In discussion on Facebook of my last post “Leadsom & Motherhood” a friend pointed me to the following quotes from the same Times interview that gave us the motherhood quotes, but this time on nannies:

“As an employer we’re not, let’s face it, most of us don’t employ men as nannies, most of us don’t.  Now you can call that sexist, I call that cautious and very sensible when you look at the stats.  Your odds are stacked against you if you employ a man.  We know paedophiles are attracted to working with children.  I’m sorry, but those are the facts.”

These quotes appear in several places online, for example the Evening Standard.  Now, I’m not obsessed with Andrea Leadsom and not about to rename this blog “Analysing Andrea”, but I did find it interesting thinking through these comments, especially after another friend pointed out to me that the same misconception had also driven an airline seating policy at one time.  Here’s a report from the BBC about that incident.

Behind these rather unflattering conclusions about the male of the species, lies a pretty common misconception of risk.  On the face of it, Andrea Leadsom’s “facts” appear not unreasonable.  Most people would probably say that a majority of child abusers are male and that child abusers do seek positions of trust with children.  If we accept those two assumptions (I will come back to them later) then it would follow that employing a male nanny would increase your risk of employing a child abuser.  However, given that the probability of employing a child abuser as a nanny is, thankfully, very low, then even if there is a significant increase in risk then your probability of employing a male child abuser as a nanny is still going to be very low.  The same situation often crops up in health related headlines, for example: “Eating mushrooms twice a week doubles your risk of early onset of baldness”.  (I made that up.  Just in case anyone is wondering.)  It may be true, and may be of scientific interest, but if the underlying risk is tiny then the effect is also tiny and of little practical public health interest.

If you think that employing a female nanny is going to keep your children safe, then you are giving yourself a false sense of security.  There are also female child abusers out there.  There is some discussion of figures in this 2009 Guardian article.  The uncertainty surrounding the numbers of potential child abusers (as opposed to convictions) casts some doubt on the assumptions made above.  Furthermore, this 2009 BBC article claims that “Stranger attacks by women hardly exist, so most female paedophiles are winning the trust of children first and either have a position of care working with children like a babysitter or they are a relative.”  If this is true then it means that the gender split between child abusers seeking employment as a nanny might be much closer than that of child abusers as a whole, again casting doubt on the assumptions made above.

You also need to think about what you are saying in cases like this.  It is the same as the trouble caused by racially profiled stop and search policing.  Whatever logic has led to the proposal you have to be able to take a step back and recognise that if you treat everyone from a certain sector of the population as a potential criminal just for being a part of that sector then you are going to cause a lot of hurt and anger.

The final thing to say about Andrea Leadsom’s nanny argument is that it ignores the obvious explanation and invents a complicated spurious one instead.  That is something else which is not uncommon.  The obvious explanation in this case being that most people employ female nannies because most nannies are female.  It also ignores the fact that a large proportion of abuse is carried out by family and friends.

None of this, however, has altered my view expressed in my previous post.  I like to listen to what people have to say and then make my own mind up about them, but it is really difficult to do this if you can’t trust media reports, because they are usually all that you have to go on.  If someone has views that I disagree with that will become apparent from listening to them.  I don’t need a journalist to distort what they are saying to “help” me reach that conclusion.