Hmmm…Seems to me that the fear of abductors is greatly overrated. Driving with a toddler in your car is way more dangerous than leaving him unattended in said car for some moments. There are way way more kids killed in accidents than abducted. Actually, there are way more kids directly harmed by their parents (or a relative, neighbor, ect…in case of sexual abuses) than by a stranger.
As for the situation described in the OP, I would just keep an eye on the toddler, like I assume most adult people would do (or at least should do, IMO), and warn the mother if something happened (the 3 y.o. wandering outside the building, or doing something dangerous to the toddler) and she seemed not to have noticed it. And in the exceptionnal case where what is happening is really dangerous and require immediate action, without time to warn the mother, I would just act upon it (like, say, drag the 3 y.o. out of the street traffic or somesuch).
I would only warn the authorities in case of obvious abuses, or if I somehow knew the parents and noticed some pattern of neglect or hints of abuse. Certainly not because a parent leave his/her kid out of reach for some moments.
I wish the child abuse Nazis would realize already that their zealotry actually hurts their cause. When I hear “child abuse”, my first instinctive reaction is to roll my eyes and write it off as some bullshit. Because in 90% of the cases, that’s exactly what it is.
I used to be sympathetic to the cause of child abuse. In a saner place and time there was a clear definition of child abuse. When I was a kid, they would sometimes show documentaries on TV about abused children, and what they showed was pretty bad. It was real child abuse.
What is going on in this country in this day and age is akin to Nazi Germany. People encouraged to turn in their neighbors? That is really frightening. Now they even have these public service commercials on some obscure cable channels. My son is very sensitive to the persecution from the child abuse Nazis because, as a single mother and a foreigner living in the deep South people were always expressing curiosity about us and keeping an extra close eye on us.
No, I’m not paranoid. Don’t force me to trot out a sampler of the instances when we were treated with suspicion by the Hillbilly militia down there. I really don’t want to relive any of it. Okay, just one: My son had this little purple birthmark on his face. (Gone now.) One day when we were on line at Burger King, there was this old fucking BAT who kept staring and staring. So I said to her, “Is there a problem?” And she goes, never taking her eyes off my kid’s face, “I wonder…I really wonder if there is a problem.” Words pregnant with unspoken accusation.
Anyway, my kid drew my attention to the above-mentioned commercials. I couldn’t believe it. They go something like this: “Is it child abuse?? If you are not sure, report it. You can be totally anonymous.” And so on and so forth. Practically urging people on to look for it. And what did they show to accompany this ominous voice-over? A father raising his voice at a kid. A kid dropping a bowl of food and fearfully looking up at the parent, as if expecting to have the shit beaten out of him for his accident. I mean, if we go by those standards, everyone is a child abuser. No one is exempt.
I wonder what agenda the gub’mint or whoever puts out these shit-ass commercials has? Do they want to make sure that their jobs are safe by creating as much of a workload as possible?
My other problem is with the way the entire reporting process is handled. The accusers are encouraged to stay anonymous. The parents have no recourse. They are guilty until proven innocent. They are persecuted by gvmt. employees, having their privacy invaded in every possible way. How do you prove the negative? And in my observation, it’s getting worse than ever. Used to be that parents got a tentative visit from a social worker who was assigned the task of finding out if there is anything to the charges. Now, whenever you watch an episode of “Cops” or read a newpaper story on the issue, it’s the cops coming and snatching up the kids dramatically as a preemptive measure. Why is this allowed? I have sympathy for anyone (child, adult, animal) who is hurt in any way. But the over-the-top child abuse Nazi practices have made me very cynical about the entire issue of child abuse/neglect.
Also, call it my nature or whatever, but I have an innate respect for the Invisible Line. The line where another family’s privacy begins. I just never felt it was my place to butt in and tell other people how to run their families. I figure, I don’t know the whole story, they are in a better position to judge what to do when it comes to their own private shit. This is so deeply imbedded in me, and comes so natural, that I was not even aware of my respect for the Invisible Line until the first time I discussed this issue. I think this applies to the majority of people. It is just a small minority who believe that other people’s kids are somehow everyone’s business.
And, btw, I love Hillary Clinton; hope she runs for President in the near future. But she really, really dropped the ball on that “It takes a Village” tome. That is one train-wreck that should have never been written. Well, everyone is allowed one slip-up.
You’re a peach.
So the four year old boy that came to the pool where I lifeguarded, covered in bruises, asking for something to eat because his mother had locked him out of the house…I’m a fucking NAZI for reporting that to the police? How is reporting the beating of a child hurting my cause?
Other people’s kids become my business when they treat them like punching bags. A four year old versus a thirty year old is an unfair battle. It is my duty to step in and defend him.
I think you’re confusing Nazi Germany with Soviet Russia.
He probably just needs a “good whoop’m.”
It’s hard to confront someone like that. It’s harder to talk to someone that might end up being hostile than to take some sort of action to make things safer. I had the same quandry when the puppy fell out of an open car window. Even if it hadn’t been during a storm I might not have waited for the owner, who might be large and angry at me for “butting” in.
Might I ask why a certain participant in this hasn’t yet been banned?
OTOH, you don’t seem to realize that calling “Nazi” hurts your cause. There have always been neighbors who are too nosy and there always will be, there’s also people who take their jobs too seriously. The zealous CPS agent was taken to the extreme in that “King of the Hill” episode. The other side of the coin are people who are to complacent. Had you been in a situation such as welby was back in July, I bet you wouln’t have done a thing. Hell, you probably wouldn’t have even noticed.
I had something similar happen at a post office once as well. Mom and the older daughter went into the counter and left the little one (Maybe 1 1/2 years?) and an older sister out in the other part of the building with the stamps and mailboxes. Well, the baby decided that he was going to walk out the front door, and sister just watched him. I set my packages down, went out, grabbed the kid and took him into his mom, saying “He went outside, into the parking lot.” Instead of a “Oh, thanks.” she snatched the kid away and looked at me like I was the bad guy. I guess, though, that if I’d just stood by and watched the kid get run over, I’d also be the bad guy for not going and getting him.
I’ve also called the cops about kids left in a car. (Oooh. I’m a regular child abuse nazi.) My husband and I went to Kmart, and on the way in, noticed a baby in a carrier and a little girl in a car. Keep in mind that it was Texas, and it was summer time, and it gets pretty fucking hot down there. We thought that maybe mom had just gone in to pick up a prescription or something, and so we went in, got the few things we needed and were back out in 10 minutes or so. The kids were still in the car. We sat in the parking lot for a little while longer, and when no adult came to the car, went to the payphone and called the cops. We waited until the cops got there (another 10 minutes, almost), and still no one had come out to get the kids. I don’t feel that I’m a bad person or a busybody for not letting those two kids die.
'Cos he was REAL big, and I’m a pussy.
I agree with Suspenderzzz on the extent people use the term “child abuse” for everyday things that clearly isn’t child abuse, but is still reported by over zealous folks.
I think there is a huge line here that Suspenderzzz did not cross in his post. He (or she) was talking about reporting non-existent abuse (like a bruise on a kid…come on, I was bruised when I was a kid because I WAS A KID).
I think it’s easy to tell when that line is crossed if some kid is covered in bruises.
Lets try a hypothetical situation…what if you noticed a kid with a large ring like bruise around his wrist…would you report it without thinking? What if that bruise was caused when that kid’s parents saved his life by holding him from falling off, say, their balcony? You wouldn’t know that but many people here seem to me that they’d be calling in the authorities in a flash.
I can understand teachers that have to report abuse, but the fact is that a lot of “abuse” isn’t abuse (up to 1/3 from the google search I did).
Teachers make a mistake and suddenly kids are removed from parent’s houses by force and the whole thing becomes a mess that ultimately hurts the child.
I think all we really need is a little accountability in what we report.
You know, I might take Suspenderzzz opinion a little more seriously if she hadn’t
a) expressed glee over getting to see her neighbors repeatedly whipping their children
b) compared people who are basically just concerned with a child’s welfare with those who systematically exterminated millions of human beings.
But, maybe that’s just me.
I think she’s using the potential for overanalyzation as an excuse to do absolutely nothing.
The proper way to handle this instance would be to ask the kid where the bruise came from, make a mental note of it, and wait to see if any other bruises appear. If so, ask the kid about them too. There’s probably something fishy going on if all the kid can say about them is that they’re from falling down.
On preview: belladonna is right on the money. It’s not just you. I used to listen to a talk radio program while at work and invariably calling “Nazi” was the last resort of people who can’t think of any better way to defend their argument. To paraphrase Paul Harris, the host: “What the Nazis did was the ultimate of evil. Nothing will ever compare to the Holocaust and by invoking their name, your argument risks being disregarded.”
I just had this same conversation on another board. A girl on that board (girl, because she is 13) watched a child get beaten in a store and did nothing. Obviously it wouldn’t be a good idea for her to intervene, but she can call the cops, can’t she?
I agree with Suspenderzzz just a little bit: I do think that there is a lot of going overboard happening in the reporting/investigating/prosecuting of child abuse. I base this on knowing several families who have had their lives torn apart for no reason, and on having had the experience of a CPS worker knocking on my door just because I didn’t think it was a good idea to have my 3 month old x-rayed for no reason.
BUT, I do not think that the blame for this lies on those private citizens who report possible child abuse in good faith and with the child’s interest in mind. Better to report it mistakenly than to ignore it mistakenly. I think that the blame lies with the social services system that goes after a family because they don’t think the dad makes enough money (despite the obvious fact that they are managing just fine) or because they homeschool, or because their house isn’t spotless. It is the senseless chasing of perfectly good parents that causes children who are really being abused to be overlooked.
Further, I question the anonymous reports. Far too many people abuse this. And even when a name is given, it isn’t checked. I know one woman who called CPS posing as the child’s mother and claimed that the father was abusive. It was a complete lie from a drug-addicted mother-in-law that was upset she wasn’t allowed to see the children. But CPS didn’t check their source, they just went to harrass the dad. It wasn’t until the grandmother bragged about it that anyone knew what had happened.
As for the mother in the OP, I would have been disgusted, as well. It is a child’s job to get into trouble. That’s how they learn. Your job is to make sure they don’t injure themselves or anyone else while they do this. You simply do not leave a child unattended unless you know they are safe (that includes in the home – I wouldn’t leave my 8 month old crawling around my living room without supervision).
Jeff Olson – you say you would ask the kid where the bruise came from. And that, if you didn’t like the answer, you would ask again.
This is assuming that the kid is someone you know, whom you will see repeatedly. What if it is a stranger whom you will likely never see again? Would you really approach a stranger’s child and ask nosy questions like that based on nothing but assumptions? And you are probably right that the kid would not tell you the truth (if the kid told you anything other than:“I’m not allowed to let strangers chat me up”, his/her parents are fools).
Because of busybodies and their assumptions and probing questions, my son was trained from an early age not to answer nosy questions from strangers, teachers, neighbors and the like for fear of having anything twisted. Not that we had anything to hide, ever, but that is entirely beside the point in today’s crazy world. Anything can and will be twisted. (See may above example about the birthmark cum “bruise”).
You know how teachers give out “innocent” essay topics the real purpose behind which is to find something out about the kid’s homelife? My son was instructed (by me) from kindergarten age on to say to the question that would inevitably come up – “what three things would you ask for to be different if you could”? – say, “I would wish for world peace, for all the races to get along, etc.” In other words, never say anything personal. It’s none of their fucking business.
Of course, the question came up – more than once – and the probers were always foiled and frustrated. What they wanted to hear, and heard from other kids was stuff like, “I wish my daddy lived with us; I wished my parents wouldn’t fight all the time”, and shit like that. Even in HS they still pull that kind of shit, assigning essays about “the worst thing that ever happened to you” and stuff like that. They want dirt, and my son never gave them any because I brought him up right. He knows that he can talk to me about anything that bothers him – he does, but that it must stay in our closely trusted circle, and that people with nosy questions and comments like “come on, you can tell me, I promise I’m on your side” are not your friend – anything but.
Back to the thing about total strangers asking questions. It seems to me that most child abuse reports are made by family members, “friends”, neighbors and acquaintances. Stranger-on-stranger reporting seems to be the minority of cases. It’s mostly a way of sticking it to someone you don’t like, or to feel important. After all, there is NO risk whatsoever to the reporting party. How convenient.
Cessandra - how do you reconcile your relatively balanced post with your behavior described in the Zima story (of which you seem to be very proud) linked in your signature? One can only hope that the Zima story is a joke of some sort.
Boy, Suspenderzzz. I’d hate to live in your miserable paranoid world.
What are you suggesting she did wrong Suspenderzz? She saw a man drinking while driving with small children in the car so she reported it. What fucking world do you live in that that’s something she should be ashamed of?
You can bet your bottom dollar that I, too, would report a person who is drinking alcohol while driving (actually did it once). But for the obvious reason: He poses a danger to the fucking public!
She seems so fixated on the man’s damn kids that that aspect obviously never occurred to her. Give me a break.
I’m not understanding. When you did it it was okay, but when Cessandra did it it was completely out of line because she noticed that there were children in the car? You’re aware that kids–even other people’s–are part of the “public” too, right?
First, as I said in my previous post, I feel it is better to report abuse mistakenly than not to report it mistakenly. Secondly, that man was actively endangering his kids and my kids (who were in the car with me).
Yes, I do feel that the child protection services in this country run a bit amok. But there is a big difference between a man drinking and driving with two small unbuckled children in his car (two kids who are going to become projectiles through the windshield if he hits something or someone), and a man who (like I said before) makes less money than CPS thinks he should make. In fact, my big problem with CPS is that they don’y make this distinction.