|
|
|
|||||
|
||||||
|
Many years ago, I spent
three hours sitting on a plane next to a red-haired, green-eyed,
freckle-faced, profoundly kickable boy who informed me shortly after takeoff
that he was famous in New Zealand for appearing in a TV ad for meat. He then
sang me the jingle. I recognised it and
continued to every one of the several thousand times he sang it between
Wellington and Sydney. I was vegetarian for the next decade. It was this boy I
thought of when it was revealed Air New Zealand and Qantas had decided that
only female passengers would be lumbered with the chore of sitting next to
unaccompanied children. Men would be spared from having to share airspace
with noxious whippersnappers like the meat boy who, I assumed, was
unaccompanied not because his parents weren't also going to Australia but because
they found him so insufferable they had decided to take a different plane. If women have to put up
with children travelling by themselves, surely it's only right that men be
officially allocated their fair share of potentially annoying seatmates: passengers
who attempt to show you their holiday photos, for example, nervous fliers who
spend the entire flight hyperventilating at the thought of being crushed by
falling luggage, or porky businessmen who fall asleep against the neighbour's
shoulder and drool saliva down their shirt front. It seems surprising
that Air New Zealand and Qantas have no qualms about accusing half their
client base of potential paedophilia. Men, it appears, are such filthy,
immoral, perverted beasts that even those who appear relatively decent on the
surface cannot be trusted to withstand the temptation of being seated next to
young flesh. Almost as surprising is
the news that paedophiles, who we're always being told are exceptionally
cunning and devious, would feel comfortable abusing children in an
environment teeming with onlookers. In economy class, at least, you can
hardly help yourself to a beer nut without elbowing a couple of other
passengers in the face: it's hard to believe anything of a deviant nature
would go unnoticed by other travellers or passing cabin crew. It's interesting that
the two airlines haven't attempted to justify their extraordinary ruling by
citing a long list of cases in which men were convicted of abusing
unaccompanied children on flights -- indeed, they haven't bothered attempting
to justify it at all. Air New Zealand's part
in all this is particularly baffling. In my experience, which consists of
several wrist-slashingly-awful long-haul flights with my children, Air New
Zealand couldn't give a flying Fokker about the welfare of kids. Which leads
me to think that this bizarre edict is a product not of the airline's concern
for the safety of its youngest passengers, but its fear of lawsuits. The two airlines aren't
alone in regarding all men as predators and all children as prey. The biggest
threats to the children of most of us are road accidents, drownings, burns
and poisonings, yet child abusers cast an unnaturally large shadow. Perhaps it's the
newspaper photos that do it: all those well-groomed middle-aged Pakeha men
leaving the courtroom in their shirt and tie after being accused of raping
their daughters. Drug dealers look like drug dealers; gang hit men look like
gang hit men; robbers look like robbers; child abusers look like the rest of
us. A friend in her late
50s counsels the adult survivors of child sexual abuse but says that when she
was raising her own kids, she didn't even know there was such a thing as
child sexual abuse. In the space of three decades, we've gone from assuming
all adults are the natural protectors of children to accepting that some of
them will betray that trust in the most unspeakable manner. Perhaps this is why
we've allowed our fear to outweigh our common sense. Most of my male friends
are far better fathers than their own fathers were, yet few would feel
comfortable left alone in a room with a child who was not their own. The
obvious person to point this out would have been Children's Commissioner
Cindy Kiro, who presumably has an interest in encouraging men to have good
relationships with the children in their lives. Instead, she has
commended Air New Zealand and Qantas for putting thought into their policies
and for endeavouring to keep children safe. My son is four: I'd
like to ask Dr Kiro at what age she'll stop regarding him as a potential
victim of sexual abuse, and start regarding him as a potential abuser.
Because apparently, those are the only two options left for men.
|
