It’s a powerful idea. I can’t imagine the hell of losing your kid and not having any answers.
It’s not currently on my list of things to worry about, but I’m not yet a parent either. I’m only a hypothetically “pregnant” parent who is having one hell of a gestation period (adoption waiting list.)
Gigi you’re right, people who are victimised are typically blamed for being too trusting. This seems inevitable and in the case of sexual assault it only compounds the trauma. It may be small consolation, but victims will generally be blamed no matter what they do. So being extra cautious doesn’t carry much protective factor from that angle. At some point in the healing process every victim has to confront and cope with that guilt. I have, even though there’s no conceivable way a ten year old could be responsible… We castigate ourselves to absurd levels regardless of the circumstances.
The initial basic reaction really is hazardous and complicated. The fact that you go into full-on denial about it doesn’t change it. Is “The kid suddenly decides to run off away from everyone” really hard for you to wrap your brain around? Do I try to stop the kid, which violates the ‘no touching’ protocol and makes me look like a kidnapper? Do I follow him, which makes me look like I’m hunting him? Do I let him go, which means he runs off to danger and I’m the last person seen near him? Every possible response is extremely dangerous for me, and there is no clear “common sense” answer.
So your “initial basic reaction” puts me in extreme danger, and although you say it’s easy and common sense you can’t come up with what to do with a likely result of an adult standing next to a scared kid and shouting. I’ll avoid being stuck trying to answer now-not-hypotheticals that are too hard for you while the situation is making me look guilty of trying to hurt a child, jerk.
So “I start shouting like you said, kid gets scared and runs for the woods” is as sensible as “Aliens abduct the kid” in your brain? Seriously? And if it’s so “commonsense”, why don’t you just provide the answer - I mean, you’re calling me a jerk for not wanting to be in a situation where I have to answer “complicated no-longer-hypotheticals” correctly in seconds, with my life and freedom at stake, but coming up with an answer at your leisure with nothing at stake is fine?
You’ve got it completely backwards; the fact that you think it’s too hard to answer the question of “what should I do if the kid runs off” or similar extensions of the basic scenario demonstrates that your claim that it’s just common sense is pure bullshit. You can’t even answer how one should react in the situation, but you expect people to put themselves into that situation, and insult them for avoiding the danger you’ve created.
I think if you stood near a kid and started shouting loudly, the kid would likely move (if not run) away.
People who aren’t comfortable interacting with kids, for whatever reason, don’t have to do so. They doesn’t make them jerks, or horrible people. It’s completely fine.
Whether or not the dad was justified in his initial reaction is completely eclipsed by his horrible behaviour afterwards, once the facts were known. I have a pang of sympathy for someone who panics and overreacts when they lose their kid, but none at all for someone who wilfully refuses to acknowledge their mistake and continues to hound someone who was actually trying to help them.
People, come on! You see a child in need and you help them. Period. No need to obsess over hypotheticals. You make your best judgment in the interest of the child, at that time.The odds it will ruin your life are vanishingly small. Your worst case scenario fears are not rational. Not even a little bit. The guy in this story is “news” because this shit doesn’t usually happen. For fuck’s sake, how can one dismiss the irrational fears of parents in one breath and embrace a different irrational fear in the next?
The odds that it will negatively impact your life are actually higher than the odds of the child coming to harm from your inaction. The reason that this story made the news was not because parent’s don’t overreact to people around their children, the reason was because the guy had a solid alibi that he had no intent of harm, and the parent’s reaction was still great enough to run him out of town. If he hadn’t had the solid alibi, we wouldn’t be hearing about it in the news, because he would just be sitting in a jail somewhere waiting to go to court to defend himself against kidnapping charges.
There was a thread a bit ago about a parent who noticed another person acting a bit odd around the playground, so he called the police on him, and most people in the thread said he did the right thing. Turned out that they guy was just there with his own kid, but he still got hassled by the police for it. Why? Because one parent’s paranoia was greater than their common sense. I’ve gotten dirty looks and even verbal rebukes for having the temerity to pass within a few dozen feet of a playground while at a park.
The chances of being assaulted and run out of town as this guy was are small, but the chances of having to be interviewed by a police officer about why I am here, and what I am doing, and the rest of my life story that is necessary for the cop to (hopefully) decide I am not a threat and let me go on my way are much much higher. The odds of having an uncomfortable or even hostile conversation with the parents are even higher.
Sure, if I see a kid in obvious or immediate danger, I will do what I can to help out. If they are choking, if they are darting out into traffic, if they are drowning, or even lost with no one else available to help (middle of the woods scenario). Otherwise, it is not a good idea to get involved. The kid will be fine. They may cry a bit, they may be upset about being lost, their parents may be concerned (but not concerned enough to keep an eye on their child), but the chances of harm coming to a child lost in a public and populated place are vanishingly small.
All of this raises a question for me. If this kid was in a public place, with a bunch of people around, how did that guy identify the kid as lost? Why did he not assume the child belonged to one of the parents there?
I was with a friend at the aquarium once when he set his two year old down and the kid ran like a bat out of hell clear across the building. By the time the parents caught up, he was like three rooms over. But nobody would notice that right? Because the place was full of parents and kids. Their child was the most rambunctious one there, by the way. Man, he was a handful.
No, period. If you really believed that, you wouldn’t have time to post on this message board, you’d be spending all of your time and money on kids in need. But you don’t, so let’s not pretend that I’m obliged to follow some pithy-but-untrue statement that you clearly don’t even believe in yourself. The idea that I’m supposed to live my life ignoring my own best interest and acting only in the interest of random children that I have no connection to is absurd on it’s face.
Also, the scenario mostly being talked about doesn’t involve a kid “in need” in any reasonable sense of the word, it involves a kid wandering around a group of people apparently unsupervised. There’s not any actual imminent danger to the kid, and there are plenty of people who don’t have the extra risks that a single male does.
Cite, please. A cite for the odds of a stranger abducting a child has been provided, but I haven’t actually seen any statistics about single men attempting to help children and the risks involved there. Also, none of the people saying they avoid getting involved with strange children have said that only the worst case scenario bothers them, so a cite just covering the worst case scenario won’t cover it. An arrest and release, while not a worst-case scenario, is certainly a bad thing. So would detention and interrogation by police. Really, any interaction with the police for a black man and a white child is extremely not good. Being beaten up is not a worst-case scenario, but is certainly a risk. Just spending a few hours sorting out the situation could have significantly bad consequences, especially if it involves missing work at a job that doesn’t accept absenteeism.
I mean, you’re saying ‘you guys are being irrational about the risks’ in a thread where people have said there’s a good chance they’d attack a man for intervening. And as K9 befriender pointed out, we had a thread a while back where parents overwhelmingly supported calling the cops on a guy who was at a playground with his own kid but didn’t have the kid visible to them at that moment! I think you need a little more to back up your position than just saying it’s nothing to worry about. Unless you can come up with something a little more substantial than bald assertion, I’m going to continue my policy of avoiding interaction with stranger’s kids as much as possible, and of avoiding ever being in a situation where it’s possible for an observer to interpret me as abducting a kid.
Maybe you should have figured out the answer to that question before being critical of those of us who would not intervene in that situation. You’re criticizing people for not responding to a child ‘in need’, and you’re not even sure that you’d be able to tell the kid was ‘in need’ in the first place in the situation! I mean, really - on one hand you’re going “how could you not intervene to save this poor child” and on the other you’re asking “why did he not assume the kid would be OK and avoid getting involved?”.
Eh, what the hell. You took all that time, so maybe I should elaborate.
I think that your claim that men assume a significant risk in helping lost children is so fantastic that the burden is on you to provide evidence for it. But of course, we both know there is no data either way, since for all we know thousands of people help lost children every day and it isn’t reported to police or measured by any sort of scientific means. All we have are a slew of anecdotes and internet tough guys. So we are both in the position of arguing from our own good common sense.
And I don’t really give a shit about sexual assault because I only work part-time for my org. I don’t give a shit about homelessness because I don’t empty out my wallets every time I meet someone who asks for money. And I don’t give a shit about children because I would behave differently than you would in a hypothetical situation that I’ve never encountered? Come on. Clearly you’re just pissed off and throwing blind punches.
The idea that I’m supposed to live my life not caring about the safety of any person, whether they are connected to me or not, is absurd on its face. See? There isn’t much progress to be made here if we can’t agree on that basic point. The real point of contention seems to be the relative danger the child is in - it’s clear I see the risk as higher than those here who choose not to engage. Kids being so unpredictable, I’ve found it’s better to err on the side of caution.
I’m not so much worried about kids getting kidnapped, but unattended children are at a higher risk for injury than ones who are not attended. Pretty much ever time I ever hurt myself as a child was when nobody was watching me. This, in and of itself, is sufficient for me to care.
It’s funny, I am seeing ‘‘lost children’’ everywhere now. I saw one in the hall today at the movie theater. He seemed pretty upset. My thoughts were just to hang out, not interact with the kid, not even go near him, just hang out in the hall with him until he found his family. He turned out to not be lost; this incident happened in all of ten seconds and Mom came from seemingly out of nowhere. See, I think the odds that a kid actually does get lost, that someone is in the position of this poor man in the news article, are really tiny to begin with. In my entire 34 years on this planet I’ve never been in that situation, so I’m bemused that it is apparently such a point of contention.
Make up your minds, people: Is “lost child starts to wander off” a quite likely outcome, as Pantastic and k9bfriender seem to think, or a “highly alarming and unlikely hypothetical”, as per clairobscur?
It really isn’t. “Don’t try to take child away from people, and make very noticeable fuss about presence of child.” The fact that you have to keep tweaking and elaborate this basic scenario to present it as hazardous and complicated indicates how flawed your argument is.
This is the sort of misleading distortion I’m talking about. I never said you should stand right next to a kid who’s obviously scared and start shouting. I said you should not try to take the kid away on your own, and you should make a noticeable scene about the kid to attract the attention of the other adults present. Not difficult or dangerous.
If the situation with the kid then changes, you deal with it in a rational and responsible way. No, you can’t obtain an instruction manual covering every possible hypothetical evolution of such a situation (especially when you keep complaining how unfair it is to expect you to know “complicated protocols” for it). It’s evidently hard enough for you to understand and remember even the most basic and logical initial reaction.
In the first place, any situation containing any kind of unexpected hazard to anybody requires answering “complicated no-longer-hypotheticals” correctly in seconds: it’s called “coping with a problem”, and it’s part of ordinary life. Griping about how you’re not getting a complete instruction manual for coping with every possible aspect of potential emergencies doesn’t make you look unfairly burdened, it just makes you look snowflaky.
In the second place, nobody’s calling anybody a jerk merely for not wanting to be in a situation where they have to cope with an unexpected problem. Of course unexpected problems are a PITA and nobody wants them. And note that when I brought this up, I was careful to specify that I wasn’t even calling anybody a jerk for having concerns about their own safety:
That assessment still stands. I will add, based on subsequent discussion, that it’s also kind of being a selfish jerk to whine about the prospect of potentially having to cope with an unexpected problem because it may require making unplanned and possibly complicated decisions in real time.
Suddenly finding oneself a bystander in a situation where somebody else may need some kind of help but nobody present has exclusive responsibility for helping them is just one of the hazards of ordinary human experience. Pouting about how terrible and unfair it is for bystanders to have to deal with such situations occasionally is neither mature nor realistic.
I didn’t say that a kid wandering away was highly alarming and unlikely. I wasn’t talking at all about a kid wandering away, in fact. Nor was I expressing my own opinion.
I simply noted that a previous poster had mentioned “grabing the hand of a stranger” in the middle of a list including running into traffick, chocking on an item and being abducted by ETs. Which presumably mean that grabbing the hand of a stranger, in this poster mind, is as dangerous and unlikely as chocking on something or being abducted by ETs.
Kind of like stray cats. A friend of mine runs a cat shelter. She sees and interacts with stray cats all the time. She carries a pet taxi in her car so that she can transport handle-able strays. Although I live/work in the same area, I never see stray cats. It’s freaky.
If I ever do see a stray child, I’ll place an anonymous call to the police. “Stay here kid, the police are on their way. And for christs sake, don’t flash that water gun when they arrive!”
I’ll let my cousin know you find this behavior acceptable, since she was fired for this very behavior for “unwanted touching” in the workplace.
I would immediately think “Why are you touching me? Didn’t you learn to keep your hands to yourself when you were like 4 years old?”
Simply extending your hand out in order to display that you would like to shake hands is not unwanted touching, therefore, it doesn’t apply. If someone just grabbed my hand and started shaking it, then yeah, I’d be annoyed. Same as those jokesters who “playfully” punch people in the arm, or slap people on the back.
It’s funny, in every sexual harassment training I’ve had, unwanted touching was brought up as something “not to do” Opposite sex members of the military asked my permission every single time they needed to touch me for some reason (medical staff excluded of course). I find it hard to believe that you believe most women would accept a guy coming up to them everyday and rubbing their shoulder while standing behind them. Or rubbing their arm.
As clairobscur pointed out, he doesn’t actually think that it’s a highly alarming an unlikely hypothetical, but the opposite. So even though the three of us have no obligation to agree, since we’re not the ones saying that other people are obligated to behave in a particular way to a situation, we actually do agree on that point.
But you are consistently unable to answer what the rational and responsible way is, and when people do answer in general their answers rapidly become a contradictory mess punctuated with threats of beatings and police intervention. So clearly there isn’t actually a rational and responsible way to respond to the situation in question, your saying so is just a straight up cop-out.
I think the whiny asshole who can’t keep track of his own kids and wants to insult anyone who doesn’t choose to engage in large scale spontaneous freelance babysitting and the corresponding risk of beatings and arrest is the real snowflaky selfish jerk here.
Since you only work part-time for your org, you clearly don’t believe something like “any time there is sexual assault, you fight against it. Period. You make your best judgement in the interest of the victim(s) at that time.” Since you don’t empty out your wallets for everyone who asks for money, you don’t believe “anytime someone is homeless is in need, you give them money. Period. You make your best judgement in the interest of the homeless person at the time.”
The “I don’t give a shit about” is your words, not mine. At no point did I say anything stating or insinuating that you don’t give a shit about children, merely that you clearly aren’t acting as your statement would require you to act, which demonstrates that you don’t believe in that particular statement. There is a lot of ground between “don’t actually believe that you always act in the needs of someone else” and “don’t give a shit about”, you’re engaging in the fallacy of the excluded middle pretty wildly.
No, I don’t see at all. Please quote where I said something remotely like that. I disagreed with your assertion that if a child has a ‘need’ then I’m obligated to fill it. And bear in mind in the context of this thread, ‘need’ is defined so broadly as ‘might or might not be unattended temporarily around a lot of adults’ and my obligation to fill that need is ill-defined and involves activity I find morally objectionable*. So it’s not like the ‘need’ your talking about is ‘about to die’, it’s ‘kid might be unhappy for a few minutes longer, if there’s even actually a problem in the first place.’
*(Shouting out begging for someone not an evil single man to come save the kid is implicitly endorsing that objectionable belief, so I wouldn’t do it even if I thought it was a good idea, but I don’t actually think it’s a good idea).
I don’t know what basic point you want me to agree with - I do not agree that a child possibly (though not definitely) being mildly uncomfortable for a few minutes or suffering a minor injury is something to even worry about, much less something that creates an obligation in me. Really, I find the whole notion that a parent’s failure to do their job as a parent magically creates an open-ended obligation on me to act as a freelance babysitter to be absurd. While I will help people when it is reasonable to do so, I don’t accept that I have an obligation to do so, and especially don’t accept that random people get to decide what is reasonable for me and call me a jerk if I decide that a situation is either not dangerous, or so mildly dangerous that it’s not worth the risk and hassle of intervention.
I’m definitely not worried about kids getting scraped knees or bruises, that’s part of being a kid and learning how not to get hurt. If there’s a real risk of major injury of death then I’d see the situation differently - though in most cases I can think of where I’d intervene in that, I’d have to break the ‘no touching’ rule, so according to Manson1972 shouldn’t actually try to help a kid that’s alone and apparently unconscious or bleeding to death. (And I did actually break his rule the one time I encountered a kid with a bad cut and no parents in sight.)
The only appropriate response to your shitty ad-hominem would have been an apology. Instead I get more pedantic bullshit. Sometimes, Pantastic, I feel that you were custom designed to piss me off, a phenomenon that is so unusual I cannot explain it in words. Nothing good will come of us continuing to interact. And maybe it’s not fair to you, maybe it’s not some inherent flaw you have, but a happenstance of bad chemistry between two very different people, but it doesn’t really matter, because we’re done here.
Sheesh, I was latch-key at 7 years old, as were a few other kids on my block. We had a ‘block mother’ who we could go to and knock on their door if there was any trouble. I’m not saying it was the most responsible choice, but we all survived just fine without police intervention.
I didn’t make an ad-hominem, I disagreed with your insistence that a moral imperative exists, and pointed out that you don’t personally live as though the moral imperative you claimed applies to me applies to you. You decided that there is an implication that ‘don’t follow this moral imperative’ means ‘don’t give a shit about children’, but I didn’t make that claim. Further, since you believe that ‘disagree with the ‘needs of children automatically take priority’ thing’ means ‘don’t give a shit about children’, that makes your use of it an ad-hominem against me, since you’re making the claim about me that you’re angry for me supposedly making against you.
Claiming that the only appropriate response to YOUR shitty ad-hominem against me is for me to apologize for pointing out that it applies to you to is fucking bullshit, and me putting aside the insult and responding to your actual words is an attempt to engage in discussion, not ‘pedantic bullshit’.
If you fire away at me with what you classify as an ad hominem, then when I try to discuss it as an actual position and apply the statement to you respond with a demand that I apologize for your ad hominem and get pissed when I refuse to apologize for an insult you made, you can expect to be pissed again in the future.