Of all silly things I could be watching, I'm watching Super Gals! It's really cute. I hope Ran ends up with Second Place, because those two dorks deserve each other (sadly, Second Place is way too goofy to be a shoujo love interest). I also love how the English dub stars the
Nerima Daikon Brothers as main parts, because the Daikon Brothers would be Ran's natural enemies. Unfortunately, it still does not show any signs of recognising that there are things fucked up beyond subsidised dating going on with Ran's friends.
I've known sixteen year old girls who were involved with men a decade or more their senior. Far from enough of them to generalise, but hey, here's more experience anyway:
1. These girls did not need a boyfriend, they needed a safe home environment
2. These men where not your average, joe who had his life perfectly together. One of these girls once asked me my age, whereupon she had a moment of utter shock when she realised that unlike her boyfriend, most people at twenty-seven have finished an education and gotten a job and started engaging with the world like an adult.
Of course, I've also known sixteen year old girls more mature than most adults I see daily, and if any of them were to start dating a twenty-five year old, then I'm sure I wouldn't be minding it terribly much.
However.
However, Super Gals! gives us Miyu, who used to be a knife-fighting gang leader until she met a person who could love her despite her faults or w/e. This would be the main character's older brother. Who is a police officer. And yeah, you bet they met in his line of work.
I realise that this is entirely about cultural differences. I realise that Japan probably thinks this is super romantic. I realise that I'm interrogating this from the wrong perspective, but I work with teenagers. If there is ONE THING that is crystal clear to me and my colleagues, it that the kindness and affection you give these kids is your job, and that above all, your job is to help them.
If a sixteen year old girl from a bad background falls in love with you, you average, twentysomething, good-hearted person who's dealing with her as part of your work, I can promise you this: it's 95% certain that she didn't fall for you because of your good looks or your good personality or your good heart. In all likelihood, she fell for you because you're the first person who has ever shown that you cared about her. To put it in the words of Eiri Yuki,
He should know. He was an outcast at home, bullied in school, taken to a foreign country and then he met a kind-hearted tutor and we all know how that ended.
Girls like Miyu are girls who have been dumped by the entire world their entire life. Of course they'll latch onto every scrap of affection that comes their way. In a lot of cases, they are probably too young to understand that the affection they receive from people dealing with them professionally isn't exclusive. People who work with teenagers should like them regardless of who they are, should care about them regardless of how they're behaving, because the moment we stop caring, we've become mindless bureocrats passing along the papers.
Some of us care by trying to help them achieve their best in school. Some of us care by helping them achive their best in sports or arts or music. Some of us care by trying to work out their various mental ailments. Some of us care by being the safe person they can speak to when there is nobody else they can trust.
That said, I have a policy about ignoring friends requests from kids I work with - not because I don't want to be their friend, but because I'M NOT THEIR FRIEND. No matter how much fun we have together, I'm a person who is paid to deal with them, which means that I'm paid to do things that'll make them upset, to call their parents if there's something going on with them, to tell them things they do not want to hear. Through my profession, I have the power to make decisions that'll affect the lives and the future of these kids; decisions that I have to make in my position as an adult and as a professional, as someone who sees things from a different perspective than a sixteen year old does. I can't be their friend until they're out of the system, until they're grown up and I no longer has any say about their lives.
We need to keep this distance, because we can't save all of them. For our own sanity, we need to be aware of where our work ends, and someone else's begins. Above all, it is important that the kids, too, understand that the adults working with them are doing their job, and care about them because it is their job to care about kids. It's important that kids understand this too, because
grooming. Predators know which kids make the easiest targets, and it's not the ones with the good parents.
Professionals working with children and teenagers are simulatenously obligated to caring about the kids, but also to not get involved. This is why I have problems with the romanticising of teacher-student romance. Multiply it by five when we get to the case of a fucking police officer reforming a juvenile offender and then dating her. I. do. not. CARE. how shitty she has it at home, nor how much he sincerely wants to help her, nor how much of a nice guy he is. A twenty-five year old dating a sixteen year old referring to herself in third person is fucking skeevy, and it so does not help to know that he ended up there by being the person legally responsible for helping her get out of that mess. The enjoyment I find in watching Super Gals! just plummets every time they have to bring in the big bro and remind us all about how his detective father and constable mother find it absolutely okay for him to be involved with the underaged ex-gangster he saved, and how not a one of her friends and classmates find it even a little bit weird that she's dating a man a decade older than her.