On the Walls of a District Board Office

1-in-5

(Maybe this post should be titled, “Help! I am stuck in the bathroom and I can’t get out.”)

The picture frame enclosed the words, “1 in 5 children will be abused or neglected before they are 18.”

We again descend into the world of slippery, social science numbers. Does that “one in five” represent a truth? Could the number be one in ten? One in twenty? Who conducted the study that led to this result? Who were the children in the sample population? Who concocted the definitions? How was abuse defined? How was neglect defined? In a time when parents are investigated by state child protective services for infractions such as letting their kids walk to school alone or play unsupervised in a fenced-in yard, these are not trivial questions.

Someone in a mostly middle-class school district felt compelled to display that “statistic” behind glass in a neutral frame in a beige hallway of the central office of a district with thirteen schools, a large district that sprawls across six communities. One in five sounds high to me, but perhaps I am naïve. I think of my previous post about transgender bathroom rights. In these times, I submit that allowing anyone and everyone into the girl’s bathroom may simply be a bad idea.

I don’t believe the government should legislate morality at the cost of child safety. The U.S. government should not define entrance requirements for restrooms! I’d say the extent of government interference in normal human interactions entered a level I’d call wacky years back. That interference has crippled education, especially in disadvantaged areas, as schools chase scores and test students for as much as 20% of a school year.

I don’t know if one in five children in this nation can expect to be abused. But numbers like that one in five ought to cause alarm bells to ring when we discuss opening all the bathroom doors to anyone who chooses to declare himself or herself a victim of gender dysphoria. All indicators are that the number of sexual predators exceeds the number of transgendered individuals.

People lie. People lie all the time. Not all people lie, but some of America’s predators can reinvent their worlds without hesitation, blinks or other tells. I’ve had a few of these kids as students. I’ve listened as they told me that I was mistaken about what I had seen. Some kids can reframe reality so well that I’ve briefly even doubted the evidence of my own eyes, before I came back into the moment and realized that, no, dammit, I saw the whole thing.

From Robert Feldman, PhD, professor of psychological and brain sciences and deputy chancellor at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, found in an article titled, “The truth behind Pathological and Compulsive Liars,” by Kathleen Doheny:

“Pathological liars are so good, Feldman agrees, ”so you won’t know when you’re being lied to.” Don’t expect remorse, either, he says. “Pathological liars will look at a situation entirely from their own perspective. They have no regard for another’s feelings about what might happen as a result of their lies,” Feldman says.”

Eduhonesty: Idealism must be tempered with realism. Realistically, our kids are not fodder for social experimentation. They are children. They deserve to feel safe and protected. We don’t let people walk around the streets of America (most of America) with guns holstered on their hips. Why should we let any man who chooses enter a girl’s restroom?

I’m not anti-firearm, but I support reasonable limitations on firearms. It’s best to keep guns out of bars, for example. I’m not anti-transgender. If we could control for predators, I’d be willing to sign off on the everyone-in-the-bathroom-of-their-choice movement.

But that one-in-five statistic may be true. We cannot control for predators. The news reminds of that fact every single day. Given the dangers of daily life in this society, I think mandating free access for everyone to all restrooms should not become a civil rights issue that trumps common sense.