Free-Range Children

[History049]

If it happens to one child in a million, does that mean it's worth preventing the other 999,999 from experiencing any form of freedom during their childhoods?

Isn't that why we recall tainted food? 10 people out of 10 million get sick, but all of it has to go.

[History049]

1. A ten-year-old walking alone to school is far more likely to be hit by a car than by a pedophile. Let's plan for the actually significant dangers.
2. Randomly kidnapping kids to molest them sounds several orders of magnitude more dangerous than highway prostitution. I would assume that any perv actually dumb enough to do that would not be alive and molesting for very long.



You will be getting an angry letter from the lawyers for the Goblin Anti-Defamation League shortly. Their rep is bad enough without bastards like you comparing them to pedophiles.

FAR more likely? I don't know about that.

Kids get randomly kidnapped. It's not always on the evening news.

I don't remember what the username is supposed to be. I made it over 16 years ago (fall 1998).

[Thoth]

Ecofarm?

[kentonio]

Isn't that why we recall tainted food? 10 people out of 10 million get sick, but all of it has to go.

Ok, let me put it another way. We can basically reduce crime in our countries to almost zero. All we have to do is keep every person in the country under 24 hour surveillance and give everyone an unlockable collar that the watching security forces can activate to immobilize anyone who attempts to commit a crime. Presumably you support this, as it would prevent people being murdered, raped etc?

[Lorizael]

FAR more likely? I don't know about that.

Based on a little googling, something like 50 times more likely. So a kid has something like a .0002%/per year of being involved in a "stereotypical" (pedophile goblin) abduction.

[History049]

Ok, let me put it another way. We can basically reduce crime in our countries to almost zero. All we have to do is keep every person in the country under 24 hour surveillance and give everyone an unlockable collar that the watching security forces can activate to immobilize anyone who attempts to commit a crime. Presumably you support this, as it would prevent people being murdered, raped etc?

That's certainly the way western countries are going. I'm not necessarily opposed.

[History049]

Based on a little googling, something like 50 times more likely. So a kid has something like a .0002%/per year of being involved in a "stereotypical" (pedophile goblin) abduction.

Ah, but you don't hear of the cases that aren't reported to the police.

[Elok]

Random kidnappings of children by perverts go unreported? How? I can't think of a crime that gets us more frothing-at-the-mouth riled up than kiddy-fiddling. You could probably straight-up kill any number of kids, provided they were the right color and you were clever, but if you did anything remotely kinky to the bodies it'd be on the news for a good week. That ****'s a rainmaker for the press.

[Lorizael]

Ah, but you don't hear of the cases that aren't reported to the police.

...when would a parent not report their child's abduction?

For a little more perspective, btw, about 99% (not a made up statistic!) of all missing children reports turn out to be false alarms. The idea that they are underreported doesn't make a lick of sense.

[Proteus_MST]

There's always danger. A 10 year old walking alone to school could easily be kidnapped by a pedophile. Does it happen regularly? No, but it happens enough where it's an issue that needs to be addressed.

Of course this danger is there ... which is before I was allowed to go to school alone for the first time, my parents told me to never ever ever get into the car of someone I don´t know.
Noone says that the kid should be unprepared before it is alowed to go out of the house the first time ... just like behavior with regards to road traffic (using traffic lights whenever possible ... looking if a car comes when having to cross streets without traffic lights) the danger by pedophiles/adults should, of course, belong to the lessons a kid should learn before being allowed out of the house alone.

Isn't that why we recall tainted food? 10 people out of 10 million get sick, but all of it has to go.

But that means that you would have to keep your child locked away in the house (and only allow it to go out of the house without parental cmpany) till it is an adult.
There are always dangers in the world for a non grown up kid (especially in a country like the USA where in many regions every idiot is allowed to have a firearm) and many of those dangers have a much higher probability of happening than an abduction by a pedophile (for example getting robbed and maybe as a result also getting shot or beaten dead).

So, due to the dangers in the outside world you should truely advocate keeping your kid on a leash when outside until s/he has reached the age of 21.
It is the only way to ensure that a kid doesn´t get into any of the many dangers of the outside world without one (or both) of the parents being there to help

[Aeson]

If every child had a gun, pedophiles would be an insignificant concern in regards to child safety

[Dr Strangelove]

We can basically reduce crime in our countries to almost zero. All we have to do is keep every person in the country under 24 hour surveillance and give everyone an unlockable collar that the watching security forces can activate to immobilize anyone who attempts to commit a crime.

Britain's bringing Tony Blair back?

[Alexander's Horse]

At the age of 5, dragging my big old fashioned brown cardboard school bag (or port as we called them), I had to cross a busy suburban railway line by myself - at peak hour in all weather - to get to the school bus stop. This sort of arrangement.



I used to say "we are all survived". Actually we didn't

Today I marvel at the freedom we had.

[Hauldren Collider]

...when would a parent not report their child's abduction?

For a little more perspective, btw, about 99% (not a made up statistic!) of all missing children reports turn out to be false alarms. The idea that they are underreported doesn't make a lick of sense.

Here's why: because the parent abducted the child. Virtually all kidnappings (that are not false alarms) are of the divorced-parent-wants-kid-back variety.

[Hauldren Collider]

The astonishing thing to me is that we expect our children to grow up to be responsible adults, without ever giving them responsibility. You can't learn to be responsible unless you are GIVEN responsibility. Just like you can't learn to be smart with money without being given some money with which to be smart. Parents want to keep their children in a little box and at the same time expect them to grow up. Doesn't work that way.

My dad tried to avoid telling me "no", he would just carefully enumerate the things that would happen if I actually went ahead with the fuck-up I had planned. The few times I didn't just do what he suggested ended as you would expect, so I learned pretty fast. As a result, I didn't really have that many rules growing up--although I also knew that if I ever actually did something really stupid the leash would tighten quickly. I think that's why I never really went through a rebellious teenager phase.