If you own or manage a nudist club, landed or non-landed, you’re perpetually concerned about the possibility that some member may not be who they pretend to be: respectable nudists like everybody else. It can be particularly damaging to a club’s reputation when the media mentions that a sex offender was a known member of XYZ nudist club, as has happened several times in just the last year.
Many club owners think that by simply barring single men from entering they’ve solved the problem, but in reality it’s not unusual for sex offenders to be married or in a heterosexual relationship, and although the vast majority are men, not all are. Thus this type of policy, often masquerading as a “gender balancing rule”, is far from secure, and is certainly highly discriminatory against single men, who are in fact the largest component of the nudist community. Also, it’s not unusual for a man in a nudist couple to travel alone on a given day, as has happened to me. I would be refused entry in a lot of nudist venues on those occasions. To be fair, these same clubs will usually admit single men if they’re sponsored by, or guests of, established members.
Others choose the high road and admit single men if they’re members of a recognized naturist association, such as the INF or AANR. Neither is this perfect, but being a paying member of such an institution says that you’re at least half-serious and possibly understand the naturist philosophy and principles.
There is one way to screen unwanted visitors and cut-off the worst of the lot at the pass: The US sex offender database. Many governments around the world maintain databases of all convicted sex offenders, but it’s not accessible to the public. Not so in the United States! Anybody can search the entire database online for free, and get not only a mug shot, but the current address of the person. Just enter the first and last name of the candidate in a search form on the web site and bingo! (See URL below). Unfortunately, as mentioned earlier, if the aspiring member/visitor is from a foreign land, you won’t have much to go on, and you can’t really refuse somebody because of a gut feeling.
In the end, there’s no perfect method for screening new members, but if nudist clubs banded together, perhaps with the help of the associations, we could have our own database of “problematic people”, and not of just the sex offending type. Currently, there’s nothing preventing a deranged individual from running amok at club A, being kicked-out and then proceeding to do the same at club B. If club A could post the details of the incident in the aforementioned central database (via a web site, no doubt), club B and every other could prevent the troublesome individual from entering their premises.
Some of you may think that all this is greatly exaggerated and take an “everything’s just fine as it is” stance. The plain truth is incidents of an un-nudist nature do happen, and more frequently than most of us would care to admit. Is it not the duty of any community to protect its own?
This is good. Thanks for sharing