ALL right, I admit it, I may have been rummaging in the back of my wardrobe, found my wowser hat and decided to try it on.
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Or it could be that I read too many newspapers, but the thought of my kids at some sort of schoolies event sends chills down my spine.
Now, given that my oldest is not even a teenager yet, I have plenty of time to fret over how my kids will celebrate the end of their school years, but as an outsider looking in, the view is pretty scary.
And it’s not the behaviour of the teens that worries me as much as those who try to take advantage of them. It just strikes me that there is so much room for teens to be exploited by the unscrupulous.
As a parent, it’s our job to teach our kids about the world and all its lumps and bumps.
And one of the most vexing of those lessons must be how you warn your kids about mongrels in the world who are waiting for an opportunity to exploit them.
So how do you do it? How do you warn your teens about the few rotten apples in the world without resorting to victim blaming? Can it even be done?
At what point does warning our kids about possible exploitation by scumbags cross the line?
Writer Mia Freedman caused a storm recently when she wrote that she was planning to warn her daughter about what she believed were the risks of consuming too much alcohol.
As others pointed out, this could all too easily be twisted into a “she asked for it” scenario because “she got drunk and made herself vulnerable”.
I suspect Freedman just wanted her kids to know that not every person they encounter in life is a decent one.
How many people, in another example, would have read about the NSW teen who only days ago was poisoned by methanol that was put into her drink in a bar in Bali and thought to themselves that she should have known better, should not have been drinking or should have behaved differently?
Victim blaming is a rotten thing to do and we see it every day in our court system as criminals, on a variety of charges, claim they were “provoked” or some other such rubbish.
So how do we do avoid it?
We need to be able to say to our kids that they should feel confident to go out into the world and experience life, but at the same time be aware that there are those who would seek to exploit them.
How do we explain to our kids that even though they themselves have done nothing wrong, there are mongrels that will act criminally and ruthlessly and try to justify their actions by questioning the actions of their victims?
Isn’t the very act of saying “don’t put yourself in that situation” – no matter how well-intentioned the motive – going a long way to perpetuating the myth that victims of crime often “ask for it” by exposing themselves to risk?
There must be a way to alert our kids to the fact there are – thankfully in small numbers – mongrels that would harm them.
How do we send the message of “no excuses, never, ever” for criminal behaviour and yet still make our kids aware that some situations are more open to exploitation and there are those who don’t play by the rules?