Message-ID: <Pine.SOL.3.91.950726174317.5693A-100000@breakout.rs.itd.umich.edu> Date: Wed, 26 Jul 1995 17:51:39 -0400 From: "Vera M. Britto" <mailto:fiatlux@UMICH.EDU> Subject: Re: news item (off-topic, but you will see why) To: Multiple recipients of list DEVEL-L <mailto:DEVEL-L@AMERICAN.EDU>
please keep such non-sense off this list - there is absolutely no reason to post it here. i will be happy to post at least 10 posts educating people such as yourself on child prostitution, sexual, physical and psychological abuse in the context of strangers or intra-familial exploitation of children that is happening in the millions as you post such misinformation messages.a small mistake is better than having a child forever destroyed by abuse, while blind and insensitive adults look the other way in pathetic passivity. i applaud the stranger's actions and if these parents had any sense of responsibility for all children, they would understand that suspecting child abuse is a healthy response in the world we live in, and it was quite plausible in the situation described. fortunately it was not so, and while it may have bothered the parents, they need to step back and not take it so personally.
if adults are alert and act on suspicions, we can save countless children from serious trauma. if adults all cower with the idea that unless they have blatant proof, they cannot act, we have the current world: full of abused kids and irresponsible adults.
Vera Britto mailto:(fiatlux@umich.edu) ............................................................................ "Y no estimo tesoros ni riquezas; y asi, siempre me causa mas contento poner riquezas en mi pensamiento que no mi pensamiento en las riquezas. Y no estimo hermosura que, vencida, es despojo civil de las edades, ni riqueza me agrada fementida, teniendo por mejor, en mis verdades, consumir vanidades de la vida que consumir la vida en vanidades." Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz
On Wed, 26 Jul 1995, Chuck B. at Ext. 214 wrote:
> On a recent warm night, a certain individual was observed alone
> in a parked car with a small child who was shirtless (to a suspicious mind,
> it would not have mattered whether the man was bare-chested or wearing a
> shirt: either possibility would have seemed abnormal). The "witness"
> approached the car, asking the child, "Is this your daddy?" The toddler,
> being typically shy with strangers, did not answer; the man smiled and
> said "Yes, I'm his father." The "witness" continued, "His features are
> different from yours, and he doesn't talk, and he shouldn't be dressed like
> that in a car with a man, so I can't stand by knowing that you may have
> kidnapped him or be a molester; I am going to flag a police car." The
> good samaritan paid no attention to the man's reply.
> The police officer who responded stood at the car window, instructing
> the man in the car first to produce some ID and then to step out of
> the vehicle. Then he said, "Come behind the car." Now, just seconds
> before this last instruction, a woman (whose ethnicity was visibly different
> from that of the man and who bore a fair resemblance to the child) had
> walked up to the car's front window (where the child was sitting), so that
> fortunately (it seemed) for the child, the man claiming to be his father
> could comply without clearly engaging in and being automatically charged with
> child endangerment (in addition to the above); who knows whether the officer
> would have made this demand in the woman's absence? At any rate, the woman
> said she was the mother and "confirmed" the identity of the "father" (without
> being asked to identify herself); the man's license was returned to him
> (the officer had not run it or asked him a single question). Then the three
> drove off.
> The victim in this case was the father. No, he did not lose his child
> and car to strangers through substandard police work; and no, his wife had not
> just left him with another man, his son and his car. He was the "suspect."
> This man prizes his own and his family's privacy, especially after
> the event described. He also feels that today's American press are a major
> source of the current cultural myth that adults accompanying children are
> probably predators (as in the day-care cases). For both reasons, he chooses
> not to write a "letter to the editor" about his experience. But can it be we
> have become so paranoid about crime that we automatically trust and listen
> to some, automatically distrust and dismiss the words of others, and are
> convinced that if you come under the most negligible suspicion (through
> circumstances, not necessarily through your own conduct) you are probably
> a serious criminal?
>