I have recently been required to attend two training programs as a parent wanting to be involved in my child’s activities. Once is the “Youth Protection Training” offered online by the BSA or Boy Scouts of America. The other is the “Protecting God’s Children for Adults” program offered by Virtus, and organization representing the Catholic Church.
First both programs are available to take for the general public. Signup is online. I’m not sure if what their policy states, but practically all you have to do is first sign up online, and login for the BSA or show up for Virtus.
https://myscouting.scouting.org
I am not going to review every detail of the programs nor should I. If you want to know all about them, just sign up and participate yourself.
The BSA
First I want to say the BSA has really thought about how security and trust works here. Major kudos for their adult ‘buddy’ system. No child is to be alone with any adult but their own parent, ever. Anyone who has worked in security long enough knows that access means suspicion and liability. Preventing children from ever being alone with a single adult as a policy makes sense. This is new from when I was a child and a major change, for the better.
The lack of a physical class is not ideal, but understandable. The problem with online classes is the video is carefully vetted. This is good for not glossing over important points, but poor for connecting with people. The BSAs approach is relying more on carefully thought out rules, teaching them and sticking to that. It’s all about controlling physical access to the kids. Partly though adult pairing and partly through restricting isolated areas.
One excellent idea was the immediate confiscation of electronic devices the second they are used to take a picture of restricted areas or behaviors. This is sensible since MOST devices can communicate somehow, and once a picture or video gets out there will be no controlling it.
The regular gammit of being wary of touching, internet friends, privacy during bathroom activities, etc. They did well on general violence vs molestation as well. Hazing and bullying gets a good amount of attention, including the perils of letting junior leaders make independent decisions without supervision. They made the differentiation that children can also molest other children though all the video sequences depicted adult actors.
I should mention that the written texts are even better, and more detailed than the video training, but less likely to be read in full by parents.
Virtus
Completely different experience than the BSA training. They went right for the empathy to gets parents attention and it works! Major kudos for the video strategy. Instead of getting actors to depict (and interpret) child molesters, the actor and interviewees in the video are actual child molesters. This is useful both to parents who are less experienced with their children’s security and people who further study immoral acts. Less experienced parents get to see just how normal the deviants act is (even while casually discussing some serious perversion), and folks more in the know get to look for subtle ques that could amount to future tip offs.
For example I am fairly sure that the first molester, Ronnie, is a psychopath. He is very cold and callous to his acts, even while displaying warm conversational social ques. He has adopted some clinical and police lingo when discussing his own acts. He started molesting when he was ten years old. And the biggest tip, he displayed some rapid shifting between scripts at the end of the first video. Not just stuttering words, but stuttering ideas. Somebody give that man the Hare.
As a note using the videos of actual child molesters can backfire in the future. Anger was brewing, leaving people open to manipulation. After the training I pointed out to the man in front of me his veins were popping out of his arms and he looked as if he would rip his metal folding chair in half. Though I saw NO evidence of marketing or propaganda techniques during the training, such techniques could be used in the future. Overall I would say the benefits outweigh the risk. People have been in the dark long enough.
Another major surprise was the Deacon who lead he discussion between conversations. Among his qualifications, he is an ex LEO (law enforcement officer), was friends with a priest molester who he later investigated and busted, and has had several close interactions with child abuse cases, including near misses with his own children. I seriously doubt all the Virtus leaders are this involved and pertinent, but it’s a very good sign he the one performing the training at that church.
The Virtus curriculum was reasonably secular. It was surprisingly technological with some good suggestions like disabling the internet for latch key kids, and criticism of social networking (like Facebook.) Did a fair amount on the dangers of casual touching opening a door to normalcy.
In contrast to the physical access controls of the scouts, there were no hard and fast rules about privacy. While it was ‘to be avoided’, it’s not clear what the church is doing to limit access. The scouting policy had a sensible policy here for private conversations to be had out of earshot, but in sight. This also opens the door to hazing, bullying and possibly even molestation from other children.
Psychology
The lack of psychological discussion was disappointing. It seems to me that child molesters are one of two categories. Psychopaths who see all interactions in terms of masters and slaves. Molesting psychopaths may have molested as children which they accepted as dutiful slaves. Of course when they became an adult and the master, they expect the same privilege in return. In addition, psychopaths may have simply been presented with what they perceived to be a ‘golden opportunity’ and decided to molest because they thought it would be fun and they could not be caught. Empathic children who’s metaminds were incomplete or had blank slates when they were molested, may also become molesters. Repeated molestation added ‘sex with children’ to their consciences groups of normal ‘moral’ behavior. Again kudos to Virtus for drilling that home. In any of the three cases, molesters really think or feel their behavior is normal. They will not betray their intentions.
Psychology is important because it reveals the greatest risk. A psychopath with no past history of receiving or giving abuse, and no perceptible grooming behavior may perceive a golden opportunity to sexually abuse a child, and take it. An intelligent psychopath in the sociopath stage can show NO signs of being a psychopath at all! It can come out of the blue! The key to successful child protection is preventing golden opportunities with your child and ANY adult or child.
Now it is possible, most likely through collusion for two emapths who have normalized child molestation to work together inside the BSA. But they have disadvantages to psychopaths in subterfuge. They are subject to the kind heartstring tugging that Virtus practices in it’s training. While their emotional selves are twisted up, they still operate like any emotional people with their numerous weaknesses and tells. This is well documented elsewhere by conventional psychology.
Ratings
So together both programs make an excellent child protection program. Virtus has superior discussion of detecting empathic child molesters, while the BSA has the best policy for preventing golden opportunities.
The Catholic Church (Virtus) gets three stars for superior rhetoric appealing and dedicated to detecting empathic molesters, but failure to control physical access. This is probably a symptom of a culture in which all people are redeemable. This is at odds with the evidence of how psychopaths think. Psychopaths are oblivious to long term risk like punishment from God in the afterlife (assuming they actually capable of true faith in God, which is highly unlikely.)
The BSA gets five stars for dealing with all scenarios. While psychopaths can never really trust each other, two or more empathic molesters could come up with a pact to exploit the loophole. Problem is at least one of the adults must be a scout leader, who are subject to background checks. While not perfect, this is a best effort, and I do not know of a better system at this time.
