From CNN today http://www.cnn.com/2002/US/08/21/sunburn.charges.ap/index.html
A woman was charge with child endangerment after letting her 3 children get badly sunburned at the county fair.
Is this child endangerment, or were the sheriffs overreacting?
If this isn’t child endangerment, then what is?
How can you define what it is in a way that includes all real cases, but excludes frivilous incidents?
IMNSHO, the woman won’t get any time, but maybe she will be forced to attend some parenting lessons and maybe a “get-a-clue” workshop. The woman obviously wasn’t thinking and was harming her children by failing to do so. Hopefully, this experience jarred a few of her brain cells into service. Did it go too far? Can’t say for sure. Sometimes, messages need to be sent. I hope I’m never chosen as a messenger.
I’d consider this as child endangerment, because apparently the kids were so burnt they looked like they’d been dipped in red paint. They suffered second-degree sunburn. They needed treatment at a hospital.
Sure parents make mistakes. My kids have gotten a bit sunburnt before. But I NOTICED they were getting burnt, and covered them up, and kept them out of the sun. It sounds like this woman did none of that. Complete strangers noticed how burnt the kids were…how come she didn’t?
Like D_Odds, I doubt she’ll get jail time, and maybe that’s a good thing. But I hope this whole experience will teach her a lesson.
I can tell you what isn’t child endangerment. It is obviously not endangering a child to go to work and leave your five youngsters in the care of your wife who does not bathe, or speak, behaves in a way that could be called catatonic, and has been diagnosed with clinical depression. According to the DA here in Houston, this is not child endangerment. Go figure. :mad:
the felony charge in the sunburn case has been reduced
As I said in the other thread, every parent has momentary lapses in judgement. However, I have no problem criminalizing hours worth of ‘gee I didnt’ notice my kids faces getting red, them getting cranky, blisters forming on their faces’. (I am assuming that the kids got cranky, after all, they were burning up- the blisters refer to the fact that they were 2nd degree sunburns.)
I have really mixed feelings about this case having finally seen pictures of the children and the visible extent of their sunburn.
As someone who - quite literally - doesn’t tan at all and goes straight from seemingly OK to seriously sunburned, I have enormous compasssion for the pain these children have suffered.
In our whole family, most of us burn and when we do we burn BADLY. Each of us who burns badly has at some time suffered second degree burns as a result of sun exposure. It’s extremely painful, it makes you feel hideously ill, you can’t bear the softest of clothes in contact with your skin, and it leaves awful scarring.
The very worst case of sunburn I EVER had was acquired during 4 hours at a one day cricket match when I was 17 - presumably old enough to realise that I was getting burnt. I DID realise I was getting a little pink, but it wasn’t until hours later that I realised how extensively I’d been burnt and not until the next day when I was hideously blistered that I realised the depth of the burns.
Yes, in this day and age every parent should have an awareness of the dangers of prolonged exposure to the sun and take measures to protect their children. But no matter how much sunblock I put on my youngest daughter, or how often I reapply it, she simply cannot be exposed to the sun for anything like the period my eldest daughter can (this is a major issue I have regarding school sports carnivals and excursions - my youngest cannot be in the sun for a total of more than two hours PERIOD, no matter WHAT precautions I take; after that, she WILL burn, and she’ll burn badly).
Is it reasonable to expect that the mother of 10 month old babies would know their individual responses to sun exposure and how they might differ from those of older siblings? I wish I had a definitive answer to that question, but I don’t. I think that the mother should have been more cautious, certainly, but should she be labelled as a “criminal”? I’m inclined to say no.
We are not talking about a woman who wilfully disobeyed the law and left her children alone in a car; we’re talking about someone who took the kids on a family outing and quite clearly didn’t take the kinds of precautions many of us would have.
Yes, she needs some intensive parenting education, but I don’t think that “justice” will be served in any way by making her serve a custodial sentence.
As I said in another thread, this smacks of “wake up” call kind of prosecution designed to get across the message to the community at large that there are very real risks involved with sun exposure.
Our own “Slip, Slop, Slap, Wrap” campaign has been far more effective at achieving this goal than any number of legislative sanctions could have ever been.
One more vote here for “putting her in jail won’t accomplish anything”. The Better Half took all three of our (school-age) kids to a waterpark a few years ago, spent the entire day there, and they all came home badly sunburned on their backs, shoulders, and necks, although not to the extent of needing to be hospitalized. But it hurt, and they peeled like mad, the youngest the most, since she was the one with the least amount of tan already.
So I shudder to think that some officious deputy might have seen them getting sunburned and slapped Daddy in jail for eight days. That seems like a lot of punishment for a parental " :eek: What, you didn’t give them any sunscreen?" brain fart.
As for how bad the Ohio kids’ burns were: The children were treated and released at the local hospital, and they were treated only with “cold compresses”–I think that if children that young had had blistering due to burns, especially on their faces, the hospital would have kept them, for observation if for no other reason.
Also, there’s this.
http://www.cnn.com/2002/LAW/08/22/sunburn.charges.ap/index.html
I will also point out that she wasn’t at the fair on a “family outing”.
http://www.cnn.com/2002/LAW/08/22/sunburn.charges.ap/index.html
If it’s like the Macon County Fair, they let vendors park a camper on the grounds, with free electricity. So it wasn’t like she packed the kiddies up to spend the day at the fair and didn’t think about them getting sunburned. She packed the kiddies up and took them over to see Daddy at work and to walk around the fairgrounds a little bit, and didn’t think about them getting sunburned. To my mind there’s a difference.
And like somebody said earlier, some kids just burn fast.