Over at Pandagon, Amanda's experience every Halloween growing up in Alpine, Tx, sounds similar to mine in Tyler - a lot of religious folks wanted the event banned entirely for its allegedly Satanic origins, and the whole thing every year became a ridiculously overblown controversy.Back in my day, the big scare threat was razor blades in apples, though that never really occurred in the real world. Now it's scare rhetoric about sex offenders.
It's all pretty silly since nearly all child molestation happens in the home and with people who know the victim, not some stranger doling out Tootsie rolls.
Why all the scare rhetoric? I'd guess a trick or treater is much more likely to be hit by a car than to be molested - I could find no examples of that happening via a Google search, and I've simply never heard of it.
Just let the kids go get some candy and have some fun, for heavens sake, and if you're worried what will happen, tag along. It's called "parenting."
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8 comments:
"Why all the scare tactics?"
Sheriffs have to run for re-election, too.
Strangers who abduct children are more likely to kill the victim than a family member or aquaintance.
"Strangers who abduct children are more likely to kill the victim than a family member or aquaintance."
So why dont we have a regestry for those convicted of any violence agains t persons or murder??
"Strangers who abduct children are more likely to kill the victim than a family member or aquaintance."
But is there any evidence that this has been a problem at Halloween? In all the news coverage on the topic, have you seen ONE anecdote of a child being molested or kidnapped while trick or treating? I couldn't find any. I've seen nothing that indicates it's a problem - it's surely not as big a threat as walking around the streets at dusk when they might be hit by a car. That's easily the bigger risk of death, if that's your concern.
Halloween is just a convenient time for the pro-registry folks to scare the bejesus out of us and raise awareness for the cause. "Strangers who abduct" makes a good point, but victims of already registered sex offenders were not helped by the information. The registry does give the cops somewhere to fish when something bad happens, ala round up the usual suspects, but by then the damage is done. I guess the big question is, "Does the registry prevent sexual assaults or abductions?" Who knows, but my gut says no.
There was a Halloween abduction in Wisconsin. In 1973. I don't recall the killer having a previous record, though, so even if all today's restrictions were in place, none would have applied to him.
Just because you can't find one article or some statistics about children being molested or kidnapped during Holloween doesn't mean the public shouldn't take extra precaution. If I knew that a convicted sex offender lived in my neighborhood, I would want to know it, and I wouldn't want him to participate in holloween. It sounds like you all are appeasers to the sex offenders.
"appeasers to the sex offenders."
If a problem has never presented itself, it harms public safety to expend resources to resolve it at the expense of more important concerns. With kids in the street all night, for example, there's a good chance you'd do more to protect them if cops doing this were on traffic enforcement. Certainly 911 responses already escalate with drunks and partyers out on Halloween, so checking on sex offenders takes manpower from responding to them. What you see as "appeasement" to me is just a resistance to fear-hyped grandstanding that would shift resources from their optimal public safety use as a PR stunt. It's like you think sex offenders are Germany, but in this case France has not been invaded.
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