(06-17-2017, 07:24 AM)Odin Wrote:(06-16-2017, 04:31 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: I may have thwarted a crime yesterday: child endangerment. .... I thought that the child was in danger at the least of some abuse.
Yikes! I hope that kid ends up OK!
That was my concern. There are many scenarios that I can imagine, and few of them are benign, in the situation that I saw. There could be a nasty dispute on the issue of child custody. There could be abuse. I once saw a mother spank her son's bare bottom in my view in the parking lot of a grocery store. I called the cops on that one. It is simply stupid to so humiliate a child in public. The problem isn't that I saw it happen. I simply recognize my responsibility to a helpless, vulnerable, impressionable child.
Tough luck on the parents. I do not want them to get off easy. I want them to have to learn what is acceptable and effective child-rearing and what isn't. Maybe they will need to take junior-college courses on child development in which one learns without ambiguity that fear and intimidation do more harm than good. Child development is one of the courses I would love to see mandated in the expansion of K-12 to K-14 education. It is a fair assumption that everyone will encounter children in circumstances in which the children are at risk of abuse or other harm even if one does not sire, bear, or teach children.
It's in the hands of the police and social services now -- at least, so I hope. One of the few positives of this time is that we have much lesser tolerance for child abuse than was recently the case. Nobody has the excuse that "the Bible says 'spare the rod and spoil the child'". Beaten children all too often become brutes as adults.
The happy ending is that the parents learn a lesson. But happy endings are far from usual expectations when people have entrenched their very bad habits. Fines, probation, and community service? Those parents are welcome to fault me. I would rather that they curse me than that they abuse their child.
Children are precious -- lest we be doomed as a nation, culture, or whatever division is relevant.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.