Phillip Fisher Jr. is a pastor and Republican ward leader who coordinates faith-based outreach for Philadelphia’s Moms for Liberty chapter.
He’s also a registered sex offender, due to a 2012 felony conviction for aggravated sexual abuse of a 14-year-old boy when Fisher was 25.
It’s a numbers game. I have to deal with the same thing in my field- men are not allowed to provide one-on-one hygiene care (bathing, toileting, cleaning waste) for female adults with developmental and intellectual disabilities.
Since we’re talking about children instead of my field, 96% of people who sexually abuse children are male. Even factoring in that female perpetrators might be underreported, that is a stark number, so when people say they err on the side of caution, I’m sure you can see why only using female staff for this job would seem safer.
Are there perfectly healthy, nurturing men who pay the price? Of course. But not as many of them as potential sexual predators it seems.
Fuck me sideways, I’ve never seen such a perfect response to essentially a ‘not all men’ comment (granted this is the more unusual flavor of 'not just men’s but still)
Thank you!
It’s a response I developed explaining to people why men aren’t allowed to work alone with women in my field. I often throw in, “If you were a predator, what kind of job would you look for?”
People with developmental and intellectual disabilities are five times as likely to face this abuse as their neurologically typical peers, because many of them can’t report that abuse as effectively.
It’s my experience that the few men of the world who find this stricture upsetting do so because either they are pretending to be one of the “good” ones in order to get close enough to abuse someone, or because they believe themselves incapable of abuse and chafe at being paint with the same brush. To them I always ask; which is more important to you, that you aren’t being seen as a potential predator, or that we have a system designed to keep as many people as possible, as safe as possible? Because we can’t have both.
