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Mom jailed for letting 10-year-old walk alone to town

reason.com

11–20 of 203 posts

Re: Mom jailed for letting 10-year-old walk alone to town

#11
post #3
post #2

Phoning the sheriff first before offering to give the kid a ride? What's wrong with people?

Please, we drill into kids heads to not get into cars with strangers.

"When America’s missing children are featured in popular culture, it is usually the cases of stereotypical kidnappings, which happen to be very rare. […] The third NISMART study found that approximately 105 stereotypical kidnappings occur every year in the United States (Wolak et al. 2016). That is still 105 too many. The general public may estimate a much higher number of this type of case, based on how often they are portrayed in fiction. […]

The rare kidnapping cases may be the most known of missing children cases, but are the smallest category in number. Looking at the broader nature of the missing child problem and considering the full spectrum of the missing, including endangered runaways, children taken by family members, lost and injured children, children thrown out of their homes, and children separated from their families by natural disasters and catastrophes, the number of families having a missing person increases exponentially. In 2018, there were 424,066 new reports of missing children entered into the National Crime Information Center, the computerized index of missing persons and criminal justice information (NCIC 1984, para. 1), which works out to about 1,162 new cases of missing children every day (NCMEC 2019c, para. 4). […]

Despite what many people believe, a child can be in real danger when abducted by a family member. Family abductions are cases in which a family member absconds with the child, preventing the other parent from knowing the child’s location."

quoted from: Handbook of Interpersonal Violence and Abuse Across the Lifespan https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-89999-2

Re: Mom jailed for letting 10-year-old walk alone to town

#14

> She (the Sheriff) kept mentioning how he could have been run over, or kidnapped or 'anything' could have happened, This is weird. Is the crime so bad in the town? Even the good-for-nothing cops in my (developing) country do not come up with such nonsense.

Many cops in the US have a massive superiority complex

Re: Mom jailed for letting 10-year-old walk alone to town

#16
There's something extremely sick about the modern attitudes to children in the US (and maybe elsewhere). These people are fucking crazy. They can't imagine a world where children actually exist out in the real world and live their life like every other country instead of only in supervised jail schools. Anything approaching affection or concern for other children is seen with suspicion as if its pedophilia. Everyone hates babies or children existing or making noise in public, we don't accomodate parents or children in any way, while watching population growth collapse. Boomers who lament never having grandchildren are called monsters. We are completely losing the fucking plot on the most important responsibility of humanity. There is nothing without children, no future, only immigration which will eventually run dry or extinction. None of these attitudes towards children exist in other places, it doesn't have to be this way.

Re: Mom jailed for letting 10-year-old walk alone to town

#18

> She (the Sheriff) kept mentioning how he could have been run over, or kidnapped or 'anything' could have happened, This is weird. Is the crime so bad in the town? Even the good-for-nothing cops in my (developing) country do not come up with such nonsense.

Apparently not knowing where your kid is IS the crime. Which is rampant in the countryside, RAMPANT!

Rampant across Europe/Japan/South America/... why would anyone not let their kids outside exploring/walking/exercising?

Re: Mom jailed for letting 10-year-old walk alone to town

#20
post #8

When I was five years old I would walk along a path and take a bridge across a river to visit my friend to play board games. By the time I was nine I was bicycling forty-five minutes to school on a 80 km/h road. The level of paranoia that's infected people around keeping kids near their parents is insane.

Yes, but.

For all of the happy survivor stories like yours (and mine), the reality is that the rate of child accidental deaths has steadily decreases over the past few decades as parents (and society) became more protective. That isn't to say I agree with over-parenting and eliminating independence -- I don't -- but there needs to be rationality applied as well as personal values.

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