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Ofsted 'advice'
Posted by Pharmakon on 2024-April-7 00:35:26, SundayIn reply to Feminism or youth rights? Time to choose. posted by diogenes on 2024-April-3 17:19:41, Wednesday
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I did start writing something in response to this post, but it is getting long and isn't finished so it will probably wind up, consistent with Diogenes' own precedent, being a new thread. If I can manage it at all. (If Diogenes or anyone else is holding their breath for that, I am very surprised.) But I did want to add a couple of things about the Daily Mail story. First, I looked up the "advice," provided by Ofsted (the UK government Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills), to which the mom refers (link below). She's right that its adopts the terms "victim" and "perpetrator" throughout. While this seems to me ill advised, and their explanation for it inadequate, it's probably true that any alternative choice would have exposed them to criticism from the self-described victims to whose accounts at Everybody's Invited they had been tasked to respond. I tried, desultorily, to imagine what terms I would have suggested instead, without success. I don't think it it is the mom's position, or Diogenes' position, that this issue did not demand a response of some kind from the educational establishment. I did not actually read the whole document. It seems to be the usual doubletalk one would expect. Doing a few word searches, I was not able to confirm that it mandates removing "perpetrators" from "any classes or spaces they share with the 'victim,'" as the mom asserts. However it probably contains enough ambiguous language to support that or any other course of action administrators might prefer. If we assume, as seems certain, that sexual assaults do occur, separating the parties involved is probably wise where the accusations are plausible, and determining which accusations are plausible is bound to be a challenging task for schools. One might say (as the mom seems to conclude) that this should be left to the police. But it is understandable that girls (or boys) who complain about being sexually assaulted would not consider doing nothing other than turning it over to the police, who will often (as in this case) lack the evidence necessary to take action, a fair resolution. I consider "No sex police" one of the three fundamental precepts of our movement (see the table above my sigpic and the link to which it refers). To this my table opposes the Nanny State. Rene Guyon, whom I frequently cite, suggests that laws relating to assault should not consider the sexual element -- assault, whatever the motive, is still assault -- and I agree. But the sythesizing theorectical construct on that line of my table -- Anarchism -- would tend to oppose mandating state schooling for young people. If the Nanny State is to force kids into schools -- it does -- it must take steps to protect them from all assaults, including sexual. I continue to believe this unsubstantiated account from one mom about what happened to her son does not provide a useful context for this debate. In looking over the Daily Mail article again, I noted that she claims her son was subjected to a "merciless campaign of intimidation and bullying": My son was called a ‘rapist’, a ‘nonce’ and told he should be castrated. He was urged to kill himself on a daily basis. He was attacked by a mob in the playground and one boy threatened to stab him. We brought all this to the school’s attention, but it failed to act — too terrified to defend a boy who now had a reputation as a sexual predator. My impression was that "nonce" is a Brit term for homosexual. While I would not agree with Tyred that there is enough here to conclude that her son was "probably autistic," this, along with the other context, does suggest to me that whatever bullying occurred may well have had deeper roots than the few instances of mutual heterosexual experimentation the mom describes -- roots she may not wish to acknowledge or explore. hugzu ;-p
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