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Mom gets 6-month suspended sentence for letting 5-year-old walk to the pond
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Re: Mom gets 6-month suspended sentence for letting 5-year-old walk to the pond
#122This is insanity, I thought "gated communities" were sold on safety - the child should absolutely be safe there.
Re: Mom gets 6-month suspended sentence for letting 5-year-old walk to the pond
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
It happened because a neighbor was so disturbed by a child walking alone to report it, the police thought it was serious enough to refer for prosecution, and a prosecutor decided it needed to be charged using their office's limited resources. All insane. The part that really gets to me is that the neighbor was so "concerned" about the child's safety that they called the police, but for some reason, in their urgent co…
Perhaps the neighbor who called it in thought that if they approached the child themselves, they might be seen as a potential child molester.
If you automatically assume somebody approaching a child is a kidde fiddler (!) then your society has problems.
Re: Mom gets 6-month suspended sentence for letting 5-year-old walk to the pond
#124How does this happen? There’s no silver lining which makes this conviction reasonable. If they can’t appeal, I hope they use Streisand to get the town or state of Virginia to vacate everything.
Virginia also has a free range kid law. And in particular, the conviction here was delinquency of a minor. That's usually used to convict parents of teenagers whose kids do serious crimes. I caveat to say, we don't know the full details. But it all seems pretty weak sauce.
I hate to to say it but way to often "outrage" stories like this are written for engagement, not assessment.
The boy could have been spotted walking along a highway median, or similar detail that would kind of spoil the outrage effect. Lord knows the pedestrian hostile nature of modern infrastructure.
Re: Mom gets 6-month suspended sentence for letting 5-year-old walk to the pond
#125This is one of those frustrating things. You're just not allowed to not be scared with kids. If you aren't scared of letting your kid walk to a pond, you get punished for it. If you're not scared of the kidnappers, you have to be scared of the police. None of it is rational, it's different how many of us were raised, yet if you try to opt out the law gets involved.
Stranger kidnappings are basically unheard of. It's never been a safer time for kids in terms of crime like that.
They're heard of because it's so rare that media loves to broadcast them far and wide for the views. Like it's good to get people watching out for the kidnapped child as quickly as possible, but the media sensation causes paranoia in unaffected viewers.
Re: Mom gets 6-month suspended sentence for letting 5-year-old walk to the pond
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
The US is extremely car focused, which they often don't really realize. Things that are normal here (like everybody has a bike) conflicts with their cyclers vs drivers culture. Such a distinction simply does not exist here. Instead we have roads that are red with signs "Cars are guests". Or indeed city centers where cars aren't allowed. When I go to the US I'm often surprised that you can't get to things that are onl…
On holiday in the Florida we walked to the gated entrance to the community to ask whether delivery drivers got access or we needed to pick it up at the gate. The way they looked at us, you would think we had two heads for arriving on foot.
I once walked into a drive through in Texas (Galveston) with a group of scientists there for a conference (because main restaurant was closed), we almost got shot (no not really but people felt very very threatened and threatened us)!
Re: Mom gets 6-month suspended sentence for letting 5-year-old walk to the pond
#127What seems odd to me whenever this debate comes up is the failure to differentiate between:
- the child must never be unsupervised
- I/we think the child should never be unsupervised
We have less and less space between an opinion or recommendation and legal requirement. On a wide range of subjects people go straight to “require”, unwilling to simply express their opinion and move on.
Re: Mom gets 6-month suspended sentence for letting 5-year-old walk to the pond
#128Here in Switzerland children start walking to school at around 5-years. Parents aren't allowed to bring them to school. If a parent escorts their children to school they'll be told not to. If they keep doing it they'll get a letter from the school and probably a police visit. And if they continue (I never heard of it getting to this stage) they may be fined. It's funny in the morning. One child walks to another child…
Young children also walk to the elementary schools near me. When I’m at the park with my kids, it’s common to see other very young kids show up alone on their bikes or on foot to play in the park. This is in the US.
I think international readers see these headlines and assume the entire US is like this, but the reason the story is a headline is because it’s a dumb sentence. This is going to get appealed.
The US is a big country. The state this happened in has a similar population to the entire country of Switzerland. Laws and cultural norms vary across the country, but this story is unusual even for the location it happened in. That’s why it’s a news story.
Re: Mom gets 6-month suspended sentence for letting 5-year-old walk to the pond
#129How does this happen? There’s no silver lining which makes this conviction reasonable. If they can’t appeal, I hope they use Streisand to get the town or state of Virginia to vacate everything.
> How does this happen?
Simple. Evolutionarily, the dumber you are, the higher the risks of dying, because you do stupid shit. Inversely, the safer the environment, the dumber people become, because not doing stupid shit stops being evolutionarily advantageous. Nature is pretty brutal so there is evolutionary pressure not to be dumb, but in modern civilization we have pretty much infinite resources dedicated to safety, which means there is a feedback loop "people are dumber -> more safety measures -> people are dumber -> more safety measures".
When you go to poor countries you'll realize just how much knowledge children posses on the topic on how not to die.
Re: Mom gets 6-month suspended sentence for letting 5-year-old walk to the pond
#130Here in Switzerland children start walking to school at around 5-years. Parents aren't allowed to bring them to school. If a parent escorts their children to school they'll be told not to. If they keep doing it they'll get a letter from the school and probably a police visit. And if they continue (I never heard of it getting to this stage) they may be fined. It's funny in the morning. One child walks to another child…
Yes, I’m Swiss and walked to school starting around 5. I was hit by a car (due to bad judgment on my part) on the way back from school at 6, though, so it’s not all roses.
I also pulled one of my sons twice from the same pond around that age, so I would not necessarily be super comfortable trusting them around those attractive nuisances, even though I’m on board with the “let them walk to school” policy. It’s a difficult balancing act.