STYLETHREAD -- LET'S TALK SHOP!

Kelly wrote:

---

I don't know how I feel about this. Honestly, it sounds like things my parents did when I was a kid. I mean, if they dropped me off 3 miles from my house because I was fighting with my brothers, we would have understood that the punishment was that we had to walk those 3 miles to get home and that we had to get along while doing it - not that I was actually being abandoned. I assume the kids knew how to get home from there.

I don't know what the place was like where she dropped them off (like if it's a busy city, or whatever) but 3 miles is not too far away to be from home when you're 10 and 12, IMO, especially if they're together. I guess it also depends on the sensitivity of the children involved.

And if the mother was in the wrong, I definitely don't think she should be charged with child endangerment, that seems way to severe to me. But like I said, I guess it depends on where she dropped them off - if she left them in the slums of Harlem or something like that, then yes, maybe it would have been dangerous. But it sounds like it was just shops or a stripmall or something like that?

Of course, I say this having never been a mom myself, I'm just going by what I would have thought/felt as a child in this situation.

-- Edited by Kelly on Wednesday 22nd of April 2009 11:00:52 AM

 

---

Boots wrote:

---

What if the wrong type of person found these girls first? Or offered them a ride? Scared kids make bad choices. You can see from the article they didn't even stay together.

---

 I just want to say, and I know that most of you probably don't share my experience and I wouldn't expect you to see it from this perspective...but it's much more serious than a discipline method that is being criminalized.

I am someone who was assaulted (and thank God, not permanently kidnapped) by a stranger when I was a child, it's not only scared kids who make bad choices, I was taught like everyone else, not to talk to strangers. But when you are alone and an adult comes up and says it's okay, most kids will go along with it. Especially less assertive and agreeable "good kid" types. I also don't think it's appropriate to say that this is some sort of sign of the times and that kids today are coddled, even if in other circumstances the generation may be less tough than previous generations, the importance of protecting children and supervision is never to be underestimated. I was born in the mid-70's, my neighborhood was lower middle class and white and unremarkable. And even though I was closely watched 99% of the time, someone still got me in the few minutes that my dad stepped inside the house once while he was working on his car outside. And these poor girls were abandoned by their mother on the street, far from home!

Child predators are everywhere, strip malls included, and they have been around forever. Anyone who was ever kicked out of a car by their mother is LUCKY they didn't get picked up by a predator, period, because it only takes ONCE to completely change your life. Plus even if a child resists, a 10 and 12 yr old are still small enough to be taken by force. We don't hear about these cases too often, they aren't in the news, because the kids usually end up just being sexually assaulted, not kidnapped or missing for long periods of time or murdered, then the kid is dropped back off somewhere, and either doesn't tell his parent (especially if it is a boy, out of the humiliation) what happened or he comes home to a parent who doesn't notice he was gone anyway. Very, very typical target is kids who have to walk home from school. I have read interviews from child predators who claimed they got with dozens of kids every week. How many of those cases do you think get reported?

I absolutely agree with the arrest of this mother. I don't believe she should have her custodial rights threatened, but the abandonment cannot be tolerated, the risk she put her children in is just too great.