8,000,000 children go missing each year around the world and 800,000 of those are in the United States alone. Correspondingly so, 18 children go missing in Ireland every day, with over 50,000 of them missing in the last ten years.
Sinead Moriarty
To put this on a more personal perspective, I lived in New York for ten years. My mornings there usually consisted of milk. Within a family of five, that was usually at least two to three litres a day. On those revolving and changing cartons of milk every week, were the photos of bright and innocent faces of children that went missing every month and for many years. Behind those faces were the invisible ones that tracked the trail of tears from the bereft and inconsolable parents of those children who would never make it home, ever. For some parents, the knowledge of their child’s death would have been easier to live with that the imaginings of the horrors that might have befallen them if they had lived, even for a short while, under the hands of a paedophile or murderer.
The attached photograph (above) from Sinead's article shows two children around ten or eleven years old walking alone in the woods.
I write all this to remind us to be on guard against the dangerous musings of Sinead Moriarty, who headlined her advice in the Irish Independent on how to protect children: ‘Parents are playing it too safe with their children’ just two days ago.
Her narrow unknown research on this matter did not include the above statistics, which claimed that Irish parents are over protective and are stunting their children's development by not allowing them to have more independence when they are out and about. The world has changed if it has not always been the same and Sinead needs to change with it. This is part of the narrative in her piece that gives a glimpse of the world she lives in presently, albeit an Alice in wonderland one:
....“This boy (who had an over protective father) grew up to be someone who is extremely independent and makes friends easily. Granted, he could have been beaten up, flashed at or just ignored for the afternoon, but it all worked out well. As a parent I can't even begin to imagine doing this in the Ireland we live in today. I'd be terrified of paedophiles lurking in the bushes, kidnappers waiting to whisk my child away or bullies hunting for new prey. It’s ridiculous. The chances of any of these things happening are almost non-existent…"
Later in the article she slipped a bit by admitting that flashers were the ones to avoid in her local park and even witnessed a few, yet in her innocence, considered them harmless enough, while piling on more of that wide eyed naive world view of hers by declaring that children are now paranoid by the ‘bad person’ in a white van attempting to kidnap them as taught by their parents.
The next day, after this highly ignorant article was published, in a small village in Cork in Ireland a ‘bad person’ did pull up, not in a white van but in a stolen jeep, alongside a eleven year old girl and tried to kidnap her. The quick thinking of her ten year old brother saved her.
Whatever the future holds for Sinead, who is also a mother, she will not get the mother or the babysitter of the year award while she still has those doe-eyed views of hers. And if she has a future as a scribe, it needs to be backed up by real research and not dangerous mis-information.
Then again, we are talking about the Irish Independent and their particular brand of reporting and what they allow to be reported.
Barry Clifford
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