| Keeping Kids Safe — and Yourself Sane |
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Why sometimes it's a good thing for children to talk to strangers It all started innocently enough. My 5-year-old son wanted to know why I had stopped to talk to the woman who was heading into Starbucks with her kids just as we were leaving. “Do you know them?” Nope, I said; just being friendly. Then he made a face like an airport security agent who had discovered my name on the no-fly list. “Daddy, don’t you know it’s never okay to talk to strangers?” Oh, yes. Every kid knows, because every kid is told, that Strangers are bad news. What I didn’t know was that my son had already incorporated this truism as rock-solid fact. I also didn’t know what to tell him just then about real dangers in the real world. My momentary sense of insufficiency was amplified by the fact that, barely an hour earlier, the front page had featured horrific photos of the recent three-day assault on a southern Russian school that killed at least 326 students, teachers and parents and wounded more than 700 others. As I hurriedly trashed the paper so he wouldn’t see the carnage, my mind decided to start reminding me that next week my kid would enter a strange new world called public school kindergarten. As I later watched him swimming delightedly with friends, I realized that a deep pool filled with water is a considerably greater hazard than faceless prospective kidnappers. These kids had learned to navigate water safely by first learning the rules and practicing until they showed their parents they knew what to do and could be trusted to do it. Their body-minds had somehow transformed information about swimming, into knowledge of swimming, into swimming itself. By the same token, we’ve all met people who seem remarkably adept at knowing which side of a city block is safer; which approaching person’s actions are threatening; which inner doubts and hesitations deserve a moment’s consideration. What do these street sages know that the rest of us don’t? Wrong question, says Gavin de Becker. When it comes to predicting violence and protecting kids, he says we already know what we need to know. “The brain built for protecting our children was field-tested for millions of years in the wild,” says de Becker, one of the America’s foremost authorities on the prediction and management of violence. “This natural ability is deep, brilliant, and powerful. Nature’s greatest accomplishment, the human brain, is stunningly efficient when its host is at risk, but when one’s child is at risk, it moves to a whole new level, one we can justifiably call miraculous.” De Becker, based in Santa Barbara, is designer of the MOSAIC threat assessment systems used to screen threats to justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, members of Congress, and senior officials of the CIA. Along with the U.S. Marshals Service, he co-designed the MOSAIC system currently used for assessing all threats to Federal Judges and prosecutors. Author of the bestselling book Protecting the Gift, de Becker maintains that the first task of empowering children in the face of danger is for parents and caregivers to stop looking for certainty outside themselves, and learn to listen to internal warnings while they are still whispers. “When the principal tells us our concerns are baseless, when the other parents insist there’s no problem, when we’re assured that the school-bus driver is a good guy, when the baby-sitter seems great to everyone else, our hesitation may be the only thing that stands between us and a fraudulent feeling of certainty,” de Becker says. “Safety starts with knowing that your intuition about people is a brilliant guardian. Listening to intuition really means listening to yourself. Like everyone, you’ve had scores of experiences when you listened and were later grateful, and scores of experiences when you chose not to listen and were later regretful. I can’t say it any more clearly than this: To protect your child, you must believe in yourself.” Much of what we’ve been taught about child-safety is actually counterproductive, de Becker continues. “Ironically, the never-talk-to-strangers rule actually reduces safety because children raised to assume all strangers might be dangerous don’t develop their own inherent skills of evaluating behavior. If your child is ever lost in public, the ability to talk to strangers is actually the single greatest asset he or she could have. To seek assistance, to describe one’s situation, to give a phone number, to ask advice, to say no – all these interactions require the child to talk to strangers. For every person you encounter who might hurt your child, there are literally millions who will not. Does it make sense to treat everyone as if they are in the dangerous group?” Ninety percent of sexual abuse is committed not by strangers but by someone a child knows, and seventy-eight percent of child abductions are committed by family members. So “the issue isn’t strangers versus acquaintances,” de Becker says. “It is people who might harm your child versus people who won’t, people who deserve your trust versus people who don’t.” * * * * “People who deserve your trust.” This phrase rings in my mind as I walk onto the campus of Petaluma High School in the wine country of northern California. I’ve chosen this school because Polly Klaas probably would have attended Petaluma High. When she was kidnapped at knifepoint from her bedroom on October 1, 1993, the community of Petaluma responded with an unprecedented effort to find her. Thousands of volunteers joined in what became an international search for the missing 12 year-old. Assistant Principal Jake Colburn has agreed to answer some of the unspoken questions that de Becker says many parents think about but hesitate to ask, because, de Becker adds, “schools are highly regulated by government, we were safe in school, no need to worry.” These queries are at the top of my list: Is the safety of students addressed in the policy manual or teacher’s handbook? Are there policies addressing violence, weapons, drug use, sexual abuse, child-on-child sexual abuse, unauthorized visitors? Are background investigations performed on all staff? If my kid is missing from class, will administrators notify me? Can my child call me at any time? May I visit my child at any time? How does the school address special situations like custody disputes and child kidnapping concerns? Are acts of violence and criminality at the school documented? Is there control over who can enter the grounds? Yes. That’s Colburn’s consistent answer. Far from finding the questions off-putting, he says these kinds of issues are on his mind every day. “Background checks are now standard procedure, not just for students but all personnel. The risks are simply too great not to learn everything we can about the people who are in close contact with our kids for so many hours every week.” When a student accused a substitute teacher of sexual impropriety a while back, Colburn notes, the teacher was removed from contact with students and an investigation began involving education officials from outside the school itself. But were parents were notified of the accusation? “You bet – there’s no reasonable alternative,” Colburn says. He agrees that school officials all over the country sat up and took notice when the media reported that the notorious Columbine shooters had given clear advance they intended to make trouble. “There’s no going back.” Ever since Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold deployed their murderous, suicidal offensive, school officials across the country have been scrambling to figure out how to prevent it from happening again. In the name of safety and deterrence, security guards have been posted, surveillance cameras have been installed, and violence prevention programs have been implemented at public schools throughout the nation. And there you begin to understand the bind that administrators like Jake Colburn find themselves in. On the one hand, the Justice Department's Annual Report on School Safety for 1999 says kids have less than one in a million chance of being killed at school. Still, it’s hard to dismiss parents’ fears as unfounded, when, for instance, two Tuolumne, California 17-year-old boys were arrested for planning to storm their high school and kill students and teachers on the first anniversary of the Columbine massacre. One of the most controversial solutions is de Becker’s software program called Mosaic, a threat assessment method originally created to screen threats to public figures. It’s an interactive system that breaks down a threat situation to its elements, then organizes and identifies the most important factors. The program consists of a series of 40 questions that have not been revealed to the public, but are said to include questions like: Has the child threatened to harm others or himself? Has he exhibited cruelty to animals? Does he have access to a gun at home? Some school administrators hope the software will help them pick out a Klebold or a Harris before he goes on a rampage. But critics fear the program has potential for abuse, and say it wouldn't work, anyway. Kevin Dwyer, past president of the National Association of School Psychologists, says even if the research behind the program is found to be rigorous, there’s still the question of whether the people who use the program probably have suitable training and experience. "My concern about any system is who is using it, and what their qualifications are," he says. "Who makes a judgment whether or not a kid is depressed? That's a medical diagnosis. It does not make a lot of sense to leave this to the judgment of an administrator or a police officer." Ken Trump, who runs a school safety assessment business in Ohio, believes the best way to prevent violence is simply to know the child. "If Johnny comes in acting weird on Friday, you have to know what's normal for Johnny on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday," he says. * * * Students are capable of resolving a lot of their own problems if we are willing to trust them to try, Colburn says. “We’ve got a required class called Human Interactions, where students explore a wide range of issues dealing with respect, personal dignity, bullying, sexual harassment, clear communication about expectations and feelings. Each year we also train a certain number of interested students in conflict management skills, and these students sit with aggrieved parties and help work out solutions. It’s great to see students reaching difficult understandings that go beyond impasses and prepare them to take an active role in social issues outside of school.” Mary Jane Burke, Marin County Superintendent of Schools, puts much of her own faith in prevention. “In the wake of Columbine, we have felt the need to pay close attention to threat assessment at numerous levels. There’s the obvious dimension of physical safety, yet school counselors also regularly deal with complex family, social and emotional problems. Students need to feel they matter, that they’ll have a chance to contribute their best and be challenged by schools that expect the best of them.” Burke points to evidence that when dedicated adults serve as mentors to kids, positive results include reduced school dropout rates, drug and alcohol abuse, and gang participation. “Too many kids wake up each day in California without a caring person there to say, ‘I hold high aspirations for you.’ It might be a neighbor or family friend, or at school it could be the crossing guard or the custodian. It’s about chemistry, it’s about commitment, it’s about knowing that an older person genuinely cares about you achieving your highest and your best.” Our biggest challenge is a family one, says de Becker, involving the larger family, the social family. “Victimization will continue until that family takes an entirely different view of children, not as temporary visitors who will someday grow into citizens, but as full-fledged, fully contributing, fully entitled members of our society, just as they are right now.” * * * The Test of Twelve: Do your children know... 1. How to honor their feelings - if someone makes them uncomfortable, that's an important signal; 2. You (the parents) are strong enough to hear about any experience they've had, no matter how unpleasant; 3. It's okay to rebuff and defy adults; 4. It's okay to be assertive; 5. How to ask for assistance or help; 6. How to chose who to ask; 7. How to describe their peril; 8. It's okay to strike, even to injure, someone if they believe they are in danger, and that you'll support any action they take as a result of feeling uncomfortable or afraid; 9. It's okay to make noise, to scream, to yell, to run; 10. If someone ever tries to force them to go somewhere, what they scream should include, "This is not my father (or mother)" (because onlookers seeing a child scream or even struggle are likely to assume the adult is a parent); 11. If someone says "Don't yell," the thing to do is yell, (and the corollary: If someone says "Don't tell," the thing to do is tell); 12. To fully resist ever going anywhere out of public view with someone they don't know, and particularly resist going anywhere with someone who tries to persuade them. —from Protecting the Gift by Gavin de Becker * * * A Parent’s Worst Nightmare: “My Child is Gone” When Glena Record’s daughter was five, she went missing. Glena was cleaning the garage while her daughter did art projects at the dining room table just inside. Although the door swung shut between them as she went in and out with boxes and brooms, Glena chatted with her every few minutes as she came through. “And then on one of my trips in she wasn’t there,” Glena recalls. “I assumed she’d gone to the bathroom or to get more art supplies. On the next trip a few minutes later she hadn’t come back, but I still didn’t worry. She’s upstairs in her room, I thought, and I blessed whatever was occupying her so that I could finish my work.” Finally, when Glena hadn’t seen her daughter for twenty minutes, she went looking for her. She wasn’t there. She wasn’t anywhere. Glena couldn’t imagine what had happened. The backyard was completely enclosed – no way out there. The garage door where she worked was open to the street. If she had gone out the front, Glena would have seen her. She knew the rules about checking first before going somewhere, and about not crossing streets on her own. She had always been reliable about following them. Until now. “A flood of awful possibilities swamped me. I panicked, and didn’t do what I should have done, which was to call 9-1-1 right away. Instead, I searched for her in wider circles around the neighborhood. I even walked up the block to the back pathway to the elementary school, but the playing fields were deserted.” Glena recruited the one neighbor who was home and desperately kept looking. They agreed to take one more look up at the school, and if they couldn’t find her then, they call 9-1-1. And there she was. Exhausted, stumping home across the damp fields in her red boots, her sky-blue coat on and its pink heart buttons buttoned (she’d followed the rules about coats and boots on rainy days). “I was so relieved to see her that, most fortunately, I didn’t yell. I scooped her up and took her home and fed both of us a snack. But even as she revived, I found that my panic did not recede. I thought we’d had the bases covered. She had been taught and had shown that she knew and followed safety rules, but clearly it wasn’t enough. I needed to know what had gone wrong so that I could make sure something like this would never happen again.” Her daughter’s explanation made no sense, so finally Glena asked her to show her where she had gone and to tell her what she had been thinking all along the way. And this is the story Glena pieced together. “She had looked into the garage and hadn’t seen me. She thought that I had gone to her friend Emily’s house because Emily’s mom and I were also friends. There was no one at home to check with, so she put on her coat and boots and set out to find me. She walked up two long blocks and around the corner, past another friend’s house, and up to the corner of the busy cross street. She knew she shouldn’t cross the busy street, so she decided to go home. But when she turned around, the street she had just come up didn’t look familiar. She didn’t recognize the friend’s house even though she had just passed it. “So she tried to get home another way, by crossing the side street and heading east. Eventually, that way didn’t look familiar, either, so she turned around, and found her way back to the corner of the busy street. Lost, she had to figure out what to do. She finally thought that if she could head west and follow the way we went in the car to go to school, she could then get home by crossing the playing fields and coming down the shortcut that let out near our house. And so she went the long way around. When I found her at the end of her journey, she was very tired, but quite matter-of-fact about her adventure. ‘I had a problem, and I solved it,’ seemed to be her attitude.” Glena wanted to support her daughter’s sense of accomplishment, and wanted to avoid sharing the panic she was still feeling. So she tried to be as matter-of-fact as she reviewed the rules with her, and added new ones to cover the new contingencies:
“We can’t be with our children every minute,” says Glena, who today works as manager of education and development at the Polly Klaas Foundation. “There’s always the possibility that because of miscommunication, accidents, or just plain chance, children will need to make safety decisions on their own. They must know what to do. Not with dire warnings, but very matter-of-factly, in the same way we teach kids about crossing the street. It’s just something else to add to the other safety practices we teach children as they grow up. And like all other safety training, it will take time, repetition and lots of practice.” When a child is missing: Don’t wait.
If your child isn’t found quickly, call a missing child organization like the Polly Klaas Foundation (1-800-587-4357) for guidance in what to do next. And here’s some good news: 99.8 percent of missing children make it back home – including kidnapped kids. |