Jokodo,
While I somewhat agree that many men overestimate the likelihood that another adult will view them as a potential predator when they are clearly helping an injured kid, what the OP story illustrates is that hysteria over kid predators has reached high enough levels that among a group of parents there is a good chance that at least 1 of them will have just such an irrational reaction to an objectively innocent and harmless situation. IT only takes 1 such parent in a group of 40 to ruin a person's life no matter how innocent they are.
As to the issue of men being more suspected for being a predator, there is no reasonable doubt about this and you are completely wrong about it.
Metaphor said:
Adult females probably would not be scared to do so. No-one ever thinks a woman would kiddy fiddle.
Demonstrably wrong. According to
this 1995 study, "
75% of respondents considered intervention required in cases in which a mother often appeared nude in front of her fiveyear-old son," which is pretty much in the same ballpark as the responses for father-daughter situations.
First, nothing in that study could possibly show that Metaphor is wrong because the study is about something quite different. It not about strangers approaching kids but parents interacting with their own kids. It is not about perceptions of predatory behavior but merely "inappropriate" or "unsuitable" behavior. It is not interpretations of ambiguous interactions, but judgments about very clear cut an specific activities that they parent and child engage in on a regular basis, including showing, bathing, changing, kissing on the lips, genital contact for hygiene, and sleeping with a single parent.
Second, the issue at hand is the hysteria over child predators increasing in the past decades and your study used data at least 20 years old.
This other follow-up study is still 10 years old but shows that things changed notably even in the parent-child actions your study refers to. In general, opposite-sex nudity and intimate touching were viewed as more inappropriate than same-sex, but the difference was quite small and sometimes non-existent when the opposite-sex pairing involved the mother and her son versus a father and his son. In contrast, the differences were much more extreme (5-10 times greater) and the judgments of "inappropriate" much higher when the opposite sex pairing involved the father. This show massive bias against males and the lack of comfort and trust people have about them regarding even their own kids and potentially sexual contact.
I think this is the story you are talking about. But you do realise that evidence of fear is not evidence that the fear is reasonable?
http://www.scotsman.com/news/uk/man-...-slur-1-486995
Whether the fear is reasonable isn't relevant to whether it is widespread and that people act upon it an ruin other people's lives because of it, as the OP and many other incidents show. That said, even though the fear that any random male will be a predator has near zero probability and is irrational, the fear that a predator is much more likely to be male is highly rational, given that 97% of child predators in sexual offense cases are male,
as shown by DOJ stats. Not only is this fact objectively true but its information that is directed at and brought to the attention of parents that are paranoid about predators,
such as this website uses the information to scare parents and schools into purchasing their products and workshops with their child-friendly, anti-pedophile, yellow dinosaur.
In sum, people suspect and are fully rational to suspect that most predators of kids are male, but they are highly irrational to suspect that any random male of being a predator, and yet enough people do such that men are reasonable to be cautious around other people's kids, and even more sadly, around their own kids.
All of that said, I would help a kid with an injury at a park and deal with any fucktard hysterical parents if needed.
