I am completely against the full body scanners too but let’s try to be rational.

When you start throwing absurd and irrational claims and arguments against the TSA you start to lose credibility.

Just because sexual predators do it, it’s not automatically bad.

Your reasoning is sound. On the other hand, isn’t this teaching children that it’s OK to enter into games with strangers that end up with the children being fondled by the strangers?

I’m not a child abuse expert but I can see that one clearly enough.

So when I make a game of cleaning my son’s room with him does that mean I’m “grooming” him for sexual predators?

If cleaning your son’s room involves allowing a stranger to grope his genitals, then yes, yes it does.

By this logic, any time a person uses a game to make a child do something — even with the parent present and indicating that it’s OK — they are “grooming” for predation.

Not even considering what we think of TSA and their policies, this logic simply doesn’t make sense.

I agree that this “bad people do this so TSA is bad” is not in and of itself logically conclusive. Yet, how many good people are going around telling kids it’s a game to perform a full-body search? Correlation certainly can be suggestive of useful hypotheses to test, such as “the TSA is molesting us, including our children”.

I have been avoiding air travel as much as possible since 9/11. Not because I’m concerned about terrorism. Because I hate what our government has done since then. But I can only drag my heels on visiting relatives for so long. It’s been four years, and unfortunately a trip is due.

You can bet that the last thing I’ll be doing is suggesting to my kids that the TSA search is a game. I will make very clear to them that under ordinary circumstances, this degree of touching would be completely inappropriate. (It may or may not come up, of course; one child has already expressed a refusal to be scanned, and no one in my family will be permitted to go through the x-ray version of the scanner in any case, but of course it’s possible we won’t be selected for the “enhanced screening” anyway).

I could wonder if people really want to see what happens if they hurt other people provided that they aren’t held personally responsible for their actions.

The Supreme Court recognized this in its recent ruling in Stafford Unified School District #1 et al. v. Redding (2009), which held that the partial strip search of a teenage girl “necessarily exposed [her] breasts and pelvic area to some degree, and both subjective and reasonable societal expectations of personal privacy support the treatment of such a search as categorically distinct, requiring distinct elements of justification … for going beyond a search of outer clothing and belongings.” The Court goes on to note that the girl’s “subjective expectation of privacy against such a search is inherent in her account of it as embarrassing, frightening, and humiliating.” In other words, there is a legitimate distinction to be made between a search of the outer clothing and a search of the body itself, particularly the breasts and pelvic area. This is not about prudishness. It’s about the right of the individual not to have his or her body – and, in particular, those parts of the body most closely associated with sexuality – violated in such a way that might be embarrassing, frightening, or humiliating.

It is perfectly reasonable for someone to consent to a search that is not embarrassing, frightening, or humiliating, while objecting to a search that involves genital groping. It’s also perfectly reasonable for an adult to consent to a thorough pat down while objecting to the idea of kids being groped in the same way. Just because someone accepts the need for a certain amount of passenger screening at the airports doesn’t mean that they can’t draw the line at the point where they feel that the costs begin to outweigh the benefits – at the point where the screening process itself becomes so embarrassing, frightening, and humiliating that it begins to overshadow any fears they might have about terrorists trying to hijack or blow up the plane.

If cleaning your son’s room involves allowing a stranger to grope his genitals, then yes, yes it does.

If the stranger was doing it without my consent – yes. But in the case of the TSA screenings, the search is done with the parent’s consent.

Now the question of whether TSA is essentially coercing us as parents to consent to these searches (either because we feel that it’s necessary to use air travel or because we would be fined for trying to leave the security area) is a good question. I think this is a major civil liberties problem.

But to claim that this is inapproprate contact is not correct. If it were inappropriate, the parent should not consent to it.

I understand the problem – believe me I do. I don’t like the scanners or the “enhanced” pat-downs. But the logic being used here is – IMHO – faulty.

Seems to me that the question is whether these TSA policies are appropriate from a civil liberties perspective. The question is not “is TSA grooming my child for inappropriate contact”? As a parent, if you think the contact is inappropriate, you would not consent.

Make it real big, with a ‘WTF Cat’ image next to a crying child so that everyone sees it.

I think Pedobear would be even more appropriate than WTF Cat.

But, I haven’t yet figured out how to explain to them what going to the family reunion this Christmas is going to entail…especially considering the fact that they’re not all under 12, so they’re not all eligible for the “gentler” kid version of the groping.

At least I know they are fully capable of standing up for themselves in other situations.

If someone spends their day looking at disturbing porn because they want to I’d call them a pervert, if they spend their day looking at disturbing porn because their job is screening and removing adult content from youtube, I’d say they have a sucky job.

They’re usually not enjoying it, or else it’d be fair to call them perverts.

“Enjoying it” is a not a legal requirement for a pervert conviction. To be convicted of possession of child pornography, for example, it is not necessary for the prosecution to prove that the perp actually got off on the material.

No one here is arguing that there’s anything wrong with motivating your kids by turning unpleasant chores into games. What we’re arguing is that telling a child that it’s okay for a stranger to grope him because “it’s just a game” is exactly the sort of thing that child molesters do; and that if you decide to play that game with the TSO at the airport, your child might think it’s okay to play the same game with the nice man with candy at the playground.

This.

Few people would argue that this is priming the kid for sexual abuse.

Count me among the few. (Somehow I suspect that “few” in this case means “just about any parent.”)

To do so is completely contrary to what we in the sexual abuse prevention field have been trying to accomplish for the past thirty years.

– from TFE(xpert) in TFA …

Correct. My kids’ pediatrician uses the same technique to look in their eyes, ears and nose.

Isn’t it remarkable how a civilised society can become so sick and twisted? Its an incremental process … image where you’ll be in a decade.

Well, yeah. The alternative is that you don’t get to fly to grandma’s after all.

So “consent” should be taken with an asterix.