Which people -- the free range parents, the protective parents, the perverts or the CPS?
Posted on 12/26/2014 3:52:55 PM PST by Altariel
Is that a legal term? What does it mean?
Great post. Bears repeating. Thanks.
Getting statistics from a site dedicated to "free range kids" is like getting Candy Crowley to moderate a presidential debate.
Besides the sheer availability not just of porn, but of cheap and easy equipment to make and disseminate porn all over the world in the blink of an eye, other new risks include the infiltration of our communities by illegals who are often untraceable. Also, people are having far fewer children, so each one is potentially a greater loss to a family if they go missing. So while the absolute rate of reported child crime may be lower, we really can't calculate the comparative depth of depravity now loosed on defenseless children.
Even a lowering of statistical incidence does nothing to ease the pain of losing an individual child; or worse, raising a child who has been sex-tortured and psychologically maimed for life. No amount of statistical abstraction can ease that pain for the parents, grandparents, schoolmates, neighbors, and congregation. People didn't use to talk about tragedies and sternly hushed up about a missing child; this was the only balm in the past. Today, everyone knows what is likely to be involved if a child is kidnapped and raped or murdered; and the pain is horrific for the family and everyone who loves them, especially because they are now constrained from the frontier justice an earlier generation would have exacted.
So, just because the incidence of child abduction/rape/murder may be statistically lower doesn't make it any more tolerable. I agree with the poster above who said we should reinstate the death penalty for child rape.
That's amazing. I raised mine in the mafia-protected Italian section of Philadelphia, no lie — it was the safest part of the center of town. But the first time I let my 12-year-old son go a half a block unattended to get a slice of pizza, he was robbed on a side street by two kids from the projects 4 blocks away.
In the preceding 20 years, I had been shaken down on the street for money several times, had a car stolen, had my residence broken into twice and my parking space vandalized twice, my bike and my car license plate stolen, our bowl of Halloween candy robbed out of our hands, the flowerpots on the front step and decorations on the front door stolen, and was once robbed at gunpoint while sitting in my car at a Burger King drive-thru, during which time I was just lucky they didn't hijack the car with me in it. But when they started on my kid, time to leave. We arrived in the suburbs not long after.
See post 104.
Which people -- the free range parents, the protective parents, the perverts or the CPS?
Thanks for the link to “without prejudice”, Star Traveler.
A fact is a fact regardless of its source. I did not claim the site as an authority, but rather as a source for a fact.
If you have evidence that it is not a fact, feel free to disprove it.
I have no problem at all with capital punishment for child rape, though to be fair our present position of death penalty for murder but not rape does give the rapist some incentive not to kill his victim.
There seems little doubt kidnapping/murder of children has dropped in the last 20 years, more or less in parallel with the similar reduction in violence against adults.
But that’s not the number I’m interested in. The hysterical and (probably) often wildly exaggerated fear of child abduction/rape/murder was already at its height 20 years ago. At that time it was based on the assumption that children were at exponentially greater risk that their parents had been 20 or 30 years earlier.
For which I’ve simply never seen any evidence. BTW, I suspect the campaign to convince adults children were at great risk was part of the same moral panic as the Day Care Child Abuse cases, which just about everybody since has admitted resulted in horrific miscarriages of justice.
There are somewhere around 60M children 14 and under in this country. In 2014 about 115 will be kidnapped by a pervert and about 50 of them killed.
That is of course a horrible tragedy, but that means any given child has a risk of less than one in 500,000 of being kidnapped, and considerably less than one in 1M of being murdered. Which puts the risk for both in the same neighborhood as being struck by lightning (1:700,000).
Does it really make sense to tremendously restrict the lives and freedom of children to “protect” them against such an extremely low-risk event?
After all, there is a cost to the children of doing so. It seems highly likely to me that over-protected children are by the very nature of things exposed to greater risk of other problems later in life.
IOW, as with everything else in life it’s a tradeoff. Compare the costs, don’t pretend option A doesn’t have one while Option B does.
BTW, I suspect the campaign to convince adults children were at great and increasing risk was part of the same moral panic as the Day Care Child Abuse cases, which just about everybody since has admitted resulted in horrific miscarriages of justice. The timing lines up nicely, starting in mid-80s. Yet we still hold onto the perception of great risk from strangers despite little evidence it exists.
BTW 2, just as with the present “rape culture” campaign, activists play fast and loose with definitions and statistics to exaggerate the risk and create a perception of peril justifying extreme measures.
Time to shoot these liberal assholes. Sub-human scum.
Apologies for the lousy editing. I pasted but apparently didn’t cut.
Looking at my post, I realized the one in 500,000 risk is per year. To put that into terms for a child up theu 14 you’d need to divide by number of years.
That would give you around 1:35k if you used 14 years as the divisor, but that doesn’t seem right. Nobody is proposing that children under, say, seven years of age not be watched like a hawk.
So what we’re talking about is children from perhaps seven to 14, eight years. They have a statistical risk of kidnapping by stranger of around 1:70,000 during that period.
I think even that number is wildly overstated for most children. As with all other forms of crime, certain groups are more vulnerable and at greater risk. Children in poor communities, for example.
To extrapolate this to adults, street walkers are at much greater risk of rape or murder than middle class women. So if you simply look at the risk for women as a whole, you greatly overstate the risk for most women.
Very nice!
I tend to dislike them all, roughly in this order: perverts, CPS, helicopter parents, free rangers.
Are you kidding? The CPS. I thought people would automatically get that.
More a reflection of the wide range of the comments.
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