23 ms·

The US seems to be the only country that has this problem. Children here (Norway) walk to school on their own at the age of five or six, some of them take buse

• pilarphosol 4y ago
  The US is a low trust society, because of all the poverty. You really notice the difference if you travel to Europe. It turns out that having half of the population be economically unsafe makes everyone and everything unsafe.
  • popcalc 4y ago
    Hungary is extremely low trust and extremely poor, yet no one fears public transit nor letting their kids wander about.
    • em-bee 4y ago
      that's not a contradiction. if society in hungary is low trust (which i doubt btw, unless something changed since i was there last more than a decade ago) then this low trust does not extend to the safety of their children. letting kids wander about shows high trust in their kids not getting into danger. in the US people don't even trust that.
      • dsfyu404ed 4y ago
        So let me get this straight, trust is measured on multiple axis except for the axis of children which sets the maximum?
        • em-bee 4y ago
          trust is measured on multiple axis, period. no exception. the US have low trust when it comes to children. Hungary does not. Hungary may still be low trust on other axis.
    • nmfisher 4y ago
      Why do you say Hungary is low trust?
  • HDThoreaun 4y ago
    US is a low trust society because of a culture that reveres individualism and independence to the detriment of everything else, especially community and freedom from being abused in favor of freedom to abuse. Every man for themselves means kids need to constantly be supervised.
    • hn_version_0023 4y ago
      That culture is created by a media environment manufactured by companies whose employee base are well represented on this site. This line is pushed on us, ad nauseam. Unsurprisingly, most of us are sick from it.
      • valleyer 4y ago
        An alternative view is that our individualistic culture is simply an evolution of the American idea of "rugged individualism" -- an idea which somewhat predates the tech industry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rugged_individualism#Influence_on_contemporary_America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rugged_individualism#Influence...
      • jdminhbg 4y ago
        > That culture is created by a media environment manufactured by companies whose employee base are well represented on this site. Are you saying then that "that culture" is a decade old?
        • bluGill 4y ago
          Yellow journalism dates to the 1800's. I'm sure much longer, but that is something everyone should remember from history class.
          • jdminhbg 4y ago
            That's right, which makes it unlikely that the FAANG companies are responsible for it.
    • 4y ago
  • henrikschroder 4y ago
    I made the same observation when I moved to the US, it was so weird to me that SF the city is pretty much devoid of children. They're all effectively locked up and prohibited from roaming. No-one trusts children, no-one trusts adults around children, no-one trusts strangers. But I went skiing in Lake Tahoe one weekend, and suddenly all of that disappeared. Suddenly, you have children freely interacting with strangers, there's much less adult supervision, and a whole lot of trust in others again. It's such a contrast, and you can experience it by simply driving for a couple of hours.
    • HDThoreaun 4y ago
      SF is actually a city that is devoid of children. They're not hidden, they just don't exist because housing is too expensive. People with kids mostly leave.
      • jefftk 4y ago
        It's low but not zero. SF is 13% under 18, compared to 29% nationally.
        • aidenn0 4y ago
          24% for New York City and 16% for Manhattan if people want an urban comparison, or a "insanely expensive" urban comparison.
      • ghaff 4y ago
        It's been a common pattern for a very long time in the US for new graduates to often live in a city especially if that's where their job is and then move out when they start a family. That was the pattern with essentially everyone I knew who went into finance in Manhattan.
    • jvanderbot 4y ago
      The kinds of strangers you are likely to meet in SF are not to be trusted. It's not irrational on an individual level, it's just a societal madness in the USA. I lived in LA, and would not let my wife walk around after dark let alone my daughters. There were a few individuals who lived under bridges that would regularly assault women. And we lived in a "good" area. We moved to an even better area and within a couple months there was a shooting, high speed chase, and a drunk driver rolled his car into our neighbor's yard. Needless to say, we moved away.
  • notch898a 4y ago
    The people living in poverty very very rarely hurt a stranger's children. It's the cops who show up and take them, absolutely destroying their sense of security and growing independence.
    • gretch 4y ago
      This is very false. National studies show more violent crime happens in poor areas: https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/hpnvv0812.pdf https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/hpnvv0812.pdf
      • Zetice 4y ago
        What you've linked doesn't really contradict what the commenter said; he's arguing that folks don't generally hurt kids, poverty notwithstanding, and that tends to be my experience.
      • notch898a 4y ago
        That study says poor people are more likely victims. Doesn't even say who is performing the crimes (doubtful, but based on this study could be rich people robbing the poor or whatever), nor does it show the rate at which those in poverty victimize a stranger's child (which despite your sidestepped report here was what you replied to). For example, despite all the worries about kidnappings, there are only a few hundred kidnappings of children by complete strangers every year. As an aside (and separate point): The data in there was all 12+. I'm gonna be the one to come out and say it: if the hypothetical reality is the teenager is growing up in a hell-scape world of death-match-violence then unfortunately it's one of those cases of "nows the fucking time to get out there and learn how to (gradually) adapt to the hellscape while we try to make it better." (which honestly is a little what driving feels like when you turn 15)
      • anigbrowl 4y ago
        You need to cite more specifically, I'm not reading the whole study looking for the bit you think was relevant to the other poster's point.
  • fl0ps 4y ago
    The US is a low trust society because we're told not to trust people through highly negative news stories. The result is the US being primed to think there are child murderers and rapists under every bush, etc, etc. Ancedent to this unintentional effect was the incentivised "if it bleeds it reads" motivation for promotion of the highly negative.
    • myself248 4y ago
      Both of these things can be true at the same time. The news can overemphasize the worst, AND we can have an epidemic of drug problems, mental illness, and the crimes that those bring.
      • Falkon1313 4y ago
        Yet oddly, when I was a kid, and the crime rate was roughly double what it is now, we didn't have this problem. There were drugs, oh you betchya, cocaine and crack and all these other cool things the D.A.R.E. officers were telling us about. There was crime, about twice as much of it as today. But us kids were out there riding our bikes around and playing till the streetlights came on. This is something different entirely.
  • satvikpendem 4y ago
    I grew up in India, a much poorer nation than the US, and I played outside all the time, walking to relatives' houses and going to hang out with friends. I highly doubt it's the poverty causing this kind of thing in the US. Seems more to me the high amount of media "stranger danger" affecting people's viewpoints.
    • s1artibartfast 4y ago
      I think this is a key perspective. In the US you will have rich neighborhoods where kids play freely outside and poor neighborhoods where kids play freely outside. It is in the mixed neighborhoods there is an overwhelming fear of children playing
    • idontpost 4y ago
      I don't know how it is where you grew up in India, but where my wife's family lives in the Philippines, poverty is very different than here. They are much poorer than us, but at the same time, much more secure. Losing a job is not good, but they would not lose their home or starve as a result due a combination of not being in debt-slavery and familial/social networks close by. If we lost one of our two jobs, we'd be utterly fucked. We have no family nearby, and the housing market is so fucked we'd be in dire straits within a month.
    • sashank_1509 4y ago
      the highest murder rate in US is 15.8 Louisiana while the highest in India is 6.5 (Patna). Most places in India have half or lesser murder rates compared to the average in US. India in general is just a much safer country, not in the same league as China, Japan but far safer than US. Growing up in Bangalore, I walked the streets regularly at 2AM when I was a teen, something that I’m scared to do as a full grown adult in SF
      • seanmcdirmid 4y ago
        If you include traffic deaths (more likely to cause kids to get killed than murders), India and China look much worse.
  • Zetice 4y ago
    Parts of the US are like this, but huge swaths of Americans don't even bother locking their front doors.
    • InvaderFizz 4y ago
      That's largely changed. I grew up in rural areas where this was true. In fact, we didn't bother locking our doors when I was a kid. Now, however, people lock their doors because of meth heads even in the extremely rural areas of the southeast.
      • Zetice 4y ago
        Just… no. It has not changed, crime is down across the board.
  • ajsnigrutin 4y ago
    I've been through a lof of the balkan areas in the 1990s, also yugoslavia/serbia during the sanctions before the 1999 nato bombing and fast after, and during all those times in all those areas there was A LOT of poverty. Kids were playing outside all the time... from urban belgrade, parks and playgrounds surrounded by huge socialist buildings, to rural villages. Going to school? Sure, kids 7, 8, 9yo walking alone to school was (and still is) a normal thing. Usually elementary schools (6/7->14/15yo) were walking distance, but some still had to use a public/city transport. High schools meant a bus/tram for a majority of kids. During weekends seeing a bunch of kids outside even late at night was normal and still is.
    • alluro2 4y ago
      I can back that claim. Unfortunately, it's no longer the case - not exclusively for the low trust reason, though - but that kids of school age, in my experience, now largely rush home after school to text to their same group of friends they just physically separated from, and play games. I believe the altered persona they can assume when texting, and freedom of expression they can have using that medium, over doing it in person, is of very high appeal, and something I find concerning for the future of society...
  • logicalmonster 4y ago
    I'm sure that poverty can play a factor in worsening social trust, but can the reason for anything as complex in society only have 1 cause? Also, arguing your point, there's far poorer countries that are far more trusting. And arguably at the US's "poorest" (maybe during the Great Depression to WWII period) there was a much different social attitude to strangers than exists now. I'd say that commenters have brought up some good factors like mentioning the media's business model in hyping up negative clickbait, but personally I'd say that the increasingly heterogenous population is closer to the biggest factor. Identity politics drives a wedge between most groups that can tend to make you distrust the motives of almost anybody, even if the stranger is a member of your own group. As long as identify politics persists, countries with an increasingly heterogenous population will have even lower trust.
  • yttribium 4y ago
    That's obviously not the case when poverty levels are decreasing over time along with social trust.
  • citrin_ru 4y ago
    My impression is the opposite - it is easy to encounter unsupervised children in a poor neighborhoods but practically impossible in upper-middle class ones. Helicopter parenting is common in families where one of parent stays at home with one or two kids and directs all energy into supervising and 'developing' them. Having high income such families have disproportionate political power and able to enforce this model of rising kids on society at large.
• certifiedloud 4y ago
  I would say that this is an extreme and somewhat rare example. Kids here do walk themselves to school. But this does seem to be a growing concern, hence the legislation.
• anon291 4y ago
  Some context is likely needed, as the fact that the child is a foster child most certainly played a part in how seriously they took this allegation. In the US (and actually all over the world), children in foster care situations are at higher risk of abuse. Moreover, foster children are wards of the state and placement decisions are up to the state. The law about non-foster children (children with parents) is much more strict in what parents can and cannot do with their children. That means that it is extremely easy for the state to decide to move a foster child, whereas they cannot just take someone's adopted or biological child away. At the end of the day, the state is the foster child's guardian. For example, the state makes medical decisions for foster children. When we did our foster parent training, we even learned that sometimes the foster parents cannot make decisions on haircuts! However, I'm going to guess that the state is hyper-vigilant about foster children because (1) they are often victims, (2) the state is directly in charge of foster children.
  • aidenn0 4y ago
    The usage of "foster dad" and "his child" to me implies that the child was not a foster child. However, foster homes are typically (completely depends on local laws) held to a fairly high bar for safety, so an allegation of neglect against a child (adopted or biological) will be fully investigated. On the other hand, if it's anything like where I am, then foster parents are at least used to allegations. My wife and I had at least one abuse allegation per year filed against us when we were foster parents. It was somewhat disconcerting the first time. The fifth time, when the social worker showed up it was more "Hi Zoë, how's it going? What's the allegation this time?"
• acuozzo 4y ago
  > The US seems to be the only country that has this problem. Here's my take on the issue from 5 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32680201 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32680201 Summary: We don't have safe roads and in most American suburbs traveling by car is often the only reasonable option available.
  • gitpusher 4y ago
    Related – this video does a nice job of articulating that argument: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHlpmxLTxpw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHlpmxLTxpw
    • andrepd 4y ago
      I didn't open it and I knew it was a NotJustBikes video. I actually hate that channel because it made me aware of how broken the car-centric infrastructure where I live is. I was living I such blissful ignorance, now I can't unsee it!
      • CalRobert 4y ago
        Depending on your circumstances you may be able to emigrate to the Netherlands.
        • ThePowerOfFuet 4y ago
          Western Europe in general. It's not just an NL thing.
          • matkoniecz 4y ago
            Central Europe is also reasonably well in this aspect, also Eastern Europe is much better than USA.
          • CalRobert 4y ago
            True, but if they're from the US there's the Dutch American Friendship Treaty.
• bcrosby95 4y ago
  I walk my kids to school in the US, but I definitely see kids as young as 6 walking without a parent. I choose to walk with my kids because I enjoy it, and it's easy exercise. That said, a lot of parents still drive their kids - the vast majority I would say. Even people who live within walking distance. It definitely is faster if you look at it in a vacuum: you save 10 minutes round trip! And when casually discussing things with them, that's usually the excuse - they just don't have the time! They're always running late! etc. But I get a 20 minute walk out of it, and spend time with the kids talking about stuff. So to that I say: I'm multi-tasking. Part of me thinks this problem isn't much different from the fear of child abduction: overblown. But there is something especially frustrating about the times this happens because people think they are doing something good when they really aren't.
  • kungfooey 4y ago
    I live about a half mile from my kid's school and we walk most days, or I bike. However, it has been... eye opening. We live in a fairly urban area of Nashville, but my street doesn't have sidewalks. We've been yelled at multiple times (me, my wife, and our kindergartner) by drivers to "Get out of the road!" (This is on a 25 mph street.) There are ditches and uneven ground on both sides of the road. Even the sidewalks we _do_ have on our route are paltry... about 3 feet wide and immediately adjacent to a busy 30 mph road. We sometimes walk in the grass next to the sidewalk, and I actually had one neighbor yell at us to "Get out of the yard, get on the sidewalk." That one took the cake for me. So, yeah. There's a lot of reasons people don't walk to work, but one of them might be that everyone and everything assumes you're supposed to drive in a car and idle in the parking lot for 20 minutes rather than walking. Walking can be _stressful_, especially if you're doing it with multiple kids (which I often do).
    • andrepd 4y ago
      Car-centric infrastructure and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
      • xyzelement 4y ago
• __MatrixMan__ 4y ago
  It wasn't always like this. I'm 35 and growing up in the US involved adventures that took me and my other 6-yr old pals several miles from home.
• danjoredd 4y ago
  Its been a genuine problem. I have heard people actually say that if a kid is playing outside by themselves, then the parent should be charged with child neglect because the kid could get hurt. Any time a kid gets hurt on YouTube the comments are filled with people blaming the parent for not being outside with them. Thing is, playing outside by yourself gives you a strong sense of independence. The kid might get hurt, sure, but when the alternative is them never learning to be on their own and do things for themselves, the risk seems well worth it.
  • andrepd 4y ago
    Sure, a reasonable risk is tolerable. But, for instance, car-centric infrastructure has *intensely* exacerbated those risks: space is completely surrendered to cars, sidewalks are non-existent, crosswalks go across 8 lanes of 60+mph traffic. All of this, plus terrible public transport, makes it impossible to travel anyway except by car. This leads to lack of independence for children, and sedentarism.
    • Icathian 4y ago
      This is hyperbole at best. There are entire swathes of the country, both rural and suburban, with plenty of safe places for kids to exist.
    • danjoredd 4y ago
      It also depends on where you live. If you are a suburban or rural kid, playing outside all you want is fine. Let them explore the neighborhood. If you live near a highway though, or a high crime area, then you might want to reconsider what you want to allow. You still need common sense. My main worry is people who live in relatively safe areas, like a suburban neighborhood, but with neighbors that will STILL call CPS on you for allowing them a little freedom. When I was a kid living in a trailer park we had neighbors like that. Never called CPS, but definitely complained about us being unsupervised despite the fact that the speed limit was a mere 15 MPH, and that we made a point not to bother the neighbors because our parents told us not to. They just saw kids playing and having fun, and decided it was a crime against humanity.
• MisterBastahrd 4y ago
  It's a paranoid US millennial parenting thing. I'm a younger Gen Xer and my parents would lock me out of the house from the time I got home from school until the sun went down. I was at the bus stop for 6:30 every morning.
  • pengaru 4y ago
    Fellow younger Gen-Xer here, when I was growing up this trajectory was already clearly starting. My parents were oldschool Italian immigrants and let me run wild, often accompanied by a relatively small subset of neighborhood kids whose parents also didn't worry. But there were already plenty of boomers panicking about child molesters reported in the news, locking their kids up inside. Then as minorities started moving into the predominantly white racist midwestern neighborhood, the fears went into overdrive.
• cryptonector 4y ago
  The U.S. federal government gives the States' child protection service agencies money grants that are conditional on those agencies actually taking children from their homes. You get what you subsidize, and if you subsidize petty tyranny, you'll get petty tyranny.
  • genghisjahn 4y ago
    Link?
  • notch898a 4y ago
    Works that way with lots of things. My kid gets a pretty generous existence off ~10% of our post-tax salaries. Not because we are rich, we just don't waste money. In a divorce, the state says I would need to pay 20% pre-tax (like 30% post-tax) or go to fucking jail. There's no rational reason why the kid is always going to need 3x the money in a divorce, and that reason be so dire it's worth throwing someone in jail for not paying it. The reason turns out the state gets benefits based on both the small administrative cut and based on the amount of child support outlays.
    • gowld 4y ago
      Benefits how? If your kid doesn't waste money, why does it matter whether the money is your account or theirs?
      • alwayslikethis 4y ago
        You are forced to give it. If you lose your job or somehow cannot manage your cashflow for a moment, you go to jail.
        • notch898a 4y ago
          Or if you just get hijacked by terrorists while ironically working the job to come up with money for the child support [0]. [0] https://greensboro.com/ex-hostage-jailed-in-child-support-case/article_1fed687a-38e8-55c9-ab2f-411f82a525fa.html https://greensboro.com/ex-hostage-jailed-in-child-support-ca...
• didip 4y ago
  Car-centric culture and gun-centric culture is making our society to be like this. Also, most states defund mental health institutions. Finally, the 24/7 news cycle covers a lot of crazy behaviors, encouraging copycats to one-up the crime even more. Is it a surprise if Americans are more paranoid than ever?
  • vkou 4y ago
    The 24/7 news cycle is problematic, not because of copycats, but because of paranoia about traumatic, but very low-frequency events. If we had the kind of gruesome, 24/7 news coverage that is usually reserved for crimes, but for car crashes (lethal and otherwise), instead, maybe that would shift the needle some.
  • Barrin92 4y ago
    Sort of? I've been at an Israeli wedding once and we literally had to shelter for fifteen minutes because some Gaza rocket was flying over the venue, people just shrugged it off. There's people in the thread here saying American roads in suburbs are too unsafe, I don't think these folks have seen traffic in Jakarta, and yet kids still walk to school there. Most people on earth would kill for American suburb levels of safety. America's paranoia is grounded in something else. The country has had bouts of hysteria over anything for many decades now.
    • lmz 4y ago
      > I don't think these folks have seen traffic in Jakarta, and yet kids still walk to school there. You can't compare the two. Traffic in Jakarta is often barely moving while the suburbs have the opposite problem.
      • oaiey 4y ago
        Maybe. But we all agree that American suburbs are peaceful, heaven-like places compared to many places in the world. In Australia it is poisoness animals, in many countries it is the availability of drugs, in some crime, kidnapping and rapist. And God forbid you live in a war zone. Most parents would love their kids growing up in a safe place like in the US, the EU or Japan. But they are not and are faster independent and aware of their environment. And that is okay. Was like that for thousands of years.
• Reason077 4y ago
  > "The US seems to be the only country that has this problem. Children here (Norway) walk to school on their own at the age of five or six, some of them take buses." I grew up in New Zealand, and when I was a kid it was pretty normal to walk to school also. I spent my whole childhood walking 20-30 mins every morning and afternoon! Eventually I got a bike which saved a bit of time. But now days, I think it's not as common. My nieces seem to get shuttled everywhere in their Mum's car. One issue is that there's a lot more cars on the roads now days so it doesn't feel as safe or as friendly for pedestrians as it used to.
  • aidos 4y ago
    It’s the catch22 of it I suppose. Also grew up in rural Nz where walking / cycling alone from a fairly young age was normal. Now my kids are at that age they cycle a bit on their own, but even in our village there is a street they need to cross on the way to school where they need supervision. Really we should start a community lollipop person schedule and sort it out.
    • readwriterick 4y ago
      > lollipop person TIL, "crossing guard" in Kiwi, how much cuter is that?
    • lovemenot 4y ago
      >> Really we should start a community lollipop person schedule and sort it out. That's how it's done in Japan in the mornings. Kids first collect into small local groups, they walk together to the nearest designated adult helper. From that point, there are adults manning every crossing to the school. They help the groups cross. It's not a huge commitment for the adults. Maybe 20 minutes on average. Not every week.
    • Reason077 4y ago
      > ”Really we should start a community lollipop person schedule and sort it out.” Ahh yes! My primary school in NZ had two nearby crossings over a “busy” road (but probably not that busy by today’s standards) I remember doing lollipop duty on it a few times. As a kid. A very prestigious assignment and we got some special high-vis to wear and everything. I assume there must have been some volunteer parents involved as well, but I really don’t remember now. Would have been too caught up in the excitement, haha.
• favaq 4y ago
  It's very unfair to compare Norway to the US, you just have to look at the racial composition of both societies to see why
  • Calloutman 4y ago
    What does race have anything to do with this? Unless you believe diversity somehow leads to insane laws....
  • analog31 4y ago
    There's no reason why a multi-racial society can't let their kids go out to play. Being multi-racial doesn't mean a country has to turn itself into a shit hole. Moreover, if it's because the races hate each other, then stop encouraging the hate.
    • favaq 4y ago
      >Being multi-racial doesn't mean a country has to turn itself into a shit hole. It doesn't? Do you have any examples where this hasn't happened?
      • eloisant 4y ago
        I live in a French neighborhood with multiple races (mostly white+arabic+black) and it's very safe, children play outside be themselves and no parent or neighbor ever care.
  • V__ 4y ago
    How is playing or beeing outside is a racial thing?
  • kwhitefoot 4y ago
    Granted that the average is as you say. But averages conceal the truth that the racial composition of those US districts that I have seen personally is generally not average, they tend to be overwhelmingly white or overwhelmingly black (mostly the Raleigh-Durham Triangle). In Norway we don't have many areas where that happens.
• paxys 4y ago
  It's not really a problem in the US either. Kids are walking or biking unsupervised everywhere. Only a few isolated cases like the one you mentioned make the headlines.
  • why-el 4y ago
    It's not the number of cases, it's the possible litigation that's at stake.
• insane_dreamer 4y ago
  > A passerby reported this is a big part of the problem
• ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  In Japan, one of our buildings was right next to a girls' primary school. When I took the train from Shinagawa to Nishi-Ohi, I would see these tiny little girls, basically knee-high, on the train, by themselves, on the way to school. I've talked about growing up in Africa[0], and what kinds of things we had, slithering around. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34628812 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34628812
  • wil421 4y ago
    I walked to school in the late 90s to middle school because we were so close a bus isn’t offered. I also did a similar thing and biked or walked to high school until a friend who took me. When I used to ride a public transport train to work I would see young kids going to a private school dressed in school uniforms. They would go together and it wasn’t a problem, their school wasn’t in the best area either. No one blinked an eye now or then. I live in fairly large city in the US South and half my neighborhood walks around. Never head of someone calling the cops for walking.
    • Ntrails 4y ago
      I'm told I was stopped from walking to school around the age of 10 (which did involve crossing a very busy road without any safe crossing apparatus) because someone reported it to the headmaster who then asked my parents to put a stop to it. I don't remember it well enough to comment
• api 4y ago
  The whole thing goes back to 80s and 90s daytime TV and people like John Walsh who pushed “stranger danger” unbelievably hard. Two generations of parents have been taught that the streets are crawling with child predators when in reality attacks by people not known to the child are very rare. For whatever reason this took off in America more than most other places. US culture seems very prone to moral panics and crime scares. The fact is that the vast majority of child abuse and abduction is committed by a family member or someone known to the child like a teacher, pastor, neighbor, coach, etc. Stranger abductions are horrific and terrifying but they are nowhere near the top of a list of bad things likely to happen to your kids.
• 45453836 4y ago
  Imo there's two factors at play only one of which seems to get much attention. There's the legality (and burden of compliance even when abiding the law) of leaving your children unsupervised but there's also the complete lack of penalty for being wrong. A person reporting abuse incorrectly is for all intents and purposes, an attacker. Why is attacking someone else with only a brief observation of the situation cost free? Sure there's a balance to be maintained so that people still report actual abuse but why is there no burden upon the attacker to be correct or defensibly confused when the stakes are so high for the defender? If this was a game the imbalance would be an obvious point of dialogue.
  • devtul 4y ago
    Charge $5 bucks for some type of reports, it's a small annoyance which should be nothing for someone truly concerned.
    • ethbr0 4y ago
      I'm convinced the internet would have been better if we had charged $0.05 per email. Making something free definitely has its costs.
      • makeitdouble 4y ago
        I get your point, and it was a pretty serious discussion in the early days I think. Now, introducing micro-transactions into people‘s communication looks like a straight ticket to hell to me. Reminds me of the early days of SMS when only porn sites, scams and businesses that made you pay for their SMS bills would send you messages.
        • ethbr0 4y ago
          Well, it would have combated spam effectively, which would have directly decreased the power of Gmail. But it would also have, more importantly, created a revenue stream and normalized microtransactions, which would have created an alternate business model to attention/advertising. Nobody likes paying for things... but I think the "free" future we're living in is pretty shitty compared to the way things were before.
• DanHulton 4y ago
  We also have this problem in Canada, but being as we import a great deal of our culture from the US, we're frequently "America-lite" for things like this.
• jliptzin 4y ago
  The US has a lot of problems a lot of other countries don’t have.
• HWR_14 4y ago
  I don't understand what's either astonishing or even wrong about that sequence of events by the government. Person calls 911 and reports child abuse. The government takes the situation seriously and investigates. The government determines there was no issue. Person being investigated is upset. Other than the person calling 911, who do you want to do something different? You want the first responder to dismiss the case because they don't think it matters? A lot of abuse went on for years because of that. You want the government to take the kid while investigating? You want the government to just not investigate and take the kids? You want the parents not to be worried going through the process? I just don't know how else I would want the government to react. It was far too lax in the past in investigating credible accusations. And if we have to error on one side or the other it should be helping abused kids.
  • ecshafer 4y ago
    The sequence of events that is wrong here, is that if a person calls 911 claiming that there is child abuse going on, and the "child abuse" is a child playing outside or walking to the park alone, the person should be fined. There is a difference between "I saw little Johnny outside for hours in the cold, I think there is child abuse." or "I saw bruises all over little johnny, I think there is child abuse." and "A child was walking outside alone, there is child abuse".
    • HWR_14 4y ago
      Of course what happened in this case wasn't child abuse. But the reporter didn't say "I saw them playing outside". They said "the child is being neglected". Yes, it turns out the reasons for the person calling saying so were wrong. But if the child wasn't being given food or medical care it would have been reported the same way. So the government had to investigate. Using the future knowledge that the investigation turned up nothing to suggest it should not be done isn't really something that can be applied.
  • notch898a 4y ago
    If someone makes a false claim that results in personal expenses for me that sounds like libel or defamation. Allow me to find out who they were so I can sue them. I value my time at least for say $1000 per CPS visit and $300 per hour I have to spend dealing with the investigation they knowingly initiated with their libel. The laws hiding the identity of people abusing children by making these trumped up reports should be re-evaluated. Edit: CPS investigation technically is a civil and not criminal investigation (typically) so you can see the very clever hack below did using word 'crime' to hide the fact the law prevents revealing identity of callers in this 'civil' complaint. In fact their wordsmithing is pretty brilliant in they also tried to redefine the elements of defamation which include damages or harm to reputation rather than damages from harm to reputation. 10/10 for lawyering and 0/10 for faithful rebuttal.
• throwaway892238 4y ago
  I guess it's only natural that people outside the country aren't exposed to our local news, but this kind of crazy shit happens all over the US. You probably hear about our insane politics and people who don't believe in science, but there's so much more. People in the USA are really nuts.
• Sparkyte 4y ago
  Police too busy chasing other problems than hunting down pedos.
• tchvil 4y ago
  In Belgium, we had Dutroux a serial rapist and child kidnapper that traumatised the country ~30 years ago. As a kid I remember living like you describe in Norway. Not anymore. Parents are still to this day worried letting their kids go outside. Fast forward to spring 2020. The country is locked down. The weather is surprisingly excellent. It took me a lot of effort to leave my 8y old girl go play with her friend to the small wood nearby. Initially I even asked her to go with the dog. I could see the disapprovals of other parents I was talking to about this. But little by little other kids joined. They had a blast. No school for months. Living in the sunny woods all day, just coming back to eat and sleep. She's 10 now and as you can imagine a very independent girl.
  • nanidin 4y ago
    I blame this transition to overprotection on Mean World Syndrome[0]. Our media picks up alarming stories and amplifies them in a way that wasn't happening before. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_world_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_world_syndrome
    • sneak 4y ago
      I concur. It's not just children, women are afraid to walk alone at night, when men are way more likely than women to incur violent attack from strangers. Women and children are almost always preyed upon by people who know them, not strangers.
• thrashh 4y ago
  I think it depends on the area I see little kids mobbing around everywhere here Unfortunately there are some unreasonable people out there who must be reading too much negative news
• FpUser 4y ago
  >"The US seems to be the only country that has this problem" Same here in Canada. Retarded policy I think
• ithkuil 4y ago
  Italy is not as ridiculous, but until 14 years kids cannot exit school without a register adult picking them up.
  • kwhitefoot 4y ago
    But that is ridiculous! According to thelocal.it it's no longer true: https://www.thelocal.it/20171114/italy-amends-law-kids-go-home-from-school-alone/ https://www.thelocal.it/20171114/italy-amends-law-kids-go-ho... Havs thelocal got it right? "Italy amends law to allow kids to go home from school alone Italian schools can let children walk home alone without fear of legal repercussions, after the senate approved an amendment to a law that said they had to be picked up by an adult. .. Under-14s will require written permission from their parents or guardians to leave school unaccompanied, according to the amendment, which passed the senate’s budget committee on Monday."
    • ithkuil 4y ago
      > has thelocal got it right? How can you get something right about any Italian law? Sure they correctly cited what has been defined by the law but that doesn't mean jackshit in practice. Once a law is written, it can change substantially once it gets put into practice, by the many and many little details. In theory the parents "authorize" their kids to exit the school alone. In practice, individual schools can decide whethers that's reasonable or not. The criteria for what's reasonable or not begin with reasonable stuff like "it must be safe", "the child must be mature enough", "the child must walk on your sidewalk", "the child must know the rules of the road" .... But then after a while most schools just ended up with blanket rules like "possible starting from the 5th grade" (since only those kids are generally old enough to meet all the other criteria; so even if your kid meets them before, tough luck). And some schools don't even allow that. Basically you have to fight for your right, which usually requires you to band with other parents otherwise you have no chances winning. But once you band with enough parents, there is a simpler solution which requires no fighting: you just add a bunch of other parents to the list of trusted people, and so a group of kids exits with one adult supervision and they usually just walk together to their respective homes, possibly letting the kids to leave the group once closer to home (sometimes called "piedibus") So yeah, in practice people get more or less what they want, but oh boy how different this is in practice than what you'd read in the newspapers.
• citrin_ru 4y ago
  From what I see in media more supervision for children (compare to what was norm 25-50 years ago) is a trend across most economically developed countries. But the US is definitely the most extreme case. I would not be surprised if there is an inverse correlation between birth rate and "child protect" laws - the less children a country have the better it tries to protect (to the point it harms everybody). But child hostile laws (and they abuse by police and social services) like in the US definitely not encourage young people to rise kids.
  • alwayslikethis 4y ago
    East Asian countries have among the lowest birth rates, but their children largely are allowed to travel by themselves to school from like 7 years old.
• Al-Khwarizmi 4y ago
  The US may be the most extreme case of this problem, but not every country has it as good as Norway either. I'm from Spain and sadly no kid here goes to school on their own at 5 or 6. Most start at 8 or 9, and typically "experts" recommend 7 as the absolute lower bound. While not as car-centric as the US, we still have too many cars in every city (and too fast) to feel safe leaving kids alone at 5 or 6.
  • rypskar 4y ago
    Norway is also far from perfect, we have an increase in parents driving their kids to school because of the dangers from the traffic made by parents driving their kids to school
• UnderpaidLife 4y ago
  Went at the age of 10 with the train trough the country (germany) alone to my grandparents. Also since I am 6, went also alone to school.
• mharig 4y ago
  That is not astonishing, that is the stupiest shit one can imagine. And because of the monkey nature of humans and the dominance of the US american 'culture' in the world, that will spread to other countries, too.