Of child molesters and hysteria
By Nicholas Stix
web posted February 7, 2005
Apparently, a new child molester is roaming the Rockaway
peninsula in Queens, New York – me! I say that, because on
January 11, a girl of about 11 years of age walking on the other
side of the street kept nervously looking over her shoulder at me.
When I sought to comfort her with a kindly smile, and perhaps a
nod, she became even more alarmed. At the PTA meeting that
night at my son's school, a parent insisted to me, "If a child feels
intimidated, then an incident occurred."
Salem witch trials, here we come!
But it gets worse. I wasn't some stranger cruising the
neighborhood (didn't a man once have the right to walk any
street in America?); I was walking the same route I walk at the
same time, every weekday, to pick up my child from school.
And then the girl crossed in front of me, to enter her house.
Why, she was no stranger, either! Just a few days earlier, she
had stood in front of her house as my son and I walked past,
heading home, and flashed a brilliant smile at him. And that
wasn't the first time. (He has that effect on females.)
So, what had I done to terrorize this poor child, you ask? When
I got home, I told my wife what had happened. She showed me
the following letter on school letterhead, which our son had
brought home a few days earlier.
January 6, 2005
Dear Parents:
We have received the following notification from our Supervisor
of Safety and Security regarding an incident that occurred this
morning. Please be vigilant and in clear communication with your
children in order to ensure their safety and well-being.
This morning one of our 5th grade female student [child's full
name was given!] was escorted by the police from the 101 pct.
to school this morning. [Child's first name] gave the following
account. "While on my way to school I saw a man following me.
I looked back he smiled and nodded his head. I kept walking.
when I looked back again he was still following me smiling. I
looked back a third time and he was still there. [Child's name,
now in the voice of the security supervisor, but without closing
the quotation] went into CVS on Beach 20th street and informed
the security guard there. the security guard called the pct. the
description of the male is brown skin – mixed gray and black
hair about 5 9. the officer said he looked in the area but did not
see the person. The officer also noted that this area is next to a
nursing home facility. Parent of child was called and it is being
reported online.
Sincerely,
(Name, signed)
Assistant Principal
(I did not publish the name of the assistant principal or of the
school, in order to protect my son. Thus do various guilty parties
get off scot free.)
To recap, according to the NYPD and the school brass, there
was an "incident" (read: crime) on January 6. A man was
accused and convicted, in absentia, of first degree walking
behind, smiling, and nodding at a ten or eleven-year-old girl.
How many years is that good for? And what if he hadn't smiled
and nodded at her? Would she have reported that he had an
"intimidating hard look," or that he had looked away in a
"suspicious" manner? As child abuse "experts" tell us, anything a
"suspect" does, is proof of his guilt.
As my wife observed, the man was probably on his way to
work. In any event, based on the child's own words, there was
no incident, just an hysterical child. Lord knows, children get
hysterical at times. But grownups are supposed to be … grown
up. It is our job to calm hysteria, not encourage it. Unfortunately,
the folks running my son's school were just as hysterical as the
child.
The child who reacted to me with paranoia does not even attend
my son's school. She gets out a half-hour earlier, presumably
from a nearby Catholic school. It seems that some parents from
my son's school not only drove their own kids nuts with the
hysterical, irresponsible letter, but showed it to their neighbors
who send their kids to the Catholic school, some of whom in turn
made their kids crazy.
My theory is that the precinct notified the school, so the child
wouldn't get in trouble for being late. So far, so good. The
school brass then broadcast the commotion out of fear that
otherwise a parent would find out about it, and sue them for
being guilty of insufficient hysteria. No can do. But since in
publicizing the child's name the school violated privacy
regulations, the child's family is virtually guaranteed to sue it. As
the mother of one of my son's classmates observed, the rest of
us will have to pay for that lawsuit.
Hysteria never helps.
I tried to get the local newspaper, The Wave, interested in the
story to no avail.
That same night, I brought up the matter at the local PTA
meeting, but didn't get very far there, either. The PTA is run by a
clique of school employees and perhaps a few parents, all of
whom are fanatically supportive of the schools' bosses.
Early in the meeting, the assistant principal who had sent home
the letter reported that the school works with children through
role-playing, to teach alternate methods of conflict resolution.
"The problem is not so much aggression as saying things like,
‘You're not a member of our club.'"
Until the over 90-minute meeting was almost over, only
administrators and "cliquies" whom the emcee called on by name
for reports on their respective spheres of influence got to speak.
Although the emcee was polite and eventually permitted me to
speak (due to my furious note-taking, she may have thought I
was a reporter from The Wave), a handful of the other 36
audience members clearly felt that I had no such right.
One such was a school employee who was angry at parents in
general. She complained about parents who come to parent
assemblies without "proper photo ID," "Don't put school staff
members in a position" of having to vouch for your identity.
(Why shouldn't a staffer be glad to vouch for the identity of a
parent from the neighborhood whose children have attended the
school for years? Staffers have turned an ID requirement meant
to keep weirdoes from wandering school halls, into a pretext for
harassing parents. As my mom always says, "A little power is a
dangerous thing.") Then the staffer complained about parents
who park their cars on one of the streets near the school, and
walk their children into the school building. She called on parents
to be more like taxi drivers, and stop in the school's vicinity,
open the car door, and let their kids hop out. It didn't occur to
me at the time, but she was complaining about my fellow pre-K
parents (none of whom I saw there), who walk their four-year-
olds into the building, to hand them off directly to their teacher –
as well they must!
To recap, according to the clique, parents must react hysterically
to baseless charges about imaginary incidents involving non-
existent child molesters, while cavalierly neglecting their children's
most fundamental safety needs.
The lead goon present said his name was Keith, and asked me
to "step outside" into the hall. Keith, who claimed all sorts of
grand titles, including PTA vice president, and apparently
graduated from the Mike Tyson School of Rhetoric, did
everything but bite my ear off. He kept putting his hands on me,
sticking his face within two inches of mine, and yelling at me to
let him talk, any time I disputed his loud, robotically repeated
charge that the NYPD has a "mechanism" for reporting
"incidents" that I'm not allowed to question, and that I only "feel"
that the matter was mishandled. When an hysterical child "feels"
something, all law goes out the window, but when I think
something, it means nothing.
Keith (who is at least six inches taller than me) was so out of
control that I had to grasp his shoulders and tell him, "Now, let's
back up. If you don't stop putting your hands on me, I'm going to
put my hands on you, and you're not going to like it."
The security guard working the meeting had accompanied us into
the hall, but rather than being there to keep things civil, she saw
her job as supporting Keith. After offering in vain several times,
"How about we just agree to disagree?," I had to walk away
from Keith and his bodyguard, back into the auditorium, in order
to prevent a real incident from occurring.
There is no "mechanism." Indeed, the NYPD appears to have
had nothing to do with the announcement. The security
supervisor is an NYPD employee, and while he did notify the
assistant principal of the "incident," it was the latter that had
screwed up by publicizing the matter, and the child's name.
For me, the lesson of the meeting was, don't go to the PTA
without a clique of your own to make the bullies mind their
manners. And if some poor son-of-a-gun should suffer a false
accusation, how much do you want to bet, that some of those
PTA bullies will lead the lynch mob?
How does terrorizing innocent men protect children?
You'd never know it from the foregoing, but my son's school is
head and shoulders above the region's other public schools,
which are racist and ultraviolent.
Some people specialize in using children to spread hysteria and
destroy the lives of grownups. During the 1980s, in high-profile
cases around the country, children were coached by grownups
(largely prosecutors, their investigators, and allied social
workers) into making false accusations of satanic sexual abuse
against, in particular, day-care and preschool personnel. Not one
iota of physical evidence supported lurid charges of rape,
sodomy, etc., against Virginia McMartin, Peggy McMartin Buckey,
and Raymond Buckey; Violet,
Cheryl, and Gerald Amirault; John Stoll; Margaret Kelly
Michaels (and
here); or
Grant Snowden, yet the public was told by hysterical
activists, parents, "experts" and prosecutors, "Listen to the
children!" Some parents even wore "We Believe the Children"
buttons.
Each of the above-named people spent years in prison without
any crime having been committed … save for malicious
prosecution.
When you encourage children to be hysterical towards all
strange men, you do not "err on the side of caution." Rather, you
confuse them into overreacting to non-threats, leaving them lost
in the face of real ones. And legal protections of the accused,
like the presumption of innocence, will always be the second
casualties of such hysteria – after the truth.
And things have gotten worse since the 1980s. Back then, a
child still had to accuse an adult of a real crime, before the latter
could be persecuted. Now, apparently, all a child has to say is
that a man makes her feel "intimidated." But it's all "for the
children."
Some locals might seek to rationalize the hysterics, by noting that
a man from Brooklyn was found cruising around the Rockaways
in a car full of children's toys a few weeks ago. Police stopped
the man. When they determined that he didn't know anyone
around here, they had him remanded to a psych ward. But that
little drama was no excuse for turning children into psychiatric
patients at the sight of a smiling man on the street.
During the 1980s' mass hysteria, some observers noted that
many parents felt guilty about handing over their children to
strangers in day care centers. That guilt commingled with a
related development, in which government increasingly
aggrandized legal power over children. But children have not
been served well by state "parenting." Instead, we have dead
children as before, but now with the routine violation of adults'
legal protections.
There's a darkly comical side to this story that the New York
papers will never touch. The area (including the schools) where
the little girl was walking, in Far Rockaway, is one of the most
violent in America. She lives miles outside of the district where
she attends school. As a mother who didn't come to the PTA
meeting noted, the child would have to have received a variance
to go to such a distant school, likely via No Child Left Behind. In
the area where the girl suffered the non-incident, half the males
above the age of eight are violent felons, and yet, the police are
ready to arrest a man for walking behind a little girl and smiling at
her?!
Indeed, I met my future wife around the corner from where that
little girl ran for help. We both lived in "Far Rock" in those days.
I used to hear gunfire on the street two or three nights a week;
where my wife lived, she heard it every night.
I know someone who as a little girl grew up in a rough place, yet
did not require hospitalization every time a strange man smiled at
her. Then one day, when she was a teenager, a violent criminal
tried to force himself on her younger sister. She punched the man
in the face with all her might, and ran with her younger sibling to
safety. Because she was not distracted and confused by
imaginary demons, she could focus on real ones. That older
sister is my hero; she's also my wife.
Nicholas Stix can be reached at Add1dda@aol.com.
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