lynched in the US, some for wearing their army uniforms in public, as they were perfectly entitled to do. In 26 American cities, black communities were attacked and people murdered in the streets, during the so-called and now forgotten “red summer”.
Similar events took place in Britain, and are just as lost to popular memory. There were nine so-called race riots across Britain in 1919. Black men who had worked on ships and in the factories, along with those who had fought for Britain at the front, were attacked by white mobs, and they and their families driven from their homes. In Liverpool, Charles Wooten, a sailor who had served Britain in the war, was killed by a mob in the Liverpool docks. His murder can only be described as a lynching.
A century on, if we as a nation are serious about remembrance, then the process of remembering must not come to an end this November. As well as remembering the service of the non-white soldiers and auxiliaries of the first world war, we have also to remember what happened to them and their dreams of justice in the months and years after the armistice.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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