Attention Mascots (and teams with one)

[wireties]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

How many reported incidents of sexual harassment does it take for rules about mascots to stop being premature and "PC"?

The answer is one and only one - is there one? Is there a single official reported case of harassment by a mascot at a FIRST event? Others in this thread are encouraging victims to come forward and make reports to FIRST officials or to law enforcement officials - I totally agree. Tell me about it and I'll chase it down and follow it up myself. But all we have now are anonymous-ish, but serious, complaints made in social media forums. This is America (I think) - should we be making observations about teams putting their "strangest kids" in costume w/o any guidelines? Almost all FIRST teams are from a high school and the students are bound by the "Code of Conduct".

And why does this subject have to be sexual? I never implied that it was sexual - you made that assumption. We have young persons on our team with conditions where any kind of contact is excruciating, it has zero to do with gender. In fact the original complaint in this thread sounded like such a condition.

I like the idea of a mascot having an escort has merit. And I still like the idea of preferring female mascots. Our mascot always has an escort though I think it is because the costume makes it hard to see rather that to monitor harassment claims and counter-claims. And FIRST could include guidelines in the pre-season communications to team captains and co-captains.