Congratulations to the Daily Telegraph for not opening up the comments on this tragic story of a NSW mother whose toddler died last week when she left him in the car.
It would’ve been gold for hits – prodding as it does parents’ deepest fears, and the consequent desperate need to believe that the parent whose child is dead was evil, callous, stupid… anything to make them different from me… this could never happen to me… It would’ve run all day, hit after hit, with hundreds of readers fired up and pontificating to reassure themselves. They’d undoubtedly have received hundreds of comments like these (from an unrelated but similar tragedy):
ArmyWife8297 on May 23, 2011 at 11:52 AM
how do you forget your child? i dont care if your busy with grocerys you get the kids out first then you get your stuff, some people should not breed, these people are careless and should be punished, they can sit in jail for the rest of there lifes worthless parents
And the Daily Telegraph declined to do that. Kudos.
Kudos because this is one particular sort of tragedy where those types of comments actually endanger kids. The more the commenters find to attack the parent of the dead child, the less motivated the reader is to try to put something in place to reduce the risk. Those comments reassure parents that they don’t have to worry, that it would never happen to them, that so long as they’re not horrible criminal scum they and their kids will be safe.
Which is, sadly, not the case at all, as this devastating (Pulitzer-winning) Washington Post story from 2009 reveals:
What kind of person forgets a baby?
The wealthy do, it turns out. And the poor, and the middle class. Parents of all ages and ethnicities do it. Mothers are just as likely to do it as fathers. It happens to the chronically absent-minded and to the fanatically organized, to the college-educated and to the marginally literate. In the last 10 years, it has happened to a dentist. A postal clerk. A social worker. A police officer. An accountant. A soldier. A paralegal. An electrician. A Protestant clergyman. A rabbinical student. A nurse. A construction worker. An assistant principal. It happened to a mental health counselor, a college professor and a pizza chef. It happened to a pediatrician. It happened to a rocket scientist.
Last year it happened three times in one day, the worst day so far in the worst year so far in a phenomenon that gives no sign of abating.
The facts in each case differ a little, but always there is the terrible moment when the parent realizes what he or she has done, often through a phone call from a spouse or caregiver. This is followed by a frantic sprint to the car. What awaits there is the worst thing in the world… So it would probably be more useful for the police to be giving more useful warnings than the only one quoted in the Tele:
“It’s really a tragedy, I don’t know how many times we have issued warnings to people about the danger of leaving children unattended in a motor vehicle,” [Superintendent Wright] said.
You might do that, but the problem is that people assume it won’t happen to them. That they’re good parents and so their child is safe. But, as we’ve seen, that confidence may well be misplaced.
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/purepoison/2011/10/27/a-tragedy-where-sanctimonious-c...
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