The best way to help the child who got into the gorilla enclosure is to leave his parents alone

● The last thing this child needs is a child abuse investigation

● Did Cincinnati police cave in to the virtual lynch mob?

We all know the story, right?  Four-year-old gets into gorilla enclosure at the Cincinnati Zoo.  Gorilla’s behavior endangers child.  Zookeepers kill gorilla.

Oh, and I almost forgot: A virtual lynch mob of more than 430,000 people decide that they would never, ever make the kind of mistake the child’s mother made when she lost track of the boy.  They’ve signed a petition demanding that the mother be investigated for child neglect. 

The Cincinnati police initially said there would be no investigation of either the parents or the zoo. Now they say they’ll investigate the parents.

Before I get to why that’s so unjust, let me start with why it’s such a bad idea

The reason to call off the police investigation and leave the parents alone is not for the sake of those parents. It’s because the child has suffered enough.

The last thing this child needs is to be questioned by police and/or child protective services workers. The last thing he needs is any more stress on his family. And the last thing he needs is to be put at even a slight risk of being consigned to foster care – where the chances of actual abuse are so high.

This is especially important for a child of this age – because at this age children tend to interpret anything that happens to them as their fault. So no matter how hard caseworkers and police may try to avoid it, he will interpret the questioning and, God forbid, the foster care as somehow his fault.

I can hear the virtual lynch mob now: But what if this is some “sign” of chronic neglect? What if there is more going on?  That’s what the petition says (and no, I’m not going to link to it):

We believe that this negligence may be reflective of the child's home situation. We the undersigned actively encourage an investigation of the child's home environment in the interests of protecting the child and his siblings from further incidents of parental negligence that may result in serious bodily harm or even death.

But this incident is a sign of something deeper to exactly the same extent that any mistake any parent has made while supervising a child is a sign of something deeper. So don’t send the police in to do the real damage of an investigation because of a mob’s fervid imagination.

The petition isn’t really about protecting the child at all.  That’s clear from the title of the petition, “Justice for Harambe” – that’s the gorilla. If the top priority really were the child, you’d think that would get a mention in the title.

What these 430,000+ people should be thinking is “there but for the grace of God…” because here are some things people who have not raised children may not know:

● Four-year-olds tend to be small.

● Four-year-olds tend to be curious.

● Four-year-olds often can move at something approaching the speed of light.

The New York Times puts the whole thing in perspective quite well here.  The column cites an essay from Cincinnati Enquirer opinion editor Cindi Andrews who initially condemned the mother – until she rememberd the time she made a very similar mistake.  If not for good luck and a driver with good brakes the person on the receiving end of all that condemnation - while possibly mourning the loss of a child - could have been she.

But she probably wouldn’t have faced such condemnation. Because she’s white.

As in everything else in American life, race does matter here, as New York Daily News columnist Shaun King shows us in this column comparing the response to the Cincinnati parents to the response in other, similar cases.

And there’s scholarship to back up King’s impression.  No, as far as I know, no one has done a study of how parents are treated when their children fall into zoo enclosures. But there is a study of who gets prosecuted in a similar kind of tragedy that can be viewed either as an accident or negligence: Children who die when left in overheated cars.

The researcher was not able to break down prosecutions by race – but she did break them down by economic status. She writes:

One particularly important—and disturbing—finding was the disparate treatment of parents from different socioeconomic groups: parents in blue collar professions and parents who were unemployed were four times more likely to be prosecuted than parents from wealthier socioeconomic groups.

Unfortunately, even a writer who wants to call off the virtual lynch mob threw fuel on the fire.

Alex Abad-Santos wrote this, and more, on Vox:

It just seems a little puzzling to not be able to keep an eye on your child especially in a place where killing beasts — gorillas, lions, wild African dogs, and wolves — roam. And the missing child must have been missing for some time to get through the barriers on his own.

As the New York Times story makes clear, Abad-Santos is gravely underestimating four-year-olds

And check out this account from an eyewitness quoted on Lenore Skenazy’s Free-Range Kids blog:

 This was an open exhibit! Which means the only thing separating you from the gorillas, is a 15 ish foot drop and a moat and some bushes!! This mother was not negligent and the zoo did an awesome job handling the situation!

Abad-Santos argues that the mother in this case must have been extraordinarily negligent because this has never happened before at the Cincinnati Zoo.  But that doesn’t consider all the near-misses we may never know about – all those children caught in the nick of time, or a few seconds before the nick of time, in zoos and so many other places. Go back and reread Cindi Andrews column, Alex.

Abad-Santos also argues that

It's not like [the mother] lost track of her son and he bumped his head on a kitchen table or burned himself on a hot pan.

On the contrary, that’s exactly what it’s like. But the place where it happened ratcheted up the consequences and turned the mother into a target for the mob – something that, do his credit, Abad Santos decries.

So now, let’s face up to one of the hardest truths of all: Sometimes bad things happen and no one may be to blame.

Preventing child abuse: Welcome to Child Abuse Paranoia Month

Call CPS:  These children  appear to be
walking somewhere - on their own! 

           Six years ago, I wrote a post about the kind of op-ed column that typically turns up every April during “Child Abuse Prevention/awareness Month.”  There’s also a subset, of sorts.  It’s directed specifically at the issue of child sexual abuse.  Call it the Child Abuse Paranoia Month column. 

       

If we did what the authors of these columns suggest, we’d wind up with a generation of paranoid adults raising a generation of terrified children.  And we’d traumatize tens of thousands of children with needless child abuse investigations and extremely intrusive medical examinations. In fact, we’d be well on our way to recreating the atmosphere of mindless fear that led to the mass molestation hysteria of the 1980s, typified by cases such as the McMartin Preschool.

            This column is a classic example. It starts with the obligatory three bullet points of horror stories and jumps immediately to the claim that “No young child or teenager is inherently safe from sexual abuse.”

            That is, literally, true. Just as no young child or teenager is safe from getting into an auto accident or coming down with a serious illness. But it doesn’t follow that we should never let a child into a car or out of a 100 percent sterile environment. 

            When it comes to “preventing” sexual abuse, however, this column comes close to recommending something similar. The author, Michele Booth Cole, writes: 

So with everything that institutions and people have learned about child sexual abuse, why would a school allow a staff member to be alone with a student behind a closed door? Why are there places on campus where no one can see what’s going on?

             Probably because A) When a child needs to confide something personal to the school nurse or guidance counselor, it makes sense that the door would be closed and B) We don’t want to live in an Orwellian surveillance state with cameras poking into every corner. 

            But nothing better sums up the mentality of the column than one of Cole’s proposed solutions: 

Individually and collectively, we would have to get creative, constantly assessing places and situations to make them as safe as possible for children. Let’s say a school employee needed to give a child a ride home, and only the two of them would be in the car. The adult and/or the child could be on a cell phone the whole time, giving a running description of the drive to the child’s parent or caregiver. 

            Let’s start with the practical problems. Distracted driving, because the driver had to talk on the cell phone the whole time in order to prove he’s not a child molester, is a much greater danger to this child than the exceedingly small likelihood that this school employee will turn out to be the next Jerry Sandusky.  And yes, that also applies to "hands free" cell phone use.  I've put a great big National Safety Council infographic at the end of this post to illustrate just how irresponsible this idea really is. And imagine the panic that would ensue – complete with false alarm calls to 911 - if the signal were dropped.

EMOTIONAL ABUSE

            But the bigger problem is what all this would do to the psyches of our children. 

            Cole says she wants to “inspire adults to create safe, whimsical childhoods for children at all times.”

            But the “solutions” we hear during Child Abuse Paranoia Month don’t put much emphasis on whimsy. On the contrary, from as early as toddlerhood, Cole is talking about raising children to be constantly wary and fearful. We’ve also trained the adults in their lives to be wary of so much as giving them a hug for fear it will be misinterpreted. All that is emotional abuse on a massive scale.

            And it gets worse. Cole writes:

People sometimes ask how to get “bystanders” to report their suspicions of child sexual abuse. Perhaps, as a neighbor or an acquaintance, you just get the feeling that something’s not right, but you’re afraid to raise your concerns.

You may never be sure and you don’t have to be sure. If you report your suspicions, the professionals in law enforcement and child protection will follow up and find out what’s happening. You could literally be saving that child’s life.

            Or you could be bringing down a world of misery upon that child.

            First of all, referring to the child protective services workers who will respond to the call as “professionals” often is a stretch.  In Washington, D.C., where Cole is located, they’re generally well-qualified.  More typically, however, you’re talking about someone with a bachelor’s degree in anything and a quickie training course.  Law enforcement often isn’t any better.

            These total strangers will interrogate the child about the most intimate aspects of her or his life.  That’s what happened in this case, which went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court (with my organization’s Vice President acting as pro-bono counsel for the family). 

Often that interrogation will be followed by a medical examination that, if anyone else did it, would be sexual abuse.

All this harm occurs before we even reach the issue of the child protective services worker possibly panicking – depending on whether a high-profile tragedy is in the news at the moment – and consigning a child who was not abused to the chaos of foster care.

            Cole runs a Child Advocacy Center – where the staff try their best to minimize the trauma (though suggesting, as Cole’s center does in a graphic, that the child is having a wonderful time through it all is somewhat misleading). Even when they’re the first to question the child – and that’s not always the case – it’s going to be very difficult for that child.

 

Sometimes all this has to be done anyway.  The problem of child sexual abuse, like all child abuse, is serious and real. But starting this process in motion should be based on more than “you just get the feeling that something’s not right…” (Special note to my liberal friends: How would you feel about a presidential candidate who said we should call the cops about anyone we thought might be a terrorist because we “just got the feeling that something’s not right…”?  UPDATE, APRIL 18: Or consider this story from The New York Times about what happened to a man who spoke Arabic on an airplane.  Liberals would be outraged.  Yet the behavior of the airline is no different from what Cole says we should do to children.)

            Part of the problem is the very fact that Cole runs a Child Advocacy Center. Day after day she sees the very worst that some adults do to some children.  I don’t know how you can do that and not emerge from it feeling that the world is a dark and dangerous place for children. But it’s a distorted view of reality – and another example of the tyranny of personal experience.

          “Imagine what the world would look like,” Cole writes, “if we did everything we could to keep kids safe?”

           Actually, if we went from doing what’s prudent and sensible to doing everything, it would look pretty awful. 

           

          ●It would be a world where children were raised to cower in their homes, afraid of everyone they meet – or running home after so much as seeing a stranger nearby.

          ●It would be a world that destroyed any opportunity to build the self-confidence, self-reliance and independence they’ll need to thrive as adults.  What will our children do when we’re too old to always be there to protect them?

          ●It would be a world in which children were taught to treat normal human kindness as suspect, making it far less likely they will be able to receive such kindness – or give it.

             We’ve already  gone way too far down this road, as Lenore Skenazy, once labeled the “world’s worst mom” for fighting the trend, documents on her Free Range Kids website.

WHOM ARE WE REALLY “PROTECTING”?

            Like so much that is done in the name of “child protection” Child Abuse Paranoia Month columns are not about protecting children at all – they’re about protecting parents.

          

            Specifically it’s about our efforts to protect ourselves from one of the inevitable side-effects of parenthood: Worry - that constant, nagging fear that the worst will happen to our children as soon as they are out of our sight.  (Interestingly, in my own experience, this does not stop when the child becomes a young adult.)

            When our daughter was in college and wanted to spend a semester of her junior year studying in South Africa my wife and I worried – constantly.  The easy way out would have been to say no.   But we let her go, and it turned out to be one of the most important and fulfilling experiences of her life.  (We remain grateful that she did not tell us about going shark diving off Cape Town until after the fact.)

            At other times, I’m sure we gave in to fears when we shouldn’t have. But putting the children first means rising above our own fears as much as we can, whenever it’s prudent.   

           Anything less is not child protection, it’s adult self-indulgence.

Now, about that distracted driving idea...

Provided by The National Safety Council​

Binghamton, N.Y. is a cesspool of depravity! BEWARE! BEWARE! BEWARE!

If there are any children outside in New York’s Southern Tier anymore it’s only because so few people still read newspapers.

No parent in her or his right mind would let a child out of the house, or even out of sight while in the house after reading the ten – ten! – fear-mongering stories splashed all over the Binghamton, N.Y Press & Sun Bulletin and its sister paper, the Elmira Star-Gazette on December 4. (Assuming, that is, that the parent made the mistake of believing the stories.)

Given the shrunken size of small city daily newspapers, it’s hard to imagine there was any room for anything else in the papers that day; apparently there was nothing but story after story sending messages like this:

Beware!  Sex offenders actually live in our neighborhoods!  Don’t drop your kids off anywhere! (except grandma and grandpa – maybe).   A volunteer gives a gift to a preschool child – it must be “grooming”! Johnny needs to get two blocks to a youth basketball game – quick get the minivan!  What?  Your teacher helped you after class with your homework and no one else was in the room?  Call the hotline!  Your teenager is moody and having school problems? It’s sexual abuse! 

The ten stories appeared under the umbrella title “Protecting our children from people we should be able to trust.” Other headlines included: “Background checks can’t replace vigilance” and “Grooming: It’s how predators have their way with you and your child.” After reading through all this it’s apparent that either the Southern Tier is a cesspool of depravity beyond comprehension – or post-Penn State paranoia has gotten way out of hand.  (The papers did publish a brief op ed column I wrote in response.)

Consider a few anecdotes from the series:

● A day care center director sees a volunteer laughing and joking “excessively” with a child.  The volunteer buys the child a gift – “a seemingly innocent charm.” Knowing that “this is often a predator’s ploy…the volunteer was confronted and removed from the daycare center.”  The center director declares that “I’m completely convinced the child would have been a victim.”

● When Jim Norris returned to coaching a grammar school basketball team after many years he was shocked that

parents would be driving their sons two blocks or whatever and dropping them off – two blocks … I say to [an assistant coach] “What’s this all about? No one walks or rides a bike?”  He says “Jim, these aren’t the old days.  You have no idea who’s out on the street these days.”

● Kim and Robert Michalak of Johnson City are taking precautions:  

[They] both work full-time and use the phone to stay connected with their four active sons. Each boy is required to call in his whereabouts and ETA, wherever he goes. Kim makes it her business to know their friends and the friends' parents, and has a seat on [the Johnson City] school board.  "I have my ears to the wall," she said.

To help you keep your ears to the wall, there’s a 1,542-word guide to things to watch for, in adults and in your own children, reprinted verbatim from a mysterious website.  Advice includes:

Emotional and behavioral signals [of sexual abuse] … can run from “too perfect” behavior to withdrawal and depression, to unexplained anger and rebellion.

Well, that certainly narrows things down.  Oh, wait.  The guide helpfully adds this: “Be aware that in some children there are no signs.”

Another “expert” warns that “Abusers generate situations where they are alone with the child … Babysitting, tutoring, coaching and special trips enhance isolation.” Well, yes.  But they’re also standard parts of a normal childhood.  Are we now to tell teachers they shouldn’t offer students help with their homework?  Should guidance counselors stop meeting with children to let them seek help with personal problems?

And you know how the right-wing keeps telling us marriage is the solution to all family and societal problems?  Not if you already have a child from a previous marriage. The Press & Sun Bulletin tells us that, according to one expert:

A favorite target victim is a child living with a single mother … The predator  may offer to babysit or watch her children after school, and will sometimes pretend romantic interest in the mother or express a desire to be a father figure or mentor for her child. He may even marry her or move in with her. The relationship with the mother can be used as a cover for his interest in children, and her child can be used as bait to lure or gain access to other children.

So all you single moms out there: Forget about remarrying, or even dating.  Better just keep men out of your lives entirely.

CONTRADICTORY ADVICE

Some of the advice sprinkled among the stories is remarkably contradictory.

Rabbi Barbara Goldman Wartell says that at her synagogue, in the words of one story, “Everyone will also be watching everyone else, with little tolerance for odd behaviors.”  But the mysterious website warns that “people who abuse children look and act just like everyone else.” So shouldn’t we, in fact, be least afraid of those who behave oddly?

Elsewhere a parent declares that “The kids are never in one-on-one [situations] unless it’s with somebody we’ve known for years.”  But another story tells us that abusers are remarkably patient – “grooming” may involve years getting to know the child, and the parents, and gaining their trust.  The mysterious website reminds us that “the greatest risk to children …[comes] from friends and family.”  So isn’t “somebody we’ve known for years” the person to fear most?

Topping it all off was an essay from someone who is not just a helicopter parent but a fleet-of-fully-armed-Blackhawks parent.  (I’m not going to name her or her eight- and six-year-old children - the kids are likely to be mortified enough in a few years) but here are some highlights:

When school friends have parties, I attend with [the children]. I know a lot of parents who drop off children at parties, in many cases because they have other children to take to other locations, or they have to run errands. [My husband] and I don't drop our children off anywhere, except for perhaps their grandparents' homes.

Perhaps?  Are grandma and grandpa suspect too?  Back to the column:

The same goes for baseball games and karate and gymnastics classes. Because one of us, fortunately, is able to always be there, my children never have to wait for a ride home and they know someone who loves and protects them is nearby.

I also do my best to get to know those who interact with our children. Friends, parents, coaches, teachers -- talking to them helps me ensure that my young children are surrounded by good people.

Unless, of course, they’re just especially good at “grooming.”

There are parents who can't attend every function with their children. … Some other parents just seem to be more trusting, leaving their children alone or with acquaintances much of the time. It's up to the rest of us out there -- parents, teachers, coaches, care-givers, medical professionals -- to keep an eye on all children, especially from dysfunctional homes, because they often are targeted by abusers.

But aren’t parents who start “keeping an eye on all children” exactly the ones we’re not supposed to trust?

Do I sometimes feel I'm being overprotective? Absolutely not. … Something must be working. A few weeks ago, my son was playing outside. He came running into the house and said he saw a stranger. I was so proud.  …

Meanwhile, that mysterious website tells us to treat absolutely everyone as a suspect – and let them know they’re suspects the minute we meet them for the first time: “Find a way to tell the adults who care for children that you and the child are educated about child sexual abuse,” the website says. “Be that direct.” 

I am not naming the site, because it’s already gotten tons of attention in the wake of Penn State and I don’t want to give it even more.  (Anyone who really wants to find it can get to it via the Binghamton stories.)

But here’s why I keep calling it mysterious: I searched the site for a long time and could come up with not one name of anyone connected with the organization.  No president.  No executive director.  No board of directors.  No indication of the credentials of those offering the advice. All the e-mail contact addresses were generic – there isn’t even a media contact. [UPDATE: DEC. 2016: In this years since this item originally was posted, this information has been added to the site.]

Yet in the wake of Penn State, newspapers all over America are accepting this site’s data and its advice, in the case of the Binghamton paper, reprinting it whole.  That’s remarkably – um – trusting.

REAL PROBLEM, FAKE SOLUTIONS

Yes, the problem of child abuse is serious and real, and prudent precautions are in order.  But don’t believe the scare numbers.  For example, as I’ve noted before the claim that one-in-four girls and one-in-six boys will be sexually abused (which is the first thing you see on the home page of the mysterious website) is based on a study with a definition of abuse that can include a 19-year-old kissing a 17-year-old goodnight after a date. 

And you’d certainly never guess from the Binghamton stories that all crime in America, including child sexual abuse, has dramatically decreased in recent decades.  Yes, Jim, these aren’t the old days.  They’re better.

There is no way to seal off our children against all risk of molestation, any more than we can check the driving record of every adult who volunteers for the carpool.  And behaving like the mother in that op ed column, and following all the other paranoid advice, creates its own dangers for children. 

Dangers like:

●Raising them to cower in their homes, afraid of everyone they meet – or running home after so much as seeing a stranger nearby.

●Destroying any opportunity to build the self-confidence, self-reliance and independence they’ll need to thrive as adults.  What will our children do when we’re too old to always be there to protect them?

●Teaching them to treat normal human kindness as suspect, making it far less likely they will be able to receive such kindness – or give it.

Lenore Skenazy, author of Free-Range Kids, has crusaded against hyper-protective parenting.  Long before Penn State, she wrote about the harm caused by the kind of paranoia on display in the Southern Tier in this column for The Wall Street Journal.  She pointed out another danger to Milwaukee Magazine media columnist Erik Gunn:

We don't help kids if we're telling them to distrust half the population.  If most people are good and your kid ever is in a dangerous situation, could they ever go to a principal at school or their father or their teacher and tell them what's going on? If nobody is to be trusted you’ve left your child without anywhere to turn.

There also is the risk of setting off another wave of panic like the “mass molestation” hysteria that destroyed the lives of hundreds of children in the 1980s amid lurid false allegations of Satanic cults lurking in day care centers. 

            And there’s one more risk: When every adult becomes afraid to show normal affection – when, like one teacher in Binghamton, they stop giving hugs and give taps on the shoulder instead – then children actually become easier prey for child molesters.

            That’s because, as the Binghamton stories point out repeatedly, molesters target children who are denied normal affection.  As child abuse researcher Dr. James Garbarino put it during the last wave of sex abuse hysteria in the 1980s:

The more you define making physical contact with kids as being extraordinary or something that makes one suspicious, the more you leave the field open to people who want to touch kids for the wrong reasons.

WHOM ARE WE REALLY “PROTECTING”?

            Like so much that is done in the name of “child protection” the behavior described, and encouraged, in the Binghamton stories isn’t about protecting children at all – it’s about protecting parents. 

           

            Specifically it’s about our efforts to protect ourselves from one of the inevitable side-effects of parenthood: Worry - that constant, nagging fear that the worst will happen to our children as soon as they are out of our sight.  (Interestingly, in my own experience, this does not stop when the child becomes a young adult.)

            When our daughter was in college and wanted to spend a semester of her junior year studying in South Africa my wife and I worried – constantly.  The easy way out would have been to say no.   But we let her go, and it turned out to be one of the most important and fulfilling experiences of her life.  (We remain grateful that she did not tell us about going shark diving off Cape Town until after the fact.)

            At other times, I’m sure we’ve given in to fears when we shouldn’t have.  But putting the children first means rising above our own fears as much as we can, whenever it’s prudent.    

Anything less is not child protection, it’s adult self-indulgence.