I tell my kindergarten students that they have to ask before they hug someone, and emphasize that they have the right to say no if they don't want one.

This. My mom also gave me the “creepy adult men may try to take advantage of your inexperience for the next year or two” lecture to me when I hit puberty. I’m paraphrasing badly but basically she warned me about a specific subset of guys who prey on young teen girls.

I’ve argued this point myself. Adults do more to put children in vulnerable situations than to send them to into public restrooms. So many people I know, especially those in positions of authority don’t really want to “rock the boat.” They don’t want to be the noisy one calling out inappropriate behavior or…

My mother, on the other hand, thinks I was remarkably, somewhat sadly, tame compared to her years in the 60s and 70s in New York... it all comes down to perspective.

I walk my son and the other children through the choice of “body sovereignty.” you don’t have to accept the hug, and you don’t ‘deserve’ one just because you asked for it.

It is likely the tip of the iceberg. When the Boston Globe first reported on sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, they had no idea what the end result would be. They had documents indicating the pervasiveness of the abuse, but only a few victims willing to go public. After seeing the community support the victims and…

Print media is dying, but it’s far from irrelevant and that is the tragedy.

That unwanted affection thing! I have a three-year-old and I often have to be firm about not making her receive hugs from her little friends because their parents think it’s “cute”. She doesn’t like it and doesn’t want it. It drives me crazy.

it’s seriously serious out there.

The feigned cluelessness of institutions always gets me.

#allreligions

Teenagers having sex is Obama’s fault? I can see how an intellectual, urbane, biracial President could fuel my drive as a middle aged bleeding heart liberal... but teenagers?

As you infer, they said the exact same thing about priests during the Boston scandal, many of whom who most influential during the 1970s and 1980s... “street priests” like Paul Shanley who with “hip” to young people experimenting in a fluid sexual culture and appealed to them on that basis. The NYT has written some…

They didn’t expect students to be believed? They thought they could sell it as series of one offs/bad apples and not systemic, condoned abuse that clearly went on for decades as pedos got the word as to which schools were “good” places to apply?

There are times I wonder if it wouldn’t be easier to list things that aren’t plagued by sexual abuse. Fuck.

My brother went to boarding school and when I was talking to him yesterday, he told me all kinds of crazy ass stories about sexual shenanigans at his school. One involved his lacrosse coach and a fifteen year old, and when it came out, the coach shot himself in the head on campus. His roommate had sex with the art…

Perhaps while sexual exploitation has been around forever it is now treated as the crime it should be, rather than the dirty little secret that people would prefer to forget?

That bit stopped me in my tracks too - ‘when norms and expectations across society were different.’

I went to one of these schools. My story involves a soccer coach handy with all balls, but mostly just my best friend’s. (A senior. Very sexually sophisticated.) They had a full-on relationship that everyone knew about; one which, to this day, my friend claims was healthy and fun. The coach looked like Jason Priestly…

“... public schools, where one federal study found nearly 10 percent of students are targets of unwanted sexual attention by educators in grades K-12.” - from the original article