Yesterday, we had a big family bash. Dad and Uncle Naren were swilling some whiskey in the backyard. My mom and I were in the kitchen making pasta and soup. Steve flipped some chicken on the grill.
The kids asked if they they could run down to the field at the elementary school, which is about 100 yards from my house. It has a big soccer field and a playground. We told the older ones to watch the younger ones and off they went. We let all nine kids aged 4 to 14 go down on their own, while we got down to business with the whiskey and pasta.
After about 40 minutes, the kids came running in the house. They said with some amusement that some old man took Arianna's shoes. What?!!! It's very hard to get a straight story from a group of kids, mostly verbose girls, who talked over each other, but we finally pieced the bits of the drama together.
The kids were playing soccer and had left their shoes and their sweatshirts next to a goal post, as they ran through the grass. They saw an old Indian man, wearing a traditional long jacket, watching them on the field. Half of our kids are part Indian. He looked like a relative and seemed harmless. They noted that he was looking in the garbage. They even saw him pick up their sweatshirts and put them down. One of the kids saw the man walk off the field with a pair of shoes. They came running home to tell us this strange tale.
Solitary male. At a playground. Taking shoes.
I immediately put down the tongs and called the cops. The police showed up at the field with lights flashing within minutes. At the same time, there was a car accident one block away. There were as many police cars at the soccer field as at the site of the accident.
The cops tracked down the guy. Behind the tinted windows of their SUV, my cousins drove by the man and the kids positively identified the dude. They missed most of dinner, but we nuked the pasta for them when they returned. It was not clear if the guy, a visitor from out of town, was a pervert or an addled old man, but nobody was taking chances.
Malcolm Gladwell has an interesting article in the New Yorker about Sandusky and how he used various methods of child molsters to groom his victims. Thanks to all the readers who asked me to read it.
Modern parents have been aware of perverts for a while. High profile cases of abductions and killings are always on the back of our mind. Cases like Sandusky, the Catholic priest stories and the poor Leiby Kletzky story have increased the anxiety levels. Creeps are everywhere, even among the most trusted members of society.
Fear of perverts has drastically changed the way that we parent our children.
When the kids came running in the house to tell us the shoe story, we immediately gathered the kids in the house. We second guessed our decision to let the kids go to their field on their own. We believed the kids' story and called authorities. The old man, who very well could have had dementia, was feared and the authorities forbade him from spending any more time around the playground. And all of that was right and good.
The downside is that kids today have much less freedom than we enjoyed. They can't roam a neighborhood freely. Parents pick up the kids from school, rather than let them walk home. They get less exercise. They spend more time inside, where we can protect them. We remind each other to check out the child predator lists online. We know that there are very, very few of these people out there, but no parent wants to play the odds like that.
Perverts have turned us all into helicopter parents.
Apt. 11d 
When we first bought the house, I signed up for some on-line list that would let me know if someone on the Megan’s Law sex registry moved into the neighborhood. Then I forgot about it.
Recently, I got an e-mail “alert” that a known pervert had moved within some radius from my house. I looked him up. He lives about 2 miles away. If you know South Jersey, you know that means there are at least 3 municipalities between us. The picture was non-descript.
I’m not exactly sure what I’m supposed to do now. Show the Raggirls the picture and say, “Watch out for a mid-30s white guy with no distinguishing features”? Ignore it? Get the tar, feathers, and pitchforks?
I am ignoring it for now.
Meanwhile, Eldest Raggirl has started Middle School. She is walking by herself for a few blocks, where she is meeting up with friends, and then walking the rest of the way with a group. After school, she either walks home with friends, or by herself if she is at an after-school activity where none of the other participants live on this side of town.
Friends were calling the first week of September, to find out what our “plan” was. “I’m supposed to have a plan?” Who will she walk with? What’s the carpool? How will be sure she is safe?
I don’t know. She’s 11. Apparently, other parents think 11 year old girls can’t walk home from school alone at 3:00. More interesting, other parents think it is okay to call us and ask if my daughter will walk to school with her daughter. I answer, as kindly as possible, “Your kid will have to talk to my kid. She makes her own social arrangements.” She is walking to school in a group because the girls organized a group — not because a chorus of mothers planned it for them. I arrange play dates for Youngest Raggirl because she’s not old enough to do it herself. The others see their friends when they call them up and plan to meet.
Am I doing something wrong? Creepy Indians at the park make me think maybe I should show Eldest Raggirl some of the pictures from the sex offender registry.
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Unfortunately, it isn’t the creepy guy at the playground we really need to look out for. “More than 90% of juvenile sexual abuse victims know their perpetrator in some way.”
From – Snyder, Howard, N. (2000, July). Sexual assault of young children as reported to law enforcement: victim, incident, and offender characteristics.
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Anna’s right–Sandusky is a much more typical abuser than a random guy who lurks at a playground. However, thinking of the people we know and trust as potential abusers is much creepier than limiting ourselves to Sketchy Playground Guy.
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Yeah, ironically, stranger danger is actually lower now than it was in the 60s-early 90s, when we were growing up. On the general issue, part of learning what’s a real danger and what isn’t and how to deal with either comes from life experience, which you can’t have if you’ve never walked anywhere or done anything by yourself. My grandmother used to tell me as a teenager, “it’s the good girls who get into trouble, everyone else knows better.” On the opposite side of being too naive and having disaster befall you, treating everyone like a potential serial killer means that the space for the disabled, mildly demented, harmlessly creepy people to live in society decreases, often with tragic results for this vulnerable population. Maybe what I’m trying to say is I think relying on instinct in this sort of situation is important, and if you don’t have any, you’re either never going to react, even when you should, or react wildly to everything.
On actual sex offenders, for awhile, one aspect of my mother’s job was to explain to neighborhood committees and Concerned Citizens that sex offenders were people too and deserved to live in residential areas. That almost got her tarred and feathered. Beyond teaching your children common sense, I’m not sure there’s really anything else to do, certainly not legally.
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“However, thinking of the people we know and trust as potential abusers is much creepier than limiting ourselves to Sketchy Playground Guy. ”
But, one of the big changes is imbedded in Laura’s post: “We believed the kids’ story and called authorities.”
I think a big part of the dealing with potential abusers has to be to believe the children, to tell them what might be creepy and tell them to tell us and then investigate. I feel like there was a lot of pooh-poohing of children’s concerns in the past, assumptions that the teacher/coach/priest/family friend wouldn’t possibility do those bad things and the kid must be mistaken.
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I’m with bj. This is a success story, really. Something weird happened, the kids came and told, it was addressed, done.
I actually think the biggest change in terms of kids’ afterschool and summer freedoms is more related to daycare than to fear of predators. There’s not a critical mass of kids home with free time.
That said, I’m not really nostalgic for the 70s either. While I didn’t have a stranger molestation experience I definitely had sub-par experiences that my parents never heard about because back then, the child sphere and the parent sphere did not overlap in the same way.
I think it is important that kids get to experience decision-making and solitude and all those things. And I think honing instinct is important too. I don’t know how one resolves all the factors though.
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I just got off the phone with Jonah’s guidance counselor. I was concerned because while Jonah has a lot of acquaintances at the new school, he doesn’t have a best friend. The GC said that he gets this phone call all the time from other parents. He thought that kids were in so many activities that they don’t have time to develop natural friendships. They aren’t socializing outside of those activities.
Because perverts are everywhere, people started taking their kids off the playground and putting them into activities. They go from scouts to baseball to dinner to homework to bed. When they aren’t on the tread wheel, they are home alone. If they take them out of activiites, it’s even worse, because there are no kids around at all. It’s a sad world.
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I am either incredibly naive …or perhaps life is less dangerous out here in the upper midwest. My kids have lots of unstructured, unsupervised time outside with friends. They walk home from middle school, with no adults, and still roam free through the neighborhood with the rest of the kids. They also play too many organized sports, but they can bike to almost all their practices, so they can usually manage that themselves, too, if need be.
The one big change is that the middle school kids all have cell phones now and can text parents. Instead of ringing the bell at dinner time, now the parents are texting the kids – “wherea R U? get home for dinner” I kinda miss the bell of my childhood…
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Last year I was looking up the local sex offenders near my kids’ school downtown (we were planning on renting an apartment nearby). Much to my dismay, the Salvation Army men’s shelter two blocks away had 5 registered sex offenders and the post office one block away had 1 registered sex offender among the employees. Now, I realize that at least one of these guys is probably just a public urinater and another is probably some sort of Romeo-and-Juliet thing, but even discounting for the over-broadness of the sex offender category, that leaves a lot of real perverts.
“That said, I’m not really nostalgic for the 70s either.”
There is a happy flip side to the helicopter parenting everybody complains about–kids may be fatter and more entitled than in the past, but they get into less major peril. I think we probably have helicopter parenting partly to thank for drops in teenage pregnancy, etc.
One thing to bear in mind is that while pedophiles aren’t rare at all (respectable husbands and fathers are constantly getting caught with bad stuff on their computers–it seems to come up a lot in the advice columns), those who act out are less common, and kidnapper-murderer types are very, very rare.
The sad thing about the Sandusky article and a lot of stuff I’ve read on the subject is that more often than not, it’s the nice, community-minded, generous, outgoing people that you have to keep an eye on. And, of course, knowing that fact will make normal men less likely to volunteer for activities with kids.
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Because perverts are everywhere, people started taking their kids off the playground and putting them into activities.
I think this is just backwards. To the extent that there are “pervert everywhere” they are _especially_ in these activities. It’s not as if Sandusky or your local pedophile Catholic priest is hanging around the playground looking for kids. If anything, the moral of this story ought to be “even if there’s some weird shoe-loving old guy around, kids playing in the park are safe, especially if they keep their shoes on”, not “we should be very worried about kids going to the park.”
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Laura, how long has Jonah been in the new school? 4-6 weeks? Doesn’t that seem kind of fast to be worrying about “best friends”? Especially for adolescent boys? Speaking as a teacher, I think parents sometimes worry too much about “best friends”–without the shared bond of history, they can take awhile to develop.
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No, it’s been a year. He’s still clinging to the friends in the old town. Time to cut the old ties.
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I put my kids into a million activities – in fact, I make most of my parenting decisions – as a response to my own unsupervised, unproductive, and not-altogether-safe childhood, not because of fear of perverts.
I’m with Jenn and Amy, no nostalgia for the 70s from me! Not that I didn’t enjoy some of the freedom but it wasn’t worth the cost.
“He thought that kids were in so many activities that they don’t have time to develop natural friendships. They aren’t socializing outside of those activities.”
I read that this was a phenomenon – maybe in the Times? I definitely see that. My sons run in packs defined by sports or music.
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“To the extent that there are “pervert everywhere” they are _especially_ in these activities.”
Right.
Locally, we had a recent episode where a female softball coach was carrying on with a mid-teen female softball player, under the guise of developing the girl’s softball talents. There was a very incriminating text trail.
I suspect that now that the US has gone so sports mad for kids, coaches will probably be a primary problem area (aside from traditional favorites like grandpa-the-convicted-molester, mommy’s-new-boyfriend and school teachers). Although, looking at it more generally, it’s unfair to single out just sports. Many parents will also be credulous if a music teacher or show biz agent promises to put little Zoe or Joshua’s name in lights. Look how many parents were happy to send their kids for sleepovers at Michael Jackson’s house.
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Sadly I’m not sure there has been a real change in consciousness around the fact that sexual abuse is usually perpetrated by a trusted adult, one who is often a family member. I’ve been involved in support groups for women who were sexually abused as children for over 20 years and I still hear the same stories of not being believed when they told on their fathers/uncles/family friend/minister. Many of the young women I see are in their early 20s with the abuse having taken place in the 90s or early 2000s, well into the era when child sexual abuse was no longer a taboo to discuss.
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My kids roam freely. My 10 year-old has 14 friends on the street ranging from age 4 to 12. They play in the street (we’re a dead end), in backyards and in the surrounding foothills. We’ve had a couple of heart stopping moments where no one could find any of the kids, but that was because we feared injuries instead of perverts.
I worry far more about people we know than I do any stranger. Perverts really aren’t on my radar. I feel grateful.
I worry far more about my college age daughters being victims of rape than I do my younger ones. I think it’s more likely.
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Arguably we turned ourselves into helicopter parents and blamed it on perverts. Since what we know, as pointed out in this thread, is that ‘stranger perverts’ aren’t really that big a deal by comparison to folks that are in some way socially trusted. I think the reasons why sexual abuse became a known part of life but that our culture chose to hang it on “stranger danger” are pretty complicated. Some of it is the use of fear about crime by some political factions to mobilize their constituencies (even as violent crime has become much less of a problem). Some of it is that there are lots of *other* reasons why we’ve drawn into a more tightly woven domestic world–to fight against the dissolution of domestic life as work takes more and more of our time, to compensate for distant or disengaged parenting in an earlier generation, out of anxiety about the downward mobility of our children.
But it really is all on us, not on the perverts in public spaces. The real ‘perverts’, curiously enough, haven’t yet killed off or even appreciably wounded the institutions where they have really clustered to a greater extent: the extended family, the churches, the educational institutions, the workplaces–anywhere where there are closed doors, social trust, and protective hierarchies.
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Except that all of those organization now require or encourage helicopter parenting of at least the younger kids. The cub scouts in our area won’t let a small kid at a meeting without their parent. Nor will the soccer league.
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I meant to put quotes around my comment “perverts are everywhere.” Perverts aren’t everywhere, but we believe they are. We’re more likely to be in a car accident because of talking on the cell phone, but people don’t change that behavior even though it’s very dangerous. They have changed their behavior, because of the threat of perverts.
Some parenting practices did need to change. Like I think it’s good that we now take kids’ stories seriously when they report something creepy, like shoe stealing. But maybe we have taken it too far. Maybe it’s leading to some unintended consequences.
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“Maybe it’s leading to some unintended consequences.”
Everything leads to unintended consequences. I see it as a real positive that we take kids seriously (which your story illustrates). That is a success. Believing kids blindly would be a failure (and that has happened). So would not letting your kids play in the park anymore (absent, say, a crazy sniper shooting at people all over your city or living in a war zone).
I also think the lack of unstructured time leads to all kinds of consequences, changes in friendships, changes in creativity, changes in self directed activities, . . . . and we have to be aware of those issues (even if it doesn’t mean that we give up all their activities).
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“Except that all of those organization now require or encourage helicopter parenting of at least the younger kids.”
I recently saw a forum posting where a mother was complaining that the pastor of their small church was asking parents to escort kids 9 and under to the church restroom (the mom had been sending her 6-year-old alone). That rule sounds excessive, except the church was in a tough neighborhood and the restrooms were easily available to the general public–from the mom’s description, the safety level would have been more or less equivalent to a downtown Greyhound bus station restroom.
10 years ago or so, one of the things that came out of the Catholic abuse scandals was the creation of mandatory training programs for volunteers who work with kids as well as (I believe) mandatory background checks with fingerprinting. Initially there was a lot of griping (WE weren’t abusing kids, after all). However, I’ve since seen a lot of positive responses from people who’ve done the training sessions and learned a lot about the personalities and methods of pedophiles. Here’s a short parent guide from one of these programs:
Click to access ParentHandbook.pdf
It’s unfortunate that one has to look skeptically at people who are devoting themselves to serving children, but we need to not just think “Isn’t it swell that so-and-so is taking such an interest in little Michael, especially since he doesn’t have a dad at home and his mom works so much?”
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As an adult I would never agree to work with children one-on-one. Or even be the only adult in the room. This is simple self-defense from accusation.
As a parent I went to all my kids’ sports practices and games, they never went without me; but they only ever had one activity per season (either a sport, a musical thing, or an art thing etc). They had lots of unstructured time, I was just *there* for it: in the yard with them reading a book; at the park with them knitting; sitting on the front steps while they played up and down the block and I weeded or read or knitted. But I had a pink collar 8-5 job that I could leave at the office and not need to work at home, and a very limited social life (it mostly included my kids).
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