Poll of the Day > How do you feel about male baby-sitters?

(+) Yeah! (+)

I had one as a kid. Great baby sitter. Taught my brother and I how to beat super mario world.

I would never use one if I had kids.

I wouldn't trust a male babysitter any less than a female one. That said, you should carefully vet anyone that you're leaving your kids with, regardless of whether they're male or female.

(I checked and the stats do seem to bare that out, although statistics can be misleading and I'd be open to opposing arguments).

If you're going with the statistical approach, since they have a son they're actually statistically safer with a male babysitter. Male predators are substantially more likely to target girls while female predators are more likely to target boys. About 70-80% of male survivors of CSA report that their abuser was a woman.

So I just looked after my niece (11) and Nephews (13 and 6) on Thursday and Friday for 5 hours each day. It's the first time I've done anything like this but my sister got a part time job and the kids are off school for six weeks so I helped her out and will do on the same days for six weeks. Basically I was and will be a male babysitter. I don't see the issue at all. Providing they do their job right it's fine. If anyone is wary of a male babysitter being a wrong un then they should also know some female babysitters are just as bad if not worse in some cases.

Zangulus posted...

Why is this even a question?

Also more likely doesnt really mean anything in and of itself. Whats the increased danger? Is there demographics to add to this?

https://www.nsvrc.org/sites/default/files/publications_nsvrc_factsheet_media-packet_statistics-about-sexual-violence_0.pdf

https://web.archive.org/web/20200306164458/https://www.casa.org.au/casa_pdf.php?document=statistics

McSame_as_Bush posted...

https://www.nsvrc.org/sites/default/files/publications_nsvrc_factsheet_media-packet_statistics-about-sexual-violence_0.pdf

I question that "96% of people who abuse children are male" factoid. The cited source is a different document by the same group and the link in that PDF no longer works.

I've never seen the figure reported as *that* skewed. Last I looked on this (which was, admittedly, a few years ago now) the number of women convicted of sexual abuse against children was only about 10% of the total number of convicted abusers, but that was also generally seen by criminology researchers as a massive undercount due to various cultural biases that still persist in the justice system, such as the idea that "women can't be rapists", or that "boys/men should always appreciate/enjoy sexual attention from a woman"; accordingly, sexual crimes committed by women - especially if the victim is a man or boy - have one of the single lowest charging (i.e. the number of complaints made to police that actually wind up with a charge filed by prosecutors) and conviction (i.e. the number of court cases that actually result in a finding of guilt) rates of any violent crime.

I did a research paper on this years ago, and most of the analysis I reviewed suggested that female predators probably accounted for ~40% of the total number of predators, give or take ~5%. I even found one study that suggested that female abusers of children might constitute as many as 60% of the total number of abusers, but I never saw a number anywhere close to that in any other study, so I feel pretty confident in saying it was probably an outlier. I seem to recall there was something weird in their methodology as well, but it's been a long time and I honestly don't remember the specifics.

I don't question that. Men are sexual abusers more often than women, we are the predators, the ones that go out of our way to find sex.

Women aren't anything like that. You're just playing the game with odds. Why put children at more risk? You're not doing men any favors, why put men in a position where they could ruin their lives?

You could probably curb sex abuse more often by keeping men away from kids more. And we do.

Yellow posted...

You could probably curb sex abuse more often by keeping men away from kids more. And we do.

The fuck....

wwinterj25 posted...

The fuck....

Literally just looking at the extremely underreported statistics and coming to the most obvious conclusion.

Not personal, don't care.

Yellow posted...

Men are sexual abusers more often than women, we are the predators, the ones that go out of our way to find sex.

The idea that women don't like sex and won't "go out of their way" to find it is a view of sexuality that's been out of date for at least 70 years now.

Yellow posted...

Women aren't anything like that.

Women are, in fact, like that.

Yellow posted...

You're not doing men any favors, why put men in a position where they could ruin their lives?

So, in your worldview, innocent and unassuming men suddenly turn into pedos if left unattended around children, while women are chaste, sexually-inviolate virgins with nary a dirty thought corrupting their innocent nature?

I'm honestly not sure which group should be more insulted by those characterizations.

Yellow posted...

You could probably curb sex abuse more often by keeping men away from kids more. And we do.

The numbers do not support this conclusion.

1. Men have never been more involved in the parenting/childcare sphere. The average father today is far more involved with their children than they were even 30 years ago.
2. Sexual assault rates against children have dropped roughly 60% over that same 30 year timeframe.

Seems to fly in the face of what you're suggesting.

slacker03150 posted...

I had one as a kid. Great baby sitter.

Same. He was a Chinese foreign exchange student and cooked authentic Chinese meals for us. His English was rough but he was a genuinely great guy. Haven't thought about him in years, wonder what he's up to these days...

Yellow posted...

I don't question that. Men are sexual abusers more often than women, we are the predators, the ones that go out of our way to find sex.

Women aren't anything like that. You're just playing the game with odds. Why put children at more risk? You're not doing men any favors, why put men in a position where they could ruin their lives?

You could probably curb sex abuse more often by keeping men away from kids more. And we do.

Yes because women are such pure, angelic creatures that there has never once been a case in humanity's history of them molesting children.

Anyway as long as you know and trust any babysitter well enough that's what matters most.

Lil_Bit83 posted...

Anyway as long as you know and trust any babysitter well enough that's what matters most.

I agree with this

Doesn't matter, rapist is a rapist, regardless of gender.

I had a male baby sitter that taught me how to cook things and some Spanish.

I had a female baby sitter that snuck in my room while I slept and assaulted me.

so...
personal experience aside, all baby sitters should be background checked and vetted.

Most sexual abusers are people the victim knows so you're better off hiring a complete stranger lmao

Jen0125 posted...

Most sexual abusers are people the victim knows so you're better off hiring a complete stranger lmao

The same about kidnappers, IIRC

darkknight109 posted...

bububu

Men are more likely to be child molesters than women.
Most men are not child molesters.

A child is unlikely to be molested by any given man.
A child is more likely to be molested by a man than a woman.

All of the above statements are correct and are not really debatable going by every statistic we have on this anywhere.

I'm not some super radical feminist that wants to start removing men from children everywhere. All this is to say there's a good reason we don't have male babysitters. Men's lives won't be ruined by it and their feelings shouldn't be hurt.

If I have a choice between a male and a female babysitter, I'm picking the woman. Every time. This is basically stat optimization.

IronBornCorps posted...

so...
personal experience aside, all baby sitters should be background checked and vetted.

Pretty much. Statistics only matter if you're selecting randomly from the population they describe. Any potential candidate should be screened to such an extent that you're dealing with individuals instead of statistics, at which point statistics become largely irrelevant.

Yellow posted...

All this is to say there's a good reason we don't have male babysitters.

That "good reason" has pretty much nothing to do with sexual assault rates and everything to do with gender norms. Women have been traditionally seen as caretakers, therefore women are considered the default for child care. Any other justifications you see are post-hoc rationalizations for that internalized gender role.

Yellow posted...

I don't question that.

You should. A 96/4 split when the null hypothesis is ~50/50 is massively statistically significant, to the point where you should not take any such claim at face value. It happens, certainly, but with statistics as fickle as sexual assault rates (which are massively under-reported regardless of gender and must therefore be taken with several grains of salt before being compared like that), you need pretty rigorous study before accepting that outcome. And that's exactly what Dark did, finding that the 96% claim is not particularly well-substantiated by the study that claimed it, nor reflected in other literature on the subject. Therefore, it should not be accepted as factual. Choosing not to question it despite having this pointed out is extremely poor decision making.

Yellow posted...

we are the predators, the ones that go out of our way to find sex.

Women aren't anything like that.

You made a topic literally yesterday about a girl asking you out.

MeatiestMeatus posted...

Haven't thought about him in years, wonder what he's up to these days

I'm not positive because I didn't keep in contact after we no longer needed a baby sitter, but I think someone told me he passed away from cancer around the time I was graduating high school. Hope I heard wrong because he was a good guy.

Tbh I don't want to do any more research on this subject so you say what you want. Let's just say I have my anecdotes. Too many.

Btw, she didn't ask me out, she was just trying to goad me into asking her out.

All I'm going to say is that I've never heard of anyone being molested by their stepmom...

As a guy, I get nervous when helping out with little kids because I don't know at what age it becomes weird/how to make it not weird. I have absolutely no attraction to them, I just don't like that it feels weird for me to take care of someone's kid :/

McSame_as_Bush posted...

because SIL is insane

call me a sexyist man, but i would worry about my fellow bros marrying crazy chicks.
inb4 banned for sexism.

Yellow posted...

I don't question that. Men are sexual abusers more often than women, we are the predators, the ones that go out of our way to find sex.

Women aren't anything like that. You're just playing the game with odds. Why put children at more risk? You're not doing men any favors, why put men in a position where they could ruin their lives?

You could probably curb sex abuse more often by keeping men away from kids more. And we do.

I think it'd be better to frame it regarding what can better protect the children beside simply assuming men are more suspect:
1) Educate your children - and educate yourself. Foster excellent communication with your children and comfort with communicating.
2) Honestly, I'm trying to think of others like 'better screening' etc, but really, only #1 is paramount.

Yellow posted...

All I'm going to say is that I've never heard of anyone being molested by their stepmom...

It happens. A cursory look at google will show hundreds of shocking and disturbing cases. Idk even this kind of idea sounds like something kind of tied up a in a patriarchal assumption that only men are capable of abusing their families/children.

Yellow posted...

All I'm going to say is that I've never heard of anyone being molested by their stepmom...

Yellow posted...

Tbh I don't want to do any more research on this subject

Theres your first fuckin problem, champ.

I think male baby-sitters are as good as female ones. I do not like gender stereotypes.

Cacciato posted...

Theres your first fuckin problem, champ.

I know like 4 of them. If you can figure out why they do it you can tell me.

Maybe it's gender roles and under reporting. Which means I likely know 4 female unreported molesters. Yeah ok.

I'm sorry that I live in the fucking real world here.

Ok, so I did the research, and I found a good source for what you're talking about.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizzo_%28pipe%29

Yeah now I can see that both men and women rape children just as much. Every statistic is a lie.

No, every single website, institution, and branch of government has absolutely no clue what they're talking about because men and women are equal. Every single outlet says 80-90%.

None of these first 4 google searches are as smart as you, good thing I'm listening to your advice
https://screenandreveal.com/pedophile-statistics/
https://www.raace.org/get-educated/statistics-information/
https://www.ywca.org/wp-content/uploads/WWV-CSA-Fact-Sheet-Final.pdf
https://safeatlast.co/blog/child-sexual-abuse-statistics/

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/4/8/2/AAbsMXAAEtoa.png

Lmao. Stick to posting about your awkward love life, dude.

Cacciato posted...

Lmao. Stick to posting about your awkward love life, dude.

At least I'm posting links here. The least adjl could do is post something backing up anything he's saying so I don't have to go digging through 20 pages of child molestation fun facts.

Yellow posted...

At least I'm posting links here. The least adjl could do is post something backing up anything he's saying so I don't have to go digging through 20 pages of child molestation fun facts.

If I post links showing that women statistically underperform at math, does that mean that I shouldn't hire a woman as a math professor?

ReturnOfFa posted...

If I post links showing that women are statistically worse at math, does that mean that I shouldn't hire a woman as a math professor?

Well they're not, first off

And if they were, you would have to indiscriminately screen for the ones that are good enough at math to teach math

And then we would have to address the root of the serious unfair issue of women being worse at math, which in any given society most likely be patriarchy and denial of education, which is relatively a much easier problem to solve than sex drives, something that science has failed at every attempt at altering or controlling

But see, none of that involves denying, in this hypothetical, women being worse at math

Yellow posted...

Well they're not, first off

And if they were, you would have to indiscriminately screen for the ones that are good enough at math to teach math

And then we would have to address the root of the serious unfair issue of women being worse at math, which in any given society most likely be patriarchy and denial of education, which is relatively a much easier problem to solve than sex drives, something that science has failed at every attempt at altering or controlling

But see, none of that involves denying, in this hypothetical, women being worse at math

Yes, I was using a hypothetical - I'm aware of research showing performance equality.

Of course any underperformance would relate to patriarchy and denial of education. I believe your understanding of male 'sex drive' is skewed here and linked to patriarchal ideas - a majority of abusers may be male, but that does NOT mean that a majority of men are abusers. Tying 'sex drive' to a desire to abuse is very odd, and differentiating between female and male sex drive is odd too.

Science has failed at every attempt to alter or control people's sex drives? IDK I feel like treating men as capable of emotion, sensitivity, oppeness and raising young men to live these values is important, not saying that men have an inherently disturbed and elevated sex drive.

We too could ban men from roads because they are inherently more aggressive drivers and cause more accidents.

Or we could focus on the root issue of aggression in men that is not inherent nor proven to be scientifically immovable. Case-in-point - the healthy men.

actually wait we just make insurance more expensive for them in my province lol

I am not trying to tell you that a majority of men are abusers. That is not what I am saying.

All statistics tell the same story;
A man is more likely than a woman to be an abuser.
A man is most likely not an abuser.

That is all. This is taking into account biases in the data. Still, professionals estimate most abusers are men. I don't know what button I pushed here. Reality fucking sucks.

If science figures out how to prevent men from warping their sex drives into a disgusting thing like this, then science will save the day yet again, and I will be happy.

I had one when I was a kid and he exposed himself to me and my sister, saying "I'll show you mine if you show me yours." Luckily that's all he did was pull his dick out. I would probably steer clear of a male babysitter if I had kids.

ReturnOfFa posted...

We too could ban men from roads because they are inherently more aggressive drivers and cause more accidents.

I'd love that tbh

Yellow posted...

Tbh I don't want to do any more research on this subject so you say what you want. Let's just say I have my anecdotes. Too many.

And that's poor decision making.

Yellow posted...

Btw, she didn't ask me out, she was just trying to goad me into asking her out.

That's just asking you out with extra steps. Either way, she took the initiative.

Yellow posted...

I know like 4 of them. If you can figure out why they do it you can tell me.

Maybe it's gender roles and under reporting. Which means I likely know 4 female unreported molesters. Yeah ok.

I'm sorry that I live in the fucking real world here.

If we assume a null hypothesis of a 50/50 split (which is reasonable here), your observed 100/0 split with a sample size of 4 yields a Z value of 2.00 and a P value of ~0.977. That means a 97.7% chance that what you observed was due to random chance instead of being evidence that the null hypothesis has failed. Thresholds vary for what P value is needed to be conclusive, but in the vast majority of cases anything above 0.10 is considered to represent the absence of sufficient evidence to reject the null hypothesis.

So no, you likely don't know 4 unreported female molesters, but n=4 is about as statistically meaningful as my most recent fart.

Yellow posted...

None of these first 4 google searches are as smart as you, good thing I'm listening to your advice

Let's see...

https://www.raace.org/get-educated/statistics-information/ - Claims 80-90%, no citation for this figure

https://safeatlast.co/blog/child-sexual-abuse-statistics/ - Claims 96%, no citation for this figure, home security blog that can be expected to exaggerate risks to sell more stuff

https://www.ywca.org/wp-content/uploads/WWV-CSA-Fact-Sheet-Final.pdf - Claims 96%, cites the following:

• https://www.bishop-accountability.org/specialtopics/abuse-data/2002-04-Abel-Harlow-Child.pdf - Studies a sample that's 96% men to begin with. Does not present conclusions about the gender demographics of abusers, but if you look at the breakdown of their sample groups, the group that researchers believed was lying about molesting children has a ~50/50 split, and the group that admitted to molesting children is 66% male and 34% female. This data is, however, largely self-reported and therefore somewhat suspect, in addition to being almost 25 years old. Either way, does not support the 96% figure cited
• https://www.nsvrc.org/sites/default/files/publications_nsvrc_factsheet_media-packet_statistics-about-sexual-violence_0.pdf - This is the same one linked earlier that claims 96%. As Dark already pointed out, it cites the same organization, but the link is broken, so this figure is effectively uncited
• Based on the analysis of these citations, this 96% figure is effectively uncited

https://screenandreveal.com/pedophile-statistics/ - Claims 80-90%, cites the following:

• https://screenandreveal.com/sex-offenders-stats/ - Does not specifically mention 80-90%. Does cite 96% of registered sex offenders being male, but that's less a reflection of the actual demographics of abusers and more a reflection of which abusers society and the justice system are more concerned about. Among this source's citations, only one says anything about the actual proportion (claiming 90%), which in turn cites https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9846781/, but the trail goes cold there because I can't read the full text. This citation yields a similar figure, but can't be verified and doesn't support the actual claim
• https://www.raace.org/get-educated/statistics-information/ - Claims 80-90%, but as mentioned above, is uncited
• https://theweek.com/articles/479986/pedophilia-guide-disorder - Claims 94% (specifically, "most are male, though about 6% are female"), no citations for that figure
• Indirectly links to http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8022861.stm - Claims 80-90%, with pseudo-citations for those figures (it mentions some specific names/studies, but doesn't actually link to them or provide enough information to find them without doing some hunting), but also delves into how fundamentally difficult it is to get an accurate read on it and how likely it is that those numbers are much lower than the real ones due to the many social factors encouraging under-reporting. This citation yields a similar figure and I would call it somewhat credible, but it gives the figure with a healthy dose of asterisks and therefore should not be treated as conclusive
• Based on the analysis of these citations, this 80-90% figure is not adequately cited, though further links may yield enough information to find something more definite.

It would seem that the first four google results are indeed not as smart as me, so I guess it is a good thing you're listening to my advice. Glad we're on the same page.

Yellow posted...

And if they were, you would have to indiscriminately screen for the ones that are good enough at math to teach math

Oh hey, you've found the point! Women being hypothetically worse at math doesn't mean women should hypothetically be categorically excluded from math teaching positions. Every candidate, regardless of gender, should be screened for their mathematical ability, effectively eliminating the impact of the statistical differences by artificially selecting successes. If a thousand people each roll a d6 for you and you record the first 10 sixes you find, it doesn't really matter if some of them have dice that have 4 sixes and some only have 1, you're still going to get a sheet full of sixes.

Whatever the real gender demographics of sexual abuse, you need to be screening anyone you hire to look after your kids and teaching your kids to recognize and respond appropriately to sexual abuse. That's going to eliminate most or all of the harm a sexually abusive babysitting candidate could do, such that the difference between a 0.1% risk from a female babysitter and a 0.4% risk from a male one is pretty negligible even if we accept an 80/20 split as being the real proportion. That makes discriminating by gender unnecessary.

Yellow posted...

I am not trying to tell you that a majority of men are abusers. That is not what I am saying.

All statistics tell the same story;
A man is more likely than a woman to be an abuser.
A man is most likely not an abuser.

That is all. This is taking into account biases in the data. Still, professionals estimate most abusers are men. I don't know what button I pushed here. Reality fucking sucks.

If science figures out how to prevent men from warping their sex drives into a disgusting thing like this, then science will save the day yet again, and I will be happy.

It's not a big deal, no worries. I think the button is just literally "I'd hire a male babysitter" lol.

ReturnOfFa posted...

I think the button is just literally "I'd hire a male babysitter" lol.

It's a little more than that. It's an attitude that reinforces restrictive gender roles for both men and women, with consequences that go quite a bit further than a teenage boy having to work at mcdonalds instead of babysitting the neighbour's kids. It keeps men out of ECE, which means most boys don't get male teachers until middle school, which not only reinforces the idea that child care is "for women" (if you spend your formative years never seeing a man taking care of kids, you're inevitably going to think it's not normal), but also contributes significantly to the overdiagnosis (and subsequent overmedication) of ADHD in young boys, which can translate into poorer long-term academic outcomes and higher rates of criminal activity later in life. For that matter, it's even got smatterings of the same pearl-clutching fear that leads to trans women being assaulted for trying to use the "wrong" bathroom, which I hope all of us agree is bad.

At its core, this is a question of saying "I'm not comfortable with hiring a male babysitter," but rather than questioning why that discomfort exists and whether or not it should, he's just latched on to whatever statistics he can find to support it, ignored the context or the magnitude of the actual numbers, and called it a day. That's not good critical thinking, as evidenced by the obvious disconnect between "I'm not saying a majority of men are abusers" and "I would never hire a man as a babysitter because of the risk of abuse." Acknowledging and avoiding inappropriate generalizations at an intellectual level while continuing to act on them in practice is just hypocritical.

adjl posted...

It's a little more than that. It's an attitude that reinforces restrictive gender roles for both men and women, with consequences that go quite a bit further than a teenage boy having to work at mcdonalds instead of babysitting the neighbour's kids. It keeps men out of ECE, which means most boys don't get male teachers until middle school, which not only reinforces the idea that child care is "for women" (if you spend your formative years never seeing a man taking care of kids, you're inevitably going to think it's not normal), but also contributes significantly to the overdiagnosis (and subsequent overmedication) of ADHD in young boys, which can translate into poorer long-term academic outcomes and higher rates of criminal activity later in life. For that matter, it's even got smatterings of the same pearl-clutching fear that leads to trans women being assaulted for trying to use the "wrong" bathroom, which I hope all of us agree is bad.

At its core, this is a question of saying "I'm not comfortable with hiring a male babysitter," but rather than questioning why that discomfort exists and whether or not it should, he's just latched on to whatever statistics he can find to support it, ignored the context or the magnitude of the actual numbers, and called it a day. That's not good critical thinking, as evidenced by the obvious disconnect between "I'm not saying a majority of men are abusers" and "I would never hire a man as a babysitter because of the risk of abuse." Acknowledging and avoiding inappropriate generalizations at an intellectual level while continuing to act on them in practice is just hypocritical.

Definitely a big part of my thought process. I feel it just reinforces all the negativity and acts like it's set in stone. I babysat as a teenager, but didn't get a lot of opportunities to do so.

CasualJimm posted...

As a guy, I get nervous when helping out with little kids because I don't know at what age it becomes weird/how to make it not weird. I have absolutely no attraction to them, I just don't like that it feels weird for me to take care of someone's kid :/

I can't imagine it being that bad. Granted I've only looked after my niece and nephews so they are not a strangers kids but it can't be that much different. With that said I personally wouldn't want babysitting as a job. Too much responsibilities and if I'm going to make that much effort to look after a kid it's going to be my own (if I ever have them) or family members.

Yeah, I just look at kids like little humans. They're entertaining. And it's nice to be there for them. They're usually more honest than adults.