Earlier this month, a South Carolina mother was arrested for letting her 9-year-old child play in the park while she worked a shift at McDonald’s.
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As reported by a local ABC affiliate, 46-year-old Debra Harrell let her daughter play in a crowded park instead of making her sit in the McDonald’s all day long on a nice summer day. The child had a cellphone with her, but that wasn’t good enough for concerned witnesses or the police.
Because in today’s US of A, if you are worried about someone else’s choice, you had better call the cops.
The only consolation might be the strong internet backlash over this arrest which is crossing ideological lines — commentators from Salon, to Jezebel, to The Blaze, to Reason are astonished by the overreaction to a debatable parenting choice.
But for now Herrell stands charged with felony unlawful conduct towards a child — something with which you are also charged if your child mysteriously disappears, so yeah, that sounds reasonable here — and her daughter was taken into custody by social services.
Herell posted bond the same day, but at press time she had not yet gotten her daughter back. After all, as Lesa Lamback, random concerned playground mother told ABC, “you cannot just leave your child alone at a public place, especially. This day and time, you never know who’s around. Good, bad, it’s just not safe.”
Isn’t it? If it ever was safe to let your kid play in the park for several hours, it’s safe now.
The ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s are described by just about everyone as a time when kids were booted outside — especially during the summertime — and then told to come back by dark. Crime in the U.S. has been on a near-continuous decline since the mid-1990s.
When kidnappings do happen, the perpetrators tend to be not cable news-ready creepers in vans, but family members and individuals known to children. The nightmare scenario of the stranger stealing and killing a child is a tragedy — and a truly miniscule percentage of the reported child abductions each year.
The South Augusta park in which the nine-year old was placed was full of parents and kids. Herrell’s daughter would walk a mile and a half to meet her mother for lunch at her work. The park was full of active parents.
You don’t have agree with Herrell’s choice here. Perhaps you are less comfortable with a child of nine having that level of freedom. That’s fine. But why couldn’t one of these cautious parents have simply kept one eye on little Herrell in addition to their own kids? Why not make sure she’s okay, or even try to talk to Herrell when she came to pick up her child?
If you’re going to butt in, butt in civilly, don’t call the authorities on a working mother with a very limited income.
What the hell happened to people that they think the answer to every concern is dialing the cops? The village isn’t raising the child here, the village is shoving parents into the stockade for violating subjective standards of fitness.
Another recent one from the month of July: A Connecticut woman was charged for letting her 11-year-old sit in the car while she went into a store. The girl reportedly asked to be able to stay in the car, like many a bored 11-year-old throughout history has done.
Eleven is old enough to find shopping with mom tiresome, and old enough to stay in the car and text or snapchap, or whatever the kid are into, without keeling over from heatstroke. And yet, the overhyped terror of kids dying in hot cars has lead to this kind of nonsense.
It happens, yes — maybe 20 times a year in the U.S. It’s nearly always an accident, not that that helps parents who have to live with it, as this 2009 sock-in-the-stomach Gene Weingarten piece demonstrates.
But there’s a duller, yet still worrisome stomachache to be found in a Salon essay from last month by a mother who was charged contributing to the delinquency of a minor for leaving her toddler in the car for just minutes. (She ended up with community service.)
Yes, I suppose something could have happened. And it could have happened to the other South Carolina woman’s kids, who she left in the air conditioned car while her sister-in-law stood outside watching her car and the first woman’s. (Meaning, no, they weren’t unattended. But she still gets a media shaming.)
“Could have” is a poor legal and scientific principle. As The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf points out, if we are taking kids away based on danger, we’d better start arresting parents who put their children in cars. We don’t do that because we act on perceived dangers — on media-friendly fears, not the actual statistical likelihood of a child being in peril.
This kind of hysteria is how you ruin civil society. It is how we get 2 million people in prison, and a regular kicking in of front doors over reported substances or other ills.
Somehow after reading these pieces on this poor abused parents, I am reminded of a brilliant essay from last year by a resident of the former East Germany. The most memorable lesson imparted from the essay was that the Stasi weren’t horrific because everyone was necessarily in mortal danger from them at any moment. They were evil also because they inspired such psychologically crushing distrust among the citizens.
Some estimates say one in three East Germans were reporting to the Stasi. With a one in three chance that your friend is reporting your subversive thoughts, you had best keep those thoughts to yourself.
This is an exaggeration of what we have in America, but it is the logical end result of criminalizing utterly everything — of turning to law and order instead of conversation. When punishment is a higher priority than sense or compassion, you get a whisper of that Stasi paranoia, and that distrust. People with guns and uniforms and up being the solution to everything.
And then you get a 9-year-old taken from her mother because she wanted to play in the park.