Seriously?

[conuly]

"If Anne Bruscino is a child abuser we're all child abusers, because there is not an adult in America who can claim to never have made that kind of mistake."

Exactly this. This is the sort of mistake people are paid to not let happen, but sometimes accidents will happen anyway. The trick is to catch them before they become problems.

I picked the link up over at FRK, by the way, where, for the past month, the author as been promoting her own idea, "Leave Your Kid at the Park Day". I hadn't realized until today, but the most recent negative comments on the subject have been mean, some of them expressing regret that, as far as anybody can tell, nothing untoward happened. So you know, nobody "learned their lesson". (I'm fudging a bit, a few of them were before Saturday and expressed hope that something would happen, etc. etc.) These people scare me. They remind me of that guy who broke into his ex-girlfriend's house and raped her, and then claimed it was to teach her it wasn't safe to leave her door unlocked. (Apparently it WAS safe, just so long as she didn't tell him where she lived.) Creepy.

Comments

[wednes.livejournal.com]

Wow.

I have long been against making silly lists of people so we can pretend we know who all the bad guys are. This case is doubly infuriating. Not only does it harm a dedicated child care worker, but it harms abused children by taking time away from those people who could actually help them.

[sayga.livejournal.com]

Well it should have been illegal to accompany the children to the playground in the first place. A guy with a machine gun could easily lean over a chest high chain link fence, or put the gun through the fence, and wipe out all the kids. I can't believe the daycare would be so irresponsible that they did not consider this when building the fence. The should have a 20 foot high concrete wall with rings of barbed wire on top. Some people!

[leora.livejournal.com]

I have had less opportunity to make a mistake like that, but I have never made a mistake like that. However, that said, calling that abusive child neglect does devalue the label. And we need to either stop letting tiny things get big labels or start having some sort of degree of severity attached, because child neglect can be things like that hellish case of the child who was starving, filthy, and infested, unable to move despite appearing to have no health issues not created by the neglect... or it can be one kid getting away from adult supervision for a handful of minutes. Totally not the same thing.