190. Trick, treat & privatize
It's a good bet your local paper and evening news will have "Safety tips for Halloween." Here's the word from Detroit, America's no. 2 city in crime as well as baseball:
• Stop only at familiar houses in your own neighborhood unless they are accompanied by an adult.
• Instruct your children not to eat any treats until they bring them home to be examined by you
• Instruct your child to never go into the home of a stranger or get into their car.
This isn't just a crotchet of the big cities. The Thomasville Times ("Serving the City of Roses and Surrounding Areas Since 1921!") provides its own set of tips for rural Alabama kids. The Alabama paper, at least, puts more emphasis on the responsibility of adults, as perhaps befits a paper published just down the road from Harper Lee's Monroeville.
(However, the Thomasville Times also runs perhaps the creepiest internet ad I've seen yet: "We Help to Cure Child Behavior / Helping parents make their child easy and cooperative. / radconsultancy.com". Child behavior needs to be cured??)
The Illinois state government issues its own set of Halloween safety tips, and something called the Ohio Crime Prevention Council advises parents to "report any suspicious activity to police, even if it appears to be just be some mischievous, older kids".
Yes, it's that time of year again, the one day of the year when the privatization of law enforcement crawls out from behind the platitudes and legalisms. When the kids put on their masks, the mask drops from our country's bizarre experiment in privatizing law enforcement. These well-intentioned tips reveal that the primary responsibility for ensuring the safety of society's most vulnerable citizens falls squarely on their own shoulders - and, in the case of small children, those of their parents, as well.
The safety tips are a measure of how normal violence against children has become. The Ohio group says: "This is the time of year kids tend to jump on the smaller kids and take their candy, no matter what neighborhood you're from." While of course the group is deploring it, they are also saying that in American society it is expected. Whether or not it's acceptable, it's accepted.
Privatization of government services is universally understood to be a conservative movement when the services in question are anything except protection against violence. But when the social interest involved is the physical safety of people demographically unlike the speaker, privatization becomes, through a miracle of political prestidigitation wholly appropriate to All Hallows Eve, sublimely progressive.
Joel Jacobsen
in Privatization of law enforcement
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The Centers for Disease Control once wrote a nice summary of the danger to children during Halloween (the number of kids hits by motorists is four times a normal night). The CDC wrote about the limits of child development, which makes them vulnerable to motorists (e.g. they can't tell where sounds come from; the don't understand perspective, fearing a big truck far away more than a small car nearby; etc.)
Nonetheless, after all this good scientific discussion on why we can't expect children to watch out for motorists, they publish 10 Safety Tips, 8 of which focus on child behavior. Only 1 discussed adults (Slow Down). And, of course, those Safety Tips were what the newspapers published.
Those Safety Tips, like the Detroit publishes, sound so kind and caring, and well-intentioned. But they are not.