<p>With great trepidation – and conscious that I am one of the few males who have posted in this thread – I would like to remind you all that there is a pretty big and significant difference between being a creepy guy with an inappropriately lively interest in the bodies of his daughter’s friends and being someone who takes any action on that (um, with anyone other than himself). I have no idea what the actual conversion ratio is, but I believe, maybe naively, that there are lots and lots more of the former than of the latter.</p>
<p>Now, that doesn’t mean that this guy isn’t a creepy skeeze. Clearly he has stepped over the line enough to make the girls and their parents uncomfortable, and that’s not a good sign, and the photographs are disturbing, too. But, still, it would be a big step from there to doing anything like touching one of the girls inappropriately, or disseminating the photographs, or even keeping them for private use. I don’t think it’s fair or right to hold a full-blown witch hunt as if he were an established molester. Not fair to him (although that’s the least of my concerns), and not fair to his wife and children. I don’t think sewhappy is wrong at all to worry about that. She shouldn’t worry about it to the exclusion of worrying about her daughter and the other girls, but a good person shouldn’t act as if it were irrelevant, either.</p>
<p>I think he should be confronted by two or three other adults (maybe fathers, maybe mothers, I’m not certain what works best), and told, plainly, that he is making everyone uncomfortable and has to stop immediately. Stop making comments, stop taking pictures, and really watch himself to make certain he’s being ultra-appropriate. Maybe it would be best if he stepped back from the swim team, but he can decide whether he can clean up his act enough to let everyone breathe comfortably again. If he doesn’t do that, people will ask that he be barred from involvement with the team, and will not let their daughters be around him. Give him a chance to straighten up and fly right. Maybe he can’t fix his brain, but there’s every possibility that he can fix his behavior, and fix it well. Most of us do. (It’s called “society” or “civilization”.)</p>
<p>Now, maybe he can’t handle that. After all, at the very least he’s already shown that he’s insensitive to social boundaries. But if that’s the case, it will be easy to escalate the response, and make it more public. (And so far I haven’t read anything that makes me think any of the girls is in imminent danger of more than feeling uncomfortable. If things go on unchecked, maybe, but not in the space of the week or two it would take to try this approach.)</p>
<p>Part of my sadness and caution here involves two factors: (1) This guy would not be the first husband of a woman with MS to have some issues in this area. I can only imagine how painful and shameful it is to his wife, and I would want to spare her as much as possible. I imagine it’s painful and shameful to him, too, actually. It’s hard to work through for both of them, and it takes lots of people a while and some trial and error to get it right. That’s my observational experience. (2) The situation may be pretty evanescent. His daughter is, what?, 15 or 16? It’s not like he has spent years peeping on teenage girls, as far as you know. His experience is probably that he’s suddenly surrounded by beautiful, vibrant young women who are coming into their own. He may not have been prepared for it. And in a couple of years, it will all be different. I understand that a couple of years is forever to these girls, but it is a blip in the life of his marriage and his relationship with his daughter. If he can get through the next few years, he won’t face that overload again the rest of his life unless he chooses to. In a few months, they’ll probably be driving themselves places. I would want to give him the chance to do that before taking action likely to irrevocably change his permanent relationships.</p>
<p>This whole thing makes me so sad. A cherished memory from the past is of driving six 10 year-old girls from a birthday party to dance class in a minivan. Time was tight, and I suggested they might want to change in the car. A couple of them said, “J’s a man. We can’t change with a man in the car.” But one – actually, the child of two mothers – said, “J’s a DAD! A dad’s OK.” And they all agreed that a dad was OK, and changed and weren’t late for class. Sigh. A dad should be OK; that’s a really important responsibility of being a dad. (I would not have done the same thing with older girls, of course.)</p>
<p>A not-so-cherished memory of the past: My best friend’s father developed a problem like this when his only daughter was that age. It didn’t stop with looking, although it was much more discreet, and thus more of a shock when it came to light. It absolutely tore the family apart, though. Raw pain, years of it, the only thing that made it better was his (early) death. By the time anyone knew to tell him to stop, that was unavoidable, but it would have been worth anything to his children, and even to his wife, to head it off somehow if that would have been possible.</p>