How Would You Explain a TSA Pat-Down to Your Child?

So you spend a lot of time talking to your child with disabilities about good touch and bad touch. You know that a child with communication issues or intellectual disabilities can be easily taken advantage of, so you want to make it very clear that nobody should touch their private parts, not even people in uniforms or in positions of trust, not even if the grown-up says it's okay or that you'll get in trouble if you don't allow it. Especially if the grown-up says you'll get in trouble if you don't allow it. You know that your child sees things in black and white, so you try to make it as easy as possible to distinguish what kind of touch is bad. Anything that makes you uncomfortable. Any contact that you don't want and don't invite. Like, say, being groped by a stranger in a public place.

Then you go on a trip, your young person either freaks out about having a body scan or has an anomaly that requires further checking, and a TSA employee steps up for the full-private-part-contact body search that's recently been instituted. What do you say to the kid you've carefully trained not to allow any such thing? "It's okay for someone to abuse you as long as Mom and Dad are watching?" Yikes. I've had a hard enough time persuading my son that it's okay for the doctor to touch his privates, and he knows the doctor.

Along with all the worrisome aspects of the TSA's new search protocols, let's add how potentially traumatic a full-on search would be to an individual who is not able to understand the reasons for what is happening.?Bad touch is bad touch, and creating a situation in which it is required and condoned has the potential to be all kinds of confusing, in the most harmful and hurtful way. The TSA website says allowances will be made for children with special needs, and let's hope that's the case. But this sort of search will be scary for our young people way past childhood, and I suspect that TSA employees may not be so sympathetic to a full-grown large person whose disabilities might not, to someone without a full grasp of the issues involved, preclude a search.

Think we'll be vacationing close to home for a while.

Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

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