Dear Care & Feeding: Middle Aged Man at Park

[minoanmiss]

Dear Care and Feeding,

At the playground I take my kids to, there is a middle-aged man who often comes and sits on a bench to watch the kids (and occasionally do a crossword puzzle). He doesn't have a camera or anything, but he's not there because he’s related to any of the children. I've checked in with the other parents, some of whom are skeeved out by his presence but most of whom don't see anything wrong with it. Should I ask him what he's doing or suggest he find a new place to sit?

—What's He Doing Here

Dear WHDH,
I would slow your roll. Some parks have explicit signage asking that adults only enter the playground if they are with a child. I assume yours does not, because you would have told me if he was actually breaking the rules.

You cannot be the sheriff of the playground.

As it stands, he's as entitled to this public space as anyone else. Maybe he enjoys the shouts of happy children at play. Maybe he's a creep. But he's not doing anything wrong by sitting there, and you have no justification for asking him to leave.

My advice is to sit next to him one day and draw him into conversation. "I see you here often. You must love this park," etc. This way he becomes more of a person to you and less of a potential threat. During this conversation you might, however, learn that he is substantially creepier in person, at which point my general advice to supervise your kids carefully at the park remains your best option.

If he tries to talk to or engage with your kids, that's when you can firmly tell him to back off and explain to him that you're working on "stranger danger."

But no, you cannot be the sheriff of the playground.
—Nicole

Comments

[lilysea]

Yes, unless he does something inappropriate, please don't harass him.

Imagine if you gave him a hard time for sitting on a park bench and he broke down crying because his playground-aged son had just died recently, and coming to the playground was part of his grieving process.

Or if he had a playground-aged son in hospital with a life-threatening illness and that was why he was coming to the park, because it helped give him hope...

Or he could be a children's book writer/illustrator who is looking for story inspiration...

[cereta]

Your first "imagine" was my first thought.

[mommy]

I like this advice. A few quick chats can help sort out whether or not the man is a concern for the parents.

I wonder how many public seating options there are in LW's community. If the only available place to sit outdoors is a bench at that playground/park, then why wouldn't the man sit there to work on his crossword?

[lilysea]

I wonder how many public seating options there are in LW's community. If the only available place to sit outdoors is a bench at that playground/park, then why wouldn't the man sit there to work on his crossword?

Oh, good point!

He could just be sitting on a bench to get some fresh air;
to get sunlight to combat Seasonal Affective Disorder;
to birdwatch;
and the playground is less relevant to him than the fact that it's the closest bench or the only bench.

[ashbet]

Yeah, I’m disabled, a good chunk of my limited exercise consists of walking at the park across the street from my house, and the only benches are next to and facing the playground.

(The rest of the park is a big field used for sports, and a concrete path that goes around it — no other seating.)

I’m a woman in my 40’s as opposed to a man, but I’m still an adult sitting there without a child (usually playing Pokemon Go on my phone!)

I’d be pretty damn upset if a parent asked me to leave.

[cimorene]

And he wouldn't even have to be disabled, although limited mobility is maybe the biggest reason to dictate which public bench you choose. He could have a routine of some other kind and that bench the most convenient one on, say, his route from home to the coffee shop or the hardware store or the bridge club or his friend's house.

[beable]

i enjoy Pokemon go and sit in the park too (regardless of playground nearby or not) but with the added “I am, and present as cis female” and thus am way less likely to be considered creepy in that context than a middle aged guy is

[mommy]

I worry about being late, so I generally leave a half hour early whenever I go somewhere. I've definitely sat on public benches while waiting for enough time to go by that I won't be awkwardly early for my shift at work or to go to that restaurant for lunch.

[melannen]

Yep! I used to often go sit on benches at a playground near my work, despite occasionally getting weird looks when there are actually kids there (which isn't that often, tbh) because that is literally the only public outdoor seating for ~1 square mile around my workplace - I've walked it all. Despite it being a fairly busy commercial area with lots of stores and restaurants and walking distance from a public high school, and on several bus lines (no, there's no seating even at bus stops.)

(There is now a slightly closer pavilion with benches in it, but I'm technically trespassing if I go there because it's in a "private park" that's supposed to be only used by residents of the new townhouse community. Which is across the street from the busy commercial area with no public spaces.)

If she's really worried about the idea that the park might be used by people other than parents with children, one step might be to look into whether there are any other public spaces available in your community for those people, who also have a right to see sky and grass and sit down while doing it, and if not, why not.

[mommy]

Same here. Public benches were a great place to wait for my shift to start at jobs that didn't have break rooms. The presence of a playground wouldn't be relevant to my need to sit for a while.

[cereta]

Many, many years ago, I read a transcript of a speech given at Harvard that said that one of the prices we have paid for greater awareness of sexual abuse is that we start seeing the world through the pedophile's eyes. I can easily think of 3-4 innocent reasons why he goes to that park. I would also, as a mom, be a little worried. Oddly, I worry about this stuff more now that kiddo is older. When she was tiny, I kept my eyes on her at all times in public. Now she's old enough to go to the park with a friend unsupervised, I find myself really reigning in the urge to hover.

I think getting to know the man would be a good idea. I also think - and this is true of any place like a park - parents who are there supervising their kids need to become a village, keeping an eye not just on their own kids, but all of them.

[lilysea]

Not quite the same thing as keeps-going-to-the-bench-man, but once, at the beach, on a very very hot day, I sat on a rock and dipped my legs into a very large sheltered rockpool on the water's edge that was partly artificial and partly natural [think: bigger than a king sized bed]. And the mothers who were there glared daggers at me for daring to be in that space as a 20-something young woman with no kids and also chivvied their children much closer to them when I arrived - I definitely felt they were regarding me as a potential predator - even though it was a busy public beach during a large public outdoor sculpture exhibition, and I was fully dressed apart from bare feet and there were no signs saying it was reserved for kids or parents or anything like that.

It's the only time in my life I've ever felt I was being regarded as a potential predator,

as opposed to being glared at for being fat/etc.

[minoanmiss]

one of the prices we have paid for greater awareness of sexual abuse is that we start seeing the world through the pedophile's eyes.

Yeah. And in the US there is this weird cultural emphasis on sex, especially sexual predation, as the only/most likely reason for so many actions. Such as the way men are discouraged from touching each other because it would be seen as being necessarily sexual.

I posted this because I really liked the part of the advice about talking to the man, and the subtextual push back against the idea that the only reason a man might be near children is because he intends to harm them. I think one or more of the parents talking to him will be much more useful and successful than simply ordering him "there are children here so you have to go away." Not least because if skeeviness becomes more evident through the conversation that then provides more reason for and evidence to support telling him to go away.

[cereta]

I need to find that lecture again. It made a lot of very good points.

[julian]

Like, I do think he should have a right to just hang out in the park. (I sometimes do, myself.)

But if she's THAT worried, there are sex offender registry informational things at your local town hall, which have pictures of said sex offenders, and so if you're *that paranoid*... make yourself feel better. (Though probably a conversation is a better idea.)

[rosefox]

Presumably one would at least need to learn his name; I expect those registries have a lot of people in them, especially in urban areas.

[resonant]

When the kidlet was small, I signed up for the sex offender alert in my neighborhood. But it was useless because it was so inclusive. There were dozens and dozens of people on it, and when I researched any given person, I was likely to find out that this was someone who was convicted of indecent exposure for peeing in the park, or who was arrested for soliciting an underage sex worker, or who was a 19-year-old with a 15-year-old girlfriend -- not that none of that is problematic, but none of that looked to me like it translated to a greater threat to my 3-year-old.

[ethelmay]

My state or county or whatever doesn't list the lesser degrees of offenses publicly. So those folks would be on the list and show up in a background check, but not visible to the general public. I think that is about right. I do think some of the statutory rape cases are likely to have been prosecuted that way rather than as assaults because the ages were inarguable.

[sara]

Why do so many people feel it's so important to tell women, especially mothers, that it's wrong to trust our instincts?

[minoanmiss]

I both agree and disagree -- I think people often do try to quash people's instincts, especially women's, but I also think that people, including women, can sometimes confuse prejudice for instinct. (For example I have been in many discussions over whether clutching one's purse and crossing the street on seeing a Black man is a sensible reaction based on crime rates and gut instinct or a prejudicial one based on stereotypes.)

Is the LW picking up on a vibe she cannot/did not describe? Or is she falling prey to the assumption that an unattached man near children must be there to be a predator? I'm not sure from the text provided, but I do think the advice provided can actually help the LW answer these questions for herself and her children.

[staranise]

Yeah, this is one of those "your instinct is to call the police on a man who isn't doing anything wrong" situations where... women, especially white women, are herded into a very particular response patterns. We're taught to assume that every strange man is more powerful and dangerous than we can deal with alone, and that the available power structures are here to help us and keep us safe.

Like, it's not a coincidence that feminist pushes for female ownership of public spaces have been used for people who want to push back against poor people, the homeless, people of colour, and sex workers. The people in charge are quite willing to give white women something that comes at the cost of all society's other least-favourite groups.

[sara]

Well, two things. One, I think telling women that they should approach men they don't know -- men who have already demonstrated a willingness to violate social norms in a way which worries multiple bystanders -- is bad advice.

Do I cross the street to get away from every guy I walk past? Heck no (and most of the time the black guy is less likely to mess with me than the loud white guy in the popped-collar polo, who is absofuckinglutely a menace). But do I take my kids home from the park when there's a guy who's there staring at the kids and every parent on the playground is creeped out by him? Or, as I did last night while walking home alone through downtown, do I hustle up and walk together with a group of other women away from a guy who starts yelling and throwing things outside a restaurant? I absolutely do.

Men who are abusers? Consistently play on people's fear of looking prejudiced and try to manipulate this kind of situation to their advantage, while dismissing the concerns of other adults as paranoid or overly cautious. I've gone through a LOT of child abuse prevention training in the last couple of years because of my involvement with youth orgs...and this kind of behavior is exactly what we're trained to watch out for.

[cimorene]

I agree that engaging him in conversation or seeming to invite it is not the move to take, especially against her instincts, and that encouraging her to do so against them is the wrong move.

However, I would definitely also add that if their instinct is to be suspicious of someone THAT isn't wrong, but if the object of suspicion is not doing anything wrong then they also should be actively discouraged from either confronting them (tbh there's no reason they couldn't just lie anyway) or calling the police.

[cereta]

Sitting in a public park is violating social norms?

[lemonsharks]

I've gone through a LOT of child abuse prevention training in the last couple of years because of my involvement with youth orgs...and this kind of behavior is exactly what we're trained to watch out for.

Then you know that the vast and overwhelming majority of child abuse, including and especially child sexual abuse, is perpetrated by people who know and have a trusted relationship with the child and their caregivers.

[eleanorjane]

Sitting on a park bench in a public park doing a perfectly reasonable outdoors activity is hardly violating social norms, is it?

[melannen]

I do think the difference here is that most of us are reading the situation as "man existing in public" and you are reading the situation as "man violating social norms".

The point at which your instincts have been trained to tell you that "existing in public", for certain subgroups of people, is a violation of social norms? That's maybe a good time to reconsider how your instincts are trained.

(It's possible he is violating social norms in some ways, and that's what set off LW's alarms? But sitting in a public park doing a crossword and enjoying the scenery, which is what's in the letter, isn't that.)

I am admittedly trained in the opposite way from you - I work in a library (where there are no other public spaces around). In a real way I am the sherriff of a play area. And at least a couple times a month we get a complaint from someone that teenagers, or black men, or people speaking Spanish, or middle-aged single white men, or people with disabilities, or visibly homeless people, or parents with small children, or people in hijab, should not be allowed to use a public space because their mere existence is a violation of norms and causes dangers. The complainers all have well-trained instincts, and they are black and white, male and female, old and young, parent and not. And they're all wrong. Because existing in a public space is not a dangerous violation of social norms.

(Do we occasionally get legit creepy or disruptive people we need to do something about? Yeah, and we do in fact ban adults with no kids from the children's play area, because we have other spaces for them. But actual problems is well less than 10% of the time people's well-trained instincts lead them to complain.)

[rosefox]

I'm not seeing that in this response at all. The LW asked "Should I ask him what he's doing?" and Nicole said that sounded like a good idea—not to do it in so many words, maybe, but to engage him in conversation. And she acknowledged that one possible outcome of the conversation is "Yep, creepy dude, time to keep my kids a little closer to me".

The LW's instincts and cultural training are saying "There's something not quite right here", and "Go investigate and learn more, plus keep in mind that you as a civilian can't police who uses a public space" is a perfectly reasonable response to that.

(I'm including cultural training because I'm guessing the LW is around my age, and when I was a kid my mom took me to Stranger Danger classes where I learned to scream "THIS PERSON IS NOT MY MOMMY" and demand that anyone other than my parents who picked me up from school provide the password proving that my parents had sent them. Wariness of certain demographics was directly and explicitly taught to kids, especially girls, who are now parents. I don't think "instinct" can be separated out from that.)

What response would have felt more affirming to you?

[sara]

I think the parent should take the kids and walk away from the whole situation. Don't confront the guy...but also don't second-guess your own instincts.

[rosefox]

Not everyone has another park to play in.

[cereta]

Nor easy transportation to get there.

[cimorene]

Or simply watch her kids more closely as Nicole suggests (but without trying to make friends with the guy) and probably keep an eye on the guy as well. Is he doing his crossword and apparently relaxed without necessarily paying close attention to the action on the playground? Or is he definitely watching the children, or specific children?

The reason I would discourage questioning the guy is that my mom (in the 1990s) was always the parent who engaged people in conversation - more out of kindness than suspicion, but she's then gotten stuck and unable to back out of conversations multiple times - including a memorable incident with a guy who kept approaching her on subsequent visits and couldn't be shaken off, who then followed us around and partway home (in our car) on his bike once and ultimately I think contributed to us no longer going to the public park nearest our house for some years. (She also had some nice conversations and ended up hiring some guys to do yardwork sometimes, but the suspicious bike guy is definitely a strong cautionary example.)

[minoanmiss]

The kind of guy who takes a conversation as an invitation to attempt to move in is why we can't have nice things. That sounds aboslutely awful to experience/watch your mom experience.

[minoanmiss]

Oh man, Stranger Danger. Your description is, needless to say, resonantly accurate. That was such a weird cultural clash for me, between those teachings and West Indian standards of politeness-to-adults (this is one of my major issues with my culture of origin, that it leaves children pretty much defenseless due to cultural conservatism, unwillingness to discuss sex, and expected deference) . Happy childhood memories. *wry smile*

[cereta]

I get what you're saying, but even as we push women to listen to their instincts, we have to do so with knowledge that our "instincts" are shaped by culture, experience, the frakking 24-hour news cycle (get me started sometime on stranger-danger sometime). The LW doesn't say she's skeeved by him, and even the parents who are are skeeved "by his presence," not by anything he's actually done.

[conuly]

If he IS a creeper, there is a good chance that speaking to him (but not giving him any particular access to your kids) will cause him to go elsewhere.