[Ansteorra] lawsuit and the SCA

willowdewisp at juno.com willowdewisp at juno.com
Sun Feb 5 13:26:47 PST 2012


I understand that many of us are disappointed that the SCA had members who felt that court action their only recourse. I am sure that they felt betrayed by the SCA and were deeply hurt by what had happened to their children. Since they didn't think about the situation and blindly sent their children to a man they knew nothing about I can only assume that they are a little naive and gullible,
I believe that there is something we need to think about as we change policies. Many, many times I have heard people say "we are a family and everyone looks after each other" or they say "we are a safe place for children". We lead people to believe that our communities would help the parents protect the children. This is dangerous and leads people to really be mad at the SCA for telling them their children will be safe.
In Ansteorra we have been stressing the need of parents to watch for the safety of their own children. This started back almost 20 years ago and  we are still maintaining the safeguards. This was sparked when the Police found some papers about how lacks we where and how easy it wood be the steal children from the SCA. 
Because we have a Children officer and because we do things for children we have been dealing with these problems for a long time. Many groups in other kingdoms have no children program at all so they don't have "official" things that the SCA run and "Unofficial" things that the parents run privately. Sometimes it is better to have something "official" so you can point out that all the unofficial activity are not sponsored by the SCA. We need to be careful to point out people can do things in their own campsite, but those things are unofficial.If we try to cover everything we will fail. If we try to micro manage then it could be argued that people believed that we would watching out for everyone. 
We need to be careful that we do not imply something we can't truly deliver. We are not really a "big" family and even if we were most children are molested by people close to them, family or friends. The % of people who have been molested in the USA is very high and I am sure most of  those parents tried to protect their children and couldn't so it would be unrealistic to assume the SCA is going to protect children. We need to be very careful about what we say.
We need to not say everyone will be your "friend", but to say you can find many people who could be your friend. Never say "everyone loves children" but say we have many things that families can do together. 
 As a Parent one of the best advice I was given was that, "Our events are open so the SCA doesn't have full control of our sites so it is important that SCA parents put up the same protection that they would do at any public gathering."
Willow de Wisp  Mother
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