What Can Parents Learn From the Dugard Ordeal?Jaycee Dugard's tale will be seared in our memories forever. Unfortunately, so will the ridiculous advice we're getting now on how to avoid this same fate — advice that makes it seem as if abduction/rape/enslavement is something we just have to be ever-prepared for, like the possibility of overcharges on our credit card bills. Dugard, as you undoubtedly know, was kidnapped 18 years ago at age 11 and kept imprisoned since then, bearing her rapist/captor two daughters, who also were imprisoned until just recently, when Jaycee walked into a police station. This is, of course, every parent's — every human's — worst nightmare. So naturally, our first instinct is to think, "How can I make absolutely sure this never happens to MY child?" But as Trevor Butterworth, an editor at the think tank STATS, points out: Preparing for very unlikely events is impossible. It's like preparing for the possiblity of being hit by a frozen turkey through the car window while you're driving on the expressway. Yes, that is something that really happened, at least once. But should you live your life on the constant lookout for flying turkeys? That would be inconvenient, if not insane, because what could you do? Never drive on the expressway again? Avoid all overpasses? Get your car window replaced with lead? Sure, you couldn't see through it, but at least you'd be protected from frozen airborne Butterballs! One post-Dugard advice article, on a Web site called Associated Content, earnestly suggested that from now on, we simply "never go anywhere alone." That's not asking too much, is it? Alas, this kind of over-the-top suggestion leads to over-the-top situations, such as parents' getting picked up by the police for letting their 10-year-old walk solo to soccer, for having their 9-year-old wait in the car while they ran inside the pharmacy, etc. These are real stories, brought to us by a society increasingly convinced that any moment a child is left alone easily could be his last.
From now on, that kind of comment could well be coupled with, "Look what happened to Jaycee Dugard!" Even a Washington Post columnist, Petula Dvorak, admitted the specter of Dugard's ordeal will "haunt" her when her boys begin to ask her whether "they can walk to school, play ball in the park or go take a bike ride." Maybe it will, but it shouldn't, if she wants to raise boys who are not paralyzed with paranoia. The chances of any child being kidnapped by a stranger remain, thank God, outlandishly low. In fact, if you WANTED your child to be kidnapped, do you know how long you'd have to keep him or her outside, unattended, for this to be statistically LIKELY to happen? It's 750,000 years, says British statistician and author Warwick Cairns. So let's try to keep some perspective. "It's sad our children have to grow up in a world where they have to worry about people like Craig Garrido and Nancy Garrido," wrote the Associated Content columnist. "All we can do is learn from this tragedy." No, I'm afraid, we cannot. Law enforcement officials may be able to learn a thing or two. They may learn to follow up better on missed parole visits. They may learn to pare down the list of sex offenders from the 674,000 in California to the ones who truly pose risks so they can concentrate their resources on rapists instead of on guys who peed in public or had sex at 19 with a girlfriend a few years underage. But there is no lesson to be learned from Dugard's ordeal except that sometimes, terrible things happen to innocent people, randomly. In our blame-, lawsuit- and silly advice-obsessed country, it's a lesson we find hard to accept. Lenore Skenazy is the author of "Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry." To find out more about Lenore Skenazy (lskenazy@yahoo.com) and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS.COM
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