I remember watching an episode of The Cosby Show many years ago.
I wasn’t a huge fan by any means, but one particular scene has really stuck with me – I might have mentioned it before, in fact. The two parents were discussing their teenage son. The mother had just seen him doing something she disapproved of, and she was afraid he was going off the rails, and Bill Cosby’s character was reassuring her. The behaviour she was so concerned about? Leave the tap running while brushing his teeth, thereby needlessly wasting water. Considering Bill Cosby was in the midst of his drugging-women-and-raping-them period, he must have just laughed himself sick over this sort of middle class angst. Even not knowing about that, but only having a superficial knowledge of how tough it is growing up a black man in the US, this seemed like a fairly trivial matter to be agonising over. Not that you can blame the mother, I don’t think she was writing the script.
I had to provide a reference for a colleague today. I was happy to do it, and many of the questions were quite relevant and useful, such as, “Would you hire this person again?” But there’s another section that’s been added in recent years which seems to mostly function as ass covering. It’s the child protection stuff. Of course, it’s very important to keep our kids safe, but would anyone ask me to be a referee if I knew they were a kiddy fiddler? And, how well do you ever really know someone? How do I know they don’t spend all their free time watching video nasties (do they still call them that?) and cruising playgrounds?
In any event, I felt pretty confident in this case, as she’s really the last person I could imagine sexually abusing a minor.