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In days long gone, I believed that I had been wronged by those who would perpetually warn against me. I felt like I was being victimised, targeted unjustly. But today, if faced with the unknown intentions of a young man interacting with our daughter, I can imagine behaving just as protectively.

While I knew my own mind back then, and knew what I was seeking, there was no reason anybody else would. Others were right in being wary, for I was an unknown entity. When my parents first came to know one another, it was in the context of their church social circles. At college or university, there are no such comforts: only complete strangers rubbing shoulders with one another.

My wife and I found ourselves contemplating this subject this morning, with respect to university accommodation for our children. We’re four or five years away from that eventuality, but already it is exercising my wife. While I have cut down my media consumption, she reads the news daily, so has imbibed every horror story of university life in the twenty-first century.

Over and over, we encounter surveys and reports which suggest that many female students do not feel safe on campus, reporting behaviours right across the spectrum from unwanted attention to actual physical assault. Stories of drinks being spiked are common in the press, as are tales of male chat groups promoting revolting misogyny. The impression left is that something has gone seriously wrong in the upbringing of a generation of young men.

It’s difficult to know how much this is a reflection of reality, and how much an exaggeration. Have we simply become the overbearing, concerned parents we decried in our day, or has the situation genuinely degenerated to a state in which young men know absolutely nothing about appropriate boundaries, consent and respectful behaviour?

Although we may feel that those boundaries are obvious, it turns out that as parents we have to have ongoing conversations with our children about what constitutes acceptable behaviour, and what does not. Sons, who by their mid-teens are likely to be more influenced by their peers than by their parents, need to be told clearly what is acceptable, culturally, legally and morally.

Nothing is a given. Parental guidance is competing at this point with peer pressure — and it is described that way for a reason, because pressure to conform can be immense. It is also competing with social media, and a steady stream of video clips normalising behaviours that might once have caused people to pause for thought. As for homes in which the internet has made its way into children’s bedrooms, a whole other battlefront will have opened up.

Worrying times then. If we thought we might become more liberal than our parents in our outlook on life, it turns our we’re probably going to have to be even more protective. No doubt there will be more collateral damage: another young man with good intentions feeling victimised when he was only trying to do the right thing. Oh well. If he’s a good man, he will understand by the time he is in his forties, in turn protective of his own children.

For sure, challenges lie ahead for us all. What we want for our children is for them to have wholesome, loving relationships when the time is right, founded on mutual care and respect. What we want to protect them from are others seeking only conquests and instant gratification, who know nothing of consent, patience, responsibilities, and kindness. Thus do we seek safe spaces for our children. May God help us and them.