Should you tell your young daughter to hug her relatives at holiday time? No, according to a blog post from the Girl Scouts of America. The post advises:
“Have you ever insisted, “Uncle just got here–go give him a big hug!” or “Auntie gave you that nice toy, go give her a kiss,” when you were worried your child might not offer affection on her own? If yes, you might want to reconsider the urge to do that in the future.”
The problem, the post goes on to say, is that a child who is taught she owes a relative a hug in return for, say, a gift, is likely to feel that same obligation later in life when a man has offered her a job. Telling her to hug a relative might be setting her up as a victim of sexual harassment in years to come, the post suggests.
There’s a lot that’s wrong with this message, but let’s start with an important distinction it fails to make between forcing children to hug their relatives and suggesting that they should do so. No little girl should be obliged to touch another person if she’s made it clear she doesn’t want to. But there’s a difference between telling a child she must hug her uncle or she won’t get her present and telling her it would be nice to give him a hug because she hasn’t seen him in a long time.
Why tell her anything one way or the other? Because children look to adults for guidance and social norms. If hugs are the norm in your culture or your family, children need you to communicate those norms, just as they need you to tell them not to burp at the dinner table. Research suggests that there are real emotional and physical health benefits from physical contact with other humans. Raising children who never hug adults or anyone else might seem like the safest course in a world concerned with child molesting and sexual harassment. But it really isn’t the ideal solution.
A second problem with the blog post is its unstated gender bias. Admittedly, we’re talking about the Girl Scouts so they may simply believe that boys are outside their domain. But the reality is that both boys and girls can be molested by adults, and both men and women can be victims of sexual harassment. So any advice about hugging or not hugging should apply to boys as well as girls.
Whose fault is sexual harassment?
But the biggest problem with the post is that it’s a very subtle form of blaming the victim. It suggests that the reason women are subjected to sexual harassment is that we don’t know any better. Being told to hug family members when we were children somehow makes us clueless enough to believe that as adults we owe sexual favors to people who offer us jobs or auditions or funding for our startups.
That’s a ridiculous notion. The staggering outpouring of harassment accusations against venture capitalists, business leaders, politicians, and entertainment figures is powerful evidence that women who are asked to trade sexual favors for professional advancement know perfectly well that they are being mistreated. Clearly, many have felt trapped in a system that gave them little choice but to keep silent about these demands.
They felt trapped because they were trapped. Remember the blog post earlier this year by former Uber engineer Susan Fowler that first brought the topic of sexual harassment into the limelight? She described in detail the stonewalling she received after reporting her manager’s harassment to Uber HR. Rather than leave it at that, she banded together with other women who’d been victimized by the same manager and they all complained in tandem. Each was told that “no one else” had ever complained about this man and Fowler was scolded for exchanging information with the other women. She remained undaunted until eventually she was told by her boss she would be fired if she continued reporting harassment to HR. At that point she took a job at another company and published her now-famous blog post.
I have no idea whether Fowler was ever told to hug anyone as a child, but one thing is clear: She knew perfectly well that the treatment she received at Uber was wrong. So did the other women who joined in her complaint. That knowledge didn’t do them a bit of good.
The Girl Scouts post warns that telling a child to hug someone “can set the stage for her questioning whether she ‘owes’ another person any type of physical affection when they’ve bought her dinner or done something else seemingly nice for her later in life.” That suggests that a woman who knows she doesn’t have to trade sexual favors for career advancement is safe from sexual harassment. As Fowler’s story makes clear, she isn’t. Countless women in Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Washington D.C., and pretty much everywhere else have had the same experience, even when they knew they didn’t deserve it.
Instead of encouraging parents to raise daughters who refuse to be touched, we should try to fix a system in which powerful men believe they have the right to touch whomever they want, and that they can make sexual overtures to their subordinates with no fear of consequences. Until that changes, both women and men will continue to be victims of sexual harassment. Even if they’ve never been told to hug anyone at all.