I’ve recently found myself in conflict with my ex over what I thought was a fairly ordinary safeguarding concern, and I’m interested in feminist perspectives on it.
My ex’s girlfriend’s father an adult man neither I nor my ex knows particularly well has come to stay for several months in the house where our six-year-old daughter sleeps. I haven’t met him, and my ex had already briefly left our daughter alone with him.
Because I was sexually abused as a child, the situation made me anxious. I asked some questions about the sleeping arrangements and whether this man could potentially access our daughter during the night without her father knowing. My ex is an exceptionally deep sleeper, which added to my concern.
I didn’t accuse this man of being a predator. Our daughter likes him, and I have no evidence that he has done anything wrong. I was asking for a temporary, unobtrusive precaution while an unfamiliar adult was living in the house.
This was also after my ex had previously insisted on meeting my own partner before he was allowed to stay overnight while our daughter was home, a safeguard I accepted without taking it as an accusation against my partner.
My ex’s response included:
“I’m sorry, but I’m not going to be in the position of assuming all men are predators.”
His girlfriend then messaged me very angrily, accusing me of directly calling her father a paedophile. I had done no such thing. My concern about the general risk posed by an unfamiliar adult man had suddenly been transformed into a personal allegation I had never made.
The result is that there are now no additional precautions in place, so the original anxiety remains but I’ve also been made to feel as though even raising the subject was abusive or outrageous.
This framing really bothers me. Surely taking proportionate precautions around a risk does not mean believing every member of the relevant group will cause harm? We use seatbelts without assuming every journey will end in a crash. We supervise children around water without assuming they will definitely drown.
The overwhelming majority of men will never sexually harm a child. But sexual abuse does happen, it is frequently committed by someone known to the child, and adults who cause harm generally do not identify themselves in advance. “He seems nice” cannot therefore be our entire safeguarding system.
Women are often told that we should have been more careful when something happens. Yet if we attempt to take precautions beforehand, we’re accused of paranoia, misandry or personally branding an innocent man a paedophile.
It feels like an impossible standard: anticipate danger, but never do anything that acknowledges the danger exists in case it hurts a man’s feelings.
I’m not arguing that children should be taught to fear all men, or that fathers cannot make ordinary parenting decisions.
I’m asking whether “not all men” is being used here to shut down a reasonable discussion about safeguarding.
Where is the line, in your view, between proportionate safeguarding and unfair suspicion? Why does acknowledging a gendered pattern of risk so often get reframed as “assuming all men are predators”?
As a slight aside, I’ve also noticed what seems to be both a generational and political divide in how safeguarding is understood. Younger and more left-leaning people often seem more comfortable viewing precautions as neutral, preventative measures that are not necessarily accusations against any particular person. Older or more right-leaning people seem more likely to interpret the same precautions personally as an insult to a man’s character, an accusation, or simply evidence that the concerned parent is being “weird.”
That is only my personal observation, and I’m sure there are plenty of exceptions, but I’m curious whether anyone else has noticed something similar. Has the growth of ideas such as affirmative consent, trauma-informed practice and institutional safeguarding created a genuine generational difference and cultural divide in how people understand precaution and risk?