I have read several articles about how male teachers are disappearing and why, there was also an article I saw on big brothers/big sisters having trouble finding big brothers. I used to work as a teacher, then later on as a child photographer these are my thoughts.
I worked as a teacher in the summertime at a daycare center. Working as a teacher, the only problem I had once was when a 10 year old attacked me, He was the bad kid in school and we got along pretty good, in fact, better then he got along with the other teachers which was the reason they put him with me. I don’t remember what happened that day but I managed to hold him while the principal was called. Luckily the other students told him that I had been attacked and all I had done was hold him so he wouldn’t hurt me or himself. The fact that he was the bad kid and had attacked others before helped too. He was expelled. I’m not so sure that would happen that way today.
When I got my first job as a portrait photographer, they told me that a lot of the subjects would be children. One of the rules they had was that we couldn’t touch the children, the parents were to do that. This rule was mostly a CYA rule for the company, none of the photographers followed it, it would be impossible to work if you tried. Some of the parents themselves would just hand their baby over to someone that they had probably just met without a second thought.
Just last night I saw part of a report on NBC about the decline of male teachers, I missed most of it but I did see that they were saying that money was a factor in the decline, a male teacher could make much more doing some other job. While that might be true and it is a factor, I don’t know if they mentioned fear as a factor. It is a scary time to be a male in an occupation that involves children. All that someone has to do is accuse you of molesting them or their child and that is it. whether you did it or not, the stain is on you, the scarlet letter hangs around you. Even if you are found not guilty or not enough evidence, people will still wonder. If you get convicted or plea bargain, your name goes on the sexual predator list and on the internet. Don’t think that it doesn’t happen.
As a photographer, I got complaints lodged against me from customers, luckily none were about harming the children or anything. I’m sure all of them were false, all the photographers got them. Why? Most people only call when they have a complaint, that’s true in anything, but the complaints I got were from customers who knew how to work the system, the portrait companies I worked for would usually pay off the customers by giving them free photos when they called and complained, the more they complained about the photographer the more portraits they got. This may seem great to the customer, but the photographers got paid a percentage of what they sold, the more sold the higher a percentage, the ‘freebies’ came right off of your percentage, so they were taking money out of my pocket, and I was a great photographer. The complainers knew the drill, one time, a women just flat out told me she was going to complain to get her free photos, and once, two women started arguing about it when they came to look at their portraits, The one woman was furious because the other woman called to complain to get her free portraits, she called the store manager and the customer service line to tell them the complaint was bogus, it did no good, they still gave the other woman the photos and even offered her the photos for free, she told them she was going to buy all her photos and she did. what does this have to do with the fact of fewer men in occupation with children? Well imagine what a customer would get if they just throw out an accusation? They had no problem lying about how they were treated just to get photos and cared less what happened to the photographer. I loved photographing children, the parents I liked not so much, but I don’t think that I would go back to being a photographer or teacher because of what I might be accused of.
