Lax Parenting
More and more kids are vanishing from under our noses. I’m not the least bit surprized. As I walk my dogs past a neighborhood park I observe many kids at play there,unchaperoned by adults. I must look suspicious glancing around looking for invicible grown-ups. Their only gaurdians are kids just slightly older than they are, I’m not talking sixteen to eighteen, I’m talking two and four to six. They run up to meet my canines and no parent pokes their head out of any house to warn them about strangers.
If I wanted to bring a innocent home with me it would be easy, just use my dog as bait. (Not that I have any need for more kids).It’s possible I’m wrong, there could be scores of armed policemen in every domicile waiting for me to fall into temptation and snatch a decoy, these are probably little robatrons. If I grab one I could be instantly surrounded with rifles pointed at my chest, or the robatron could simply implode in my arms eliminating me altogether, reducing the pervert pool. Doubt it, this isn’t a plot written by Stephen King.
There are hundreds of unattended children at play outside right now free for the taking. They aren’t being kidnapped, they are being offered on the alter. It’s a virtual supermarket for perverts. Go around any corner and take your pick, latino, white, black, boy or girl, one or two,infant, toddler, preadolescent. It’s like the parents are begging you to relieve them of their duties.(Wouldn’t it be nice to be foot loose and fancy free again?) Then they go crying to the authorities that junior or princess is missing. Why weren’t they watching them if they cared so much? How could they let a person with a single digit age walk home from a friend’s house three blocks away at night. Hell, it’s dangerous in the day light. Crime isn’t a night time profession.
The hours are lenient and worker friendly, crime can be worked around any schedule: school, day care, playtime, any location: bus stop, school yard, library, mall, street corner. Creeps don’t even have to have wheels to nab a kid. They get delivery service when kids ring their doorbells selling for the school band. I’ve looked out to the curb and no one is walking with these mini-merchants when I answer my door, and worse yet, they walk right in. I give them the lecture that their parents should have delivered, “It’s not smart to go into a stranger’s house, you could get hurt!” They either don’t blink an eye or run out screaming, (maybe I should change my approach but just maybe it taught them a lesson). I need to have paintings on my walls of tortured kids, maybe this would deter them from crossing my threshold, but if one shows up missing and searchers knocked at my portal I would probably be the first carted of for questioning.
Yes, I know you can’t watch kids every minute of the day. They have wandering minds and are escape artists. I caught my own twelve year old daughter about to crawl in the back seat of a car she was being lured into by a kid with a snake.(and she’d had the lecture many times, it just hadn’t taken) The driver looked like something from the night of the dead. After I gave him (and her) a piece of my mind I towed her home by the ears. She claimed I embarrassed her in front of her friends. When I asked how long she knew them, one hour counted as a long term relationship. Kids make friends real fast. Now that I look back on it, the kid in the back of the car could have been a victim himself. My daughter also had the habit of going for midnight walks.
I installed a home alarm system so that when the front door opened at night I would know it, so would the security company! She has made it to thirty two, and still not concerned about night time escapades but she’s on her own now. It’s not safe for adults out in this world, why do we leave our children unsupervised. I wouldn’t let my kid any where near a person I hadn’t met. There are people I know I wouldn’t go near! Yet most parents, not all parents, let their kids sleep over with unmet parents of other kids. When I was in my twenties riding a bike for exercise a guy in a pick up asked if I needed a ride. I politely said, “No thanks, I’m on a ride, you – – – – – – -“. How often does this occur with youngsters where they actually accept the offer. On my way home from middle school,once (I was in middle school for a long time), I was stopped by a middle aged, well dressed guy in a car with a rack of clothes in the back seat. He claimed he was looking for new models and I had potential. I believe he was telling the truth,(I was kinda cute) but I don’t believe my pictures would have been seen by a audience larger than one.
At the time I feel like I had let opportunity pass me by, but now I realize I had actually listened to my parents’ warnings that had penetrated my subconscious. I lucked out. Too many other kids have lost. Maybe if we had tougher laws on lax parents more kids would survive. I know the government is getting too in-our-face with laws on the home front but something has to be done to assure our kids will stay on the homefront or be placed where they are in less danger of neglect. We need to make sure our playgrounds, schools and malls aren’t buffet tables for freaks. Personally I don’t mind being a Mrs. Cravetz (think Bewitched) when it comes to being nosey about our nations youth.
I don’t understand why police cars on patrol don’t park next to play areas when they see adult-less children at play, follow the kids home and give a list of known pediophiles in the area to the parents. Boy would they be surprized, I certainly was when I researched it on the internet, and that only devulged the “known” pediophiles. Remember every criminal hasn’t been caught or started their life of crime yet. This might prevent some disappearences. Known sex offenders can’t be anywhere near a place kids gather, Chuckie-cheeses, the mall, schools, childrens hospitals, apartment complexes, family reunions ect. It is hard for them to find residences and employment. I think an excellent solution to this is to build them their own communities, self sufficent and enclosed so we don’t have to worry about them, oh yeah, these places do exit, they’re called jails.
