{"id":43,"date":"2007-05-29T21:36:32","date_gmt":"2007-05-29T21:36:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sentrylink.com\/blog\/2007\/05\/29\/a-dangerous-world\/"},"modified":"2014-08-19T22:32:32","modified_gmt":"2014-08-19T22:32:32","slug":"a-dangerous-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sentrylink.com\/blog\/2007\/05\/29\/a-dangerous-world\/","title":{"rendered":"A dangerous world"},"content":{"rendered":"

Like many parents, I have followed the story of Madeleine McCann<\/a> with strong emotions. For the very few of you who are not familiar with the tale, a brief recap: Four year-old Madeleine visited a resort town in Portugal with her parents and one year-old twin siblings. On May 3 her parents went to dinner with friends at a restaurant 100 yards away, from which their apartment was at least partly visible<\/a>, but they left the children alone. (The resort facility, at Praia de Luz, offers babysitting and day care but the McCanns did not use these options.) The door to the apartment was probably unlocked. Every thirty minutes a parent would come back to check on the children. At 10PM, they discovered that Madeleine was missing from her bed. She is still missing.<\/p>\n

The story has received worldwide media attention. Why does it affect us so? As tragic as the story is, dozens of children are lost every day. Part of it, no doubt, has to do with the behavior of the parents. In America at least, deliberately leaving children so young unattended is not generally accepted — in some states it is illegal<\/a>. But almost everyone leaves a child alone in their own bedroom at night, and what if something were to happen? As a parent, you watch your young ones like a hawk, but somewhere in the back of your mind there is a calculation that the odds of something actually happening are minor, and there is little reason to torture yourself over it. Then a story like this comes along and suddenly the bogeyman springs to life again.<\/p>\n

In one sense, however, the internal calculation is right. The largest risk of abuse to children comes from people who know them, rather than outsiders. In addition to keeping watch on our children, we need to be aware of who they are spending time with. There is a free national sex offender registry<\/a> that every parent should use.
\n(Note to Google: It would be helpful if this free and authoritative resource were easier to find in a standard web search — but it is nearly drowned out by pay sites.)<\/p>\n

I hope this story will have a happy ending. There are precedents for it. Elizabeth Smart<\/a> came home safely after a far longer time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Like many parents, I have followed the story of Madeleine McCann with strong emotions. For the very few of you who are not familiar with the tale, a brief recap: Four year-old Madeleine visited a resort town in Portugal with her parents and one year-old twin siblings. On May 3 her parents went to dinner with friends at a restaurant 100 yards away, from which their apartment was at least partly visible, but they left the children alone. (The resort facility, at Praia de Luz, offers babysitting and day care but the McCanns did not use these options.) The door to the apartment was probably unlocked. Every thirty minutes a parent would come back to check on the children. At 10PM, they discovered that Madeleine was missing from her bed. She is still missing. The story has received worldwide media attention. Why does it affect us so? As tragic as the story is, dozens of children are lost every day. Part of it, no doubt, has to do with the behavior of the parents. In America at least, deliberately leaving children so young unattended is not generally accepted — in some states it is illegal. But almost everyone leaves a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-criminal-checks","category-law-enforcement"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sentrylink.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sentrylink.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sentrylink.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sentrylink.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sentrylink.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.sentrylink.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":301,"href":"https:\/\/www.sentrylink.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43\/revisions\/301"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sentrylink.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sentrylink.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sentrylink.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}