One of the things that has haunted me as a parent is the 1989 abduction of Jacob Wetterling.
The Logical Husband and I lived in Wisconsin at the time and police all over the upper Midwest were looking for him and there were daily pleas on the news asking for people to look for Jacob (this was LONG before we had Amber Alerts). It is one of those situations that I look at and I marvel at how the parents could survive it. The fact that Jacob's parents (Jerry & Patty Wetterling) turned their tragedy into a cause to help missing and abused children astonishes me. It didn't take a rocket scientist to put two and two together after the abduction and rescue of Ben Ownby and Shawn Hornbeck.
Well now police are looking at Michael Devlin's past to see if there is any way to tie him to Jacob. On one hand, I hope he is the one - it would give the Wetterlings the closure they deserve. On the other, I highly doubt that Devlin was the one. I have nothing to base that on other than a parents gut instinct.The first exposure to this type of horror was when I was a teen-ager growning up in Chicago. The story of John Wayne Gacy stunned the City of Chicago. Here was this "nice guy" - a man who loved to entertain children - a quiet man who never gave the neighbors a minutes grief, who had 33 bodies buried in his basement. You hear it every time another one is exposed - he was a quiet, well mannered, "nice" guy who the neighbors are surprised to hear was a serial killer/molestor.Linda Chavez writes about the newest "nice guy" or in this case "nice family" to be caught. This "nice family" was a family of child molestors! In her piece she asks:"Sure there have always been child predators out there, preying on the innocent, destroying lives, but does anyone doubt that there are more of them today than in the past? And do we ever ask ourselves why that might be? What is it about our modern society that makes grown men want to seek sexual gratification from children? And why do we make it so easy for them to do so? "
I think the best answer came from one of her commenters:"After thirty to forty years of the schools teaching "there is no right or wrong," of parents abdicating their role to those same schools, or uneducated nannies who can't speak English, of television programming becoming more and more purient, and laws becoming more and more lenient, is it any mystery that there are more deviants out there in society?"
The commenter is partly correct. Many parents HAVE abdicated their parental duties to schools. However, we should not be expecting the schools to teach our kids right and wrong. That is the parents job! And if the school does decide that they are going to teach otherwise, it is the parents job to go to that school and demand that they stop! Schools need to stick to teaching the 3 Rs - reading, writing and arithmatic. Leave the morality lessons to the parents and to the churches. That is their job.It is also my job, as a parent, to make sure that the Junior Logician knows what to do when a stranger approaches him. I make sure that I tell him frequently and ignore when he says "I know Mom" because I know that repetition is the only way I can be sure that the lessons are being absorbed.Labels: Crime
