Six years ago Barry Neufeld, a school trustee in Chilliwack, British Columbia, with obligations to serve the students in his school district in their best interested reviewed a new school curriculum called SOGI (Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity).
Advocates sold SOGI to BC school boards with rainbows and glitter and promises of an inclusive, progressive, anti-oppression toolkit to help protect the most marginalized kids in the school system. It was created by radical gender theorists and presented by people in suits with slick power-points.
Barry had spent twenty-seven years working in BC Corrections, the majority of the time, twenty-two years, working with Youth Corrections Services and in the course of his work had seen the downstream impacts of every kind of crime imaginable upon both the victims and offenders. Relevant to SOGI, and the criticism he leveled against it, was his experience working with sex offenders, especially involving the sexual abuse of children. He recognized and understood patterns of abuse, and he understood how sexual predators behave towards children from decades of working with both victims and offenders.
When Barry looked at SOGI he saw red flags. From talking with him over tea last April in Kelowna, I learned about how he saw correlations between SOGI and grooming patterns. He described some of the process of secret-keeping, grooming, manipulation, and undermining of children’s sexual boundaries that sexual predators use. Seemingly innocent at first, predators groom both their intended victims and their caregivers, and in extreme cases, they groom the institutional systems the have infiltrated, subtly undermining the relationships between their victims and the people who protect them.
They begin to ask questions of children: about boyfriends, girlfriends, crushes; about sexual attraction, about arousal, about sexual orientation, and the sexual desires and interests of kids too young to be sexual. They might ask, “are you sure you’re straight?” all with the intention of getting kids to question themselves, and then to confide in the adult predator. In short, they start to normalize intimate conversations with impressionable children, and they keep secrets.
