At my church we have a youth group. There are the students who are underage, and the adult leaders who are at least 18 years old. We have a rule: leaders cannot be alone one on one with a student. They can talk in a group setting, or a leader can drive several students, but you can't be alone. This kind of rule is found in other churches/camps/youth organizations. The reason they have this is so that leaders and students do not do anything innappropiate, such as innappropiate touching, kissing, etc. This is especially true for a student who is say 16 alone with a leader who is 18, and they went to the same school and had crushes on each other. I think that this rule only holds true if the student and leader are opposite sexed. This obviously becomes a problem if the student and/or leader is gay. What would you recommend they do? Guys can relate to other guy problems, but if the leader were gay, then would it be innapropiate for him to be alone with a male student?
Maybe instead of imposing ridiculous rules, they could just appoint trustable people to a position of authority.
I take your point, but many of these policies are in place to protect group leaders from allegations of inappropriate behaviour too. To answer the question, if the leader is out, I would apply the policy/rule. If not, there is an even greater onus on the leader to act appropriately and use sound judgement at all times.
It's sad that such rules have to be imposed, but unfortunately, they become necessary in the face of such a large number of lawsuits and criminal actions for inappropriate activity. However, I do findi it somewhat amusing that they apply only with opposite-sex people.
Whenever rules are put in place to deal with sex issues, they're always amusing and are never airtight for reasons like this. It is a shame they are mostly necessary though. If the student wants to ruin the leader, it would just take a sufficiently detailed story.
Most insurances for churches now require background checks for anyone working with children. This goes from anyone working in the nursery to the high school youth group.
And that scared me every day with my girls when I coached youth volleyball. There were times I had to be up close with one (never alone though) and manipulate a hand or arm. I loved those girls..fantastic players and loved the game...but I won't pretend that every time I touched a hand or curled a fist I didn't cringe at some potential lawsuit or criminal charge I really don't think there is anything scarier to me then to ever potentially face a sexual assault on a minor charge plus there is the fact that I find it appalling. But yeah, used to scare the hell out of me I suppose I see the point though. For that very reason, even when I worked one on one with on of them I would stay WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY out in the open. I also had that fear with my two teenagers I did therapy with I am not starting the privilege Olympics...but it's scary being a guy sometimes even when you don't have even a fraction of an ounce of and inkling to harm a child...that one story, even if proven wrong...and you're done no thank you
I was mostly thinking that the rule was in place to protect the students from the leader, but protecting the leaders from the students is definitely an issue to consider too. The rule might seem ridiculous, but there are several churches/pastors I've heard of where there was inappropriate behavior between a minor and an adult in a position of power. I'm glad we have the rule. I have to agree with Linco. Hopefully closeted leaders will stay closeted from their students, so that they won't have secret relationships. Definitely apply the rule if the leader is out. It's strange thinking of these scenarios where the usual bigender set of rules doesn't apply fully.
