Women might be capable, we all have fingers and toes, but women just don't do it in anything remotely like the numbers that men do. Women aren't socialised or hard-wired for it in the same way. Like I said, I work in the field, my knowledge is experiential rather than stats based, although I'm fully conversant with the research. I've worked with victims and offenders for years and I’ve trained with some of the best in the world.
I always find it funny when men cite anti-discrimination legislation in cases like this... at the end of the day it's about protecting kids through managing risk, and the risk is being accurately assessed in this case. Whether it offends you or not, it's right that males are the core population of sex offenders, and more than that, they're the sole offender group who would commit this kind of high risk sex offence. I think the community expectation is that people are more concerned with protecting children than trying to cry discrimination when the risk policies are evidence based.
Put it the other way, if airlines were successfully challenged (which I don't believe could happen because of the overwhelming evidence in support of what they're doing) and men could sit next to UM's, you'd without a doubt see a spike in incidents of child abuse on aircraft. The you have the jurisdictional complexity of prosecution where it's an international flight, the fact that the child may not have access to good supports in the destination country... you're talking about massively increasing the risk of victimisation of children, placing them in a situation where it's even more traumatic than if abused where they have the ability to access supports in a familiar environment, making the process even more traumatic for them... for what? So men have the privilege of sitting next to a UM? So they don't get asked to swap seats once or twice in a decade? To my mind that position is an extraordinarily selfish one to adopt.
Anyway, I'm done hijacking the thread, just my thoughts.
