Have you ever gone to a playground without a kid? Perhaps as a playful evening date, pushing each other on the swings? Or as a parent-to-be, watching and thinking about how to manage squabbles between children? Or as a single parent looking to meet other parents, but without your kid in tow that day? Or just pausing on a walk to enjoy the sight and sound of joyful children playing?
No more. At least not in Central Park. Because, you know, you might be a child molestor.
Dr. Marty Klein, a relationship counselor, international trainer of counselors, and never one to shrink from a controversial position, is the one who noticed this, and he rips into the illogic of it with characteristic vigor, arguing that while it's hard to imagine how this could actually make kids safer, it sure does fuel the atmosphere of overblown panic over putative "sexual predators" lurking behind every bush. He notes that such an atmosphere not only makes people generally feel less safe, but creates fertile ground for policies that both kill notions of due process and restrict perfectly healthy expressions of adult sexuality.
I'd add that it also leads to children growing up in such a fearful world with such terrified parents that they never experience freedom or learn to be independent and take calculated risks, a world where they are driven even short distances to school because it would be "dangerous" for them to walk, even though the biggest risk for a kid on the way to school these days is where they dart across several lanes of traffic from the car to the school door. Not to mention obesity.
Stranger molestation is awful, but unlike molestation by family members or family friends, it's super, super, super rare. I agree with Dr. Klein: our obsession with it is creepy and not likely to be making anyone safer.
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