Some nights the news business is not all that much fun

This isn’t my usual kind of post but when you work in the news business sometimes a story comes across your screen that affects your sensibilities. For months there has been a series of advertisements running on television. They show a man’s face, one that is benign, friendly, even fatherly. But the voice over is something like: “I am your coach. your uncle, your friend and you trust me with your kids.” The eventual message is that anyone and usually someone you know can be a child molester.

The ad is infuriating. It only serves to make kids and their parents distrust EVERYONE. A few years ago I was president of a Little League and one of my duties every year was to run a check of every volunteer, even the ones who didn’t come in contact with the kids through the state’s sex offender database and a make a check of criminal convictions. I hated that and I hated that I had to do it and I hated that I knew it was necessary in today’s world. Still, knowing that, I find the ads offensive and the amount of distrust raised especially when the chance that it will happen is fairly slim despite all the publicity. We have to protect every child but do we have to distrust every adult? An awful lot of wonderful volunteers are going to start backing off from the work and I wouldn’t blame them.

I remember a time when my son was about 3. During some event he ran into the girls’ room at the school. I started in after him then realized I had better not do that. Then this girl came down the hall. She might have been in fifth or sixth grade. Without thinking I grabbed her by the shoulders and started asking her to go in and find my son. Then I saw the abject fear in her eyes. And I could almost hear her parents telling her to be careful of strangers. I let go and backed away immediately and then apologetically in a much more calming voice explained the situation. I felt so much better when I saw her relax and then she went and extracted my son from the lavatory. Whew.

So with this intense dislike for the growing public distrust of coaches and teachers and anyone else who works with kids, I edited two stories tonight. In one a teacher at a private Christian school, who also was a youth mentor and a sports coach, was arrested and charged with 14 felony counts of molesting a 14 year old boy. In the second story, two women now in their late 20s and early 30s had to testify at a trial that they were molested by a man who was one’s stepfather and the boyfriend of the other’s mother. The mother died as a drug addict and had blamed the girl when she brought the subject up originally. But it was the trusted teacher who got to me. How can we defend kids from these totally evil predators without treating every coach, every teacher, everyone who ever works with kids with extreme suspicion.

And, how can you not be suspicious when stories like those two come along? We have just been through several years of so many stories of catholic priests molesting kids in Bush villages that when the lawsuits eventually came out it forced the diocese in Fairbanks into bankruptcy.

Obviously there are no easy answers, but there have to be people a child and a parent can trust, and there are many more of them who can be trusted than there are molesters.