Manufactured Fear

It's a horrifying video. Children go up to a door trick-or-treating and then inside when the man who opens the door tells them the candy is "downstairs." After finding no candy, they are told by the man there is none, and as he advances on the kids, they start screaming and try to run, only to be stopped by masked accomplices coming out of a closet and down the stairs. They are screaming and crying when the parents reveal themselves and proceed to yell at the kids for putting themselves in danger.

But there was no danger. This is one of those vulgar, fear-mongering, words-cannot-describe-it things that have become the mode lately. There have been a dozen or more made, all showing up on you-tube. Masquerading as "social experiments" or "parental warnings," they posit situations that, when they happen, happen with such extreme rarity that those who want to profit from them have to manufacture the scenario.

They all revolve around a single premise: the danger and threat of a total stranger to a child, the danger almost always, implicitly or explicitly, of a sexual nature.

Why don't they make videos of Uncle Joey conniving to get Susie to sit on his lap while the rest of the family carries on their conversations? Or Bob's older brother's best friend holding Bob down and feeling him up while roughhousing in the back yard? Those situations would at least strike much closer to the reality of how child sexual abuse occurs.

I have a question that I wish someone would answer for me. WHY do not the parents and the makers of those videos--the ones where kids are scared to death by a fake kidnapping or a fake Halloween abduction--why does not everyone involved in those videos get arrested and charged with child abuse and unlawful restraint of a child? They have emotionally devastated their children, created a horror for them that far exceeds anything they are likely to experience the rest of their childhood.

I guess if you are a parent, it's okay to scare the living crap out of your child--just not okay to let them play outside for five minutes unless you are watching them--but then that's for another post.

Another Sex Offender Entrapment Experiment? Oh, My!

I may be too angry to write this coherently, but I'm sure gonna give it a try.

Some of you will remember the "How easy it would be to kidnap your child in the park experiment" that I blogged about two years ago. With the parents' permission, a man lured children in a park to his van to "see his puppies." It was phony and contrived but certainly accomplished its purpose of terrifying a You-Tube viewing audience.

Cut from the same entrapment-type cloth, a new one went on line, as I write this, less than twenty-four hours ago and has had over a million views. Titled "The Dangers Of Social Media (Child Predator Social Experiment)," the brilliant conceiver of this "experiment" set up a Facebook identity as a young high school boy and, with the cooperation of each parent, contacted the 12 or 13 year old daughter on Facebook, claiming to go to her school and having seen her around. By day two or three, he convinced her to meet him at a nearby park, only to have the enraged father jump out from behind a trashcan and start screaming at her when she arrived for the rendezvous. (I only watched the first of what were apparently several events; my stomach was churning.)

But, as tacky as I found the video, that isn't what made me so angry. It was this statement on a Facebook posting accompanying the link to the video: "In the United State[sic] there are over 750,000 registered child predators." Full of righteous anger and statistics, I dashed to the "Report" function of Facebook--only to discover that the sentence wasn't written by Facebook. Off I rushed to Youtube, only to discover the same.

The villian is an online rag called "GoingViralPosts." The closest I came, with admittedly only moderate effort, to finding contact information was that they are headquartered in San Francisco.

Should parents educate children about potential dangers online? Certainly. Should they be terrified of some "registered sex-offender bogeyman" who lurks in cyperspace ready to pounce? Should they be

seduced by false statements and bogus "experiments" into believing that potential luring behavior, if it comes, is likely to be done by someone already on the registry, someone who is a stranger to the child?

Just as research shows that virtually all actual child sexual mistreatment is committed by those who are NOT already on the registry for previous offenses but rather those close to the chosen victims, it strongly suggests that by far the greatest Internet threats to children and teens are the peers of the potential victims.

One of my "sounding boards" suggested this solution to the danger to children posed in the video, and actually any danger at all--save a meteor crashing out of the sky and leveling the house and everyone in it. Anyone who has children commits to keeping them in the home every second of the first 17 years of their lives, with at least one of the parents having eyeball contact with the child each of those seconds. Any parent found negligent shall be imprisoned and the child taken into care where he or she will be assigned a surrogate to fulfill the parental role and expectations.

I hope I haven't given any aspiring politicians any ideas.

Open letter to Laura Ahearn and Parents for Megan’s Law

Your program is advertised as an advocacy for children focused on preventing sexual abuse.

Yet this, from your site, tells a very different story: “Most parents and community members believe that they are doing everything they can to protect children from sexual predators but the disturbing reality is that registered sex offenders are obtaining employment and volunteer positions across the country where they can have unfettered access to children.”

This tells me that your focus is on people who have already committed a sexual crime and have served or are in the process of serving their court-ordered sentences. Your very name, Megan's Law--synonymous with public notification which often translates into public persecution--makes this focus crystal clear.

Why? Statistics and studies tell us that virtually all children who are sexually abused are not random victims of offenders already registered. They are overwhelmingly victims of those in their lives with whom they are comfortable: their family members, their peers—fully a third of those who molest children are themselves children and juveniles—and their authority figures.

Studies show that if we wish to work toward the goal of protecting children, we must focus on the children; we must change our focus to a victim-oriented one, one that stresses prevention through education, awareness, and empowerment programs.

And yet here you are again--or rather, still--"standing with" self-serving politicians "to advocate for stronger sex offender laws."

Why?

This is what you are encouraging and promoting:

Every suggestion that sexual harm to children will be prevented by closely monitoring all on the registry obscures the fact that virtually all such perpetrators are not on the registry.

Every dollar spent registering, tracking, monitoring, and legislating against registered citizens is a dollar not spent educating and empowering parents and victims against the overwhelmingly greater threat.

Every dollar spent impeding registered citizens in their goals of rehabilitation and second chances is a dollar not spent working toward prevention of child sexual abuse.

Every minute focused on those on the registry is a minute not focused on those who are victims of sexual abuse in their own homes and other places in their everyday lives.

Again I ask--Why?

If you want to get attention, just say "Sex Offender!"

I think we've all seen it--headlines shouting "sex offender" when the article had little to do with a registrant or registrants in general. It's the modern day version of, "If it bleeds, it leads."

I may have identified the most egregious example of this phenomena.

The headline screams, "Florida complex for sex offenders blasted for selling children's toys at yard sale."  Apparently the Lighthouse Mission, a halfway house for released sex offenders in Florida, was having a yard sale of used and donated items. Among these items were "Stuffed animals, baby toys and strollers...."

The implication given is that the registrants deliberately included items attractive to children in an attempt to lure them within their reach.

Neighbors were up in arms, rushing to protect neighborhood children from the danger lurking just inside the door of the mission, danger in the form of registered sex offenders.

The truth, of course, bears no resemblance to that.

The mission, which helps registrants rehabilitate and find employment, is run by a mother and daughter. They hold several of these sales a year, and their tight-stretched budget is dependent on them for income. According to them, several of the resident registrants helped move some of the heavier items before the sale began. They were not involved with the sale at all.

But what if they had been? Would children be at risk? Does the near--and mere--proximity of those who have committed any of a myriad of registerable offenses, served prison time, and been released automatically put children at risk? All available studies and research says no.

Of course, those frantically concerned neighbors would not know this. Chances are high that they are ignorant of what the literature says on the subject. No, all they need to know in order to spring into action and, ultimately, force the closing of the yard sale, is that sex offenders are somehow involved.

I have been to many a yard sale. Most of them do include items for babies, toddlers, and children. What I have never seen is the babies, toddlers, and children wandering around on their own shopping for their baby toys and strollers.


BI am used to the most trivial and ridiculous issues becoming front page news if the phrase "sex offender" can be attached to it, but this may be the most ridiculous one yet. Even if the registered offenders in question were running the sale instead of just helping out by moving heavy furniture, how on earth would children be endangered? Even assuming that children in the proximity of registrants automatically creates a risk, which it doesn't, I have been at many a yard sale, and I don't recall ever seeing babies and toddlers shopping for their own toys or strollers. I am used to the most trivial and ridiculous issues becoming front page news if the phrase "sex offender" can be attached to it, but this may be the most ridiculous one yet. Even if the registered offenders in question were running the sale instead of just helping out by moving heavy furniture, how on earth would children be endangered? Even assuming that children in the proximity of registrants automatically creates a risk, which it doesn't, I have been at many a yard sale, and I don't recall ever seeing babies and toddlers shopping for their own toys or strollers.   am used to the most trivial and ridiculous issues becoming front page news if the phrase "sex offender" can be attached to it, but this may be the most ridiculous one yet. Even if the registered offenders in question were running the sale instead of just helping out by moving heavy furniture, how on earth would children be endangered? Even assuming that children in the proximity of registrants automatically creates a risk, which it doesn't, I have been at many a yard sale, and I don't recall ever seeing babies and toddlers shopping for their own toys or strollers. am used to the most trivial and ridiculous issues becoming front page news if the phrase "sex offender" can be attached to it, but this may be the most ridiculous one yet. Even if the registered offenders in question were running the sale instead of just helping out by moving heavy furniture, how on earth would children be endangered? Even assuming that children in the proximity of registrants automatically creates a risk, which it doesn't, I have been at many a yard sale, and I don't recall ever seeing babies and toddlers shopping for their own toys or strollers. IsIIII;

A Result of Sex Offender “Stranger Danger” Nobody Saw Coming

The entire sex offender registry—indeed, the entire sex offender industry—is built around the concept of “stranger danger,” the idea that children are at high risk of sexual assault from people they do not know, strangers, people who have already sexually offended and are out there just waiting to grab a random kid and do it again. Nothing will produce spasms of eye-rolling and unintelligible

sounds of disgust and derision in the well informed as will the term “stranger danger.”

The greatest part of the American citizenry supports the public sex offender registry. And yet when anyone says that those most likely to sexually abuse a child are those the child knows, those who aren’t on the registry but rather are close to the child in his everyday life, often family members, everyone within hearing distance nods his or her head in agreement. They do know this. It has been written in article after article, talked about ad nauseam by television talk show hosts and pop psychologists, and verified by any personal knowledge they have on the subject. Yet still they support the public sex offender registry.

Three members of a family and their accomplice are in jail because of stranger danger. They apparently had not read the articles or seen the talk shows, and when the mother of a six-year-old child in Missouri felt her son was too friendly and nice to strangers, to people he didn’t know, thus increasing his risk of becoming a victim, the boy’s grandmother and aunt agreed. So they did what any loving family would do; they decided to teach him a lesson.

They enlisted the help of a co-worker of the boy’s aunt who was ready and willing to play the part of Mr. Stranger Danger himself, and his performance was truly Oscar-worthy. He lured the little boy into his pickup as he got off the school bus. There the stranger from Hell proceeded to tie his hands and feet together; he told the terrified child he would not see his mother again; he threatened him with being “nailed to a wall.” He threatened him by waving a gun at him and covered his face with his jacket so that he could not see.

In this condition—bound, vision obscured, terrified and sobbing—he was carried into the basement of his own home. There he had his pants removed and was told he would become a sex slave. This surely begs the question of what a six-year-old child knows about being a sex slave. After four hours in captivity and terror, he was released and told to go upstairs to his mother. There he was lectured by his family about—you got it—stranger danger. This kid would have been safer with almost any stranger I could drag in off the street than he was with his family members.

At school the next day, he disclosed his ordeal to school authorities. The four adults were arrested, and the little six year old victim of the unfathomable ignorance and cruelty of the people who should have protected him from ignorance and cruelty was placed in protective custody and is by now most likely with a foster family.

What will happen to this family and to this child is anybody’s guess; all we can do is keep the child in our thoughts and prayers.

And, lest the irony has escaped anyone, this case proves that, in spite of the myths that persist about bogeymen hiding in the bushes, strangers that will pounce without notice, once again the true bogeymen, the ones so much more likely to bring fear and pain and horror to children, are those close to them in their everyday lives.