Youth Protection Training
Please see my commentary after the story.
R News
Earlier this month, authorities on the west side of Monroe County arrested and charged a total of four men with sexual misconduct involving girls in The Youth Explorer Program. Youth leaders in posts met Wednesday night at RIT for a refresher course in common sense.
“It’s just basic common sense,” said Captain Garrett Dean of the Bergen Fire Department. “You can’t be alone with kids. If you’ve got two kids there that’s fine three kids is better. Just doing something one on one with a kid is stupid.”
Dean is the head of the Bergen Fire Department’s explorer post. He’s also a former explorer. “I started out in 1989 as an explorer, and spent four years with the explorer post. Now I’ve worked my way through four different fire departments.”
Dean and a large group of Fire and EMS personnel throughout the area say the explorer program needs to continue. To ensure its future, post leaders say it’s going to take new requirements to prevent one on one contact between youth leaders and youth members.
“Two-deep leadership, never have a circumstance where there’s an adult and a child alone,” said Larry Pritchard of the Boy Scouts of America. “Always make sure that young people recognize circumstances where they need to be safe.”
The explorers themselves are also being asked to use their best judgment.
“If a young person who’s all excited about your program shows up by themselves, tell them to go home and bring a friend. Just be smart for yourself as well,” Pritchard added.
These youth leaders will bring this training back to their departments. Dean hopes these steps will preserve a program that has received so much negative attention in the past few weeks.
Dean added, “It’s just bad that four people ruined it for everybody.”
I haven’t posted on this because I’m just disgusted. Not necessarily for the reasons you may think. Then, the other night at our ambulance corps meeting, a motion was made that all our memebers “consider” taking this training. I was the only member to vote no.
All of the incidents in the story, and others in the past couple of years, have involved young women who were old enough to know better. You can’t be an Explorer until you’re 14. These young women were 16 and 17.
Let’s get the man beating out of the way. Married men shouldn’t be fooling around on their wives. Men in their twenties and thirties shouldn’t be dating or having sex with women younger than 18. It’s morally and legally wrong.
These relationships were admittedly consentual. Why a 16 year old girl would want to have sex with a 30 year old man is beyond me, but one of the “victims” did two different guys. These young women are old enough to do adult time in prison for murder or other voluntary acts, but somehow they’re presumed to be too innocent to bear any responsibility for their actions when it comes to these cases????
Mr. Dean, it wasn’t just the four men that ruined things for everyone. It was the girls, too.
The guys are royally f**ked. One guy who was IMing one of the girls is up on Federal child porn charges which is a gross abuse of the real purpose of those laws. These girls got to be really slutty without any sort of public condemnation for their actions. They had sex with married men. They had sex with men they knew were too old for them. How about at least a slap to the back of the heads of these girls for being really stupid and hurting programs that lots of teen benefit from?
As for the training… Why not just state that it is expected that adults in the Explorer program will not break any laws, including those banning sexual contact with minors?
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