The toddler had an accident in the McDonald’s play area. No problem, it happens. His dad scooped up him and his sister and went to the bathroom to deal with it. He took the boy into the stall and told the girl to wait just outside the door.
A man in the stall right next to him saw an opportunity and silently persuaded the little girl to come toward him. When she got close, he snatched her up into his stall and locked her in. The attack took less than ten seconds.
At a different McDonald’s playground a four-year-old girl needed to go potty. The childcare worker watched her go into the locking, single-occupant lavatory. When the worker noticed she was taking too long she went to check on her. She knocked. The door opened and a man walked out. It had only taken a few minutes.
Two children’s lives forever changed in less time than it took you to read about it. Physical and psychological trauma inflicted to a degree that’s hard to comprehend because monsters lurk, and those in charge of protecting the children didn’t know what to look for. Do you?
If you search “child raped in bathroom” you can easily spend an entire afternoon cataloging even worse examples. These children survived, but many don’t. Study the astronomical influx of incidents of trans men or boys assaulting and exposing themselves over the last few years and you’ll quickly want to punch somebody. And it’s not just the perpetrators who deserve it, but their enablers.
That issue may new, but the reality of evil predators is not.
Ask my daughters and they’ll tell you they’ve known to watch out for “bad people” ever since they were young. They never used a public bathroom without a parent beside them, even at church. They were escorted to and from events, they don’t do sleepovers, and when they strolled down the street to a part-time job, an alert and trained brother went with them. We watch each other’s backs and ward off the wolves.
This isn’t only because we live in Alaska, the violent crime capital of the U.S.A. No, we would have the same standard anywhere, because evil people are everywhere, and it only takes seconds for them to have their way.
My wife and I are Gen Xers. Our generation did whatever the heck it wanted, and our parents rarely checked in – not in Los Angeles where I grew up, nor in Alaska where my wife did. We witnessed darkness and learned to deal with it. We watched and read about a lot of it. And we went to college and studied it – violent crime, serial murders, psychopathology and criminology. I spent time in the jails interviewing perpetrators and worked with those investigating them. Shannon worked in juvenile facilities trying to rehabilitate them, sometimes with violent sex offenders who let her know what they thought of her.
We knew, probably better than most of the people in our social circles (then and now) that some very bad people are all around us, hidden in plain sight, and that if you’re not vigilant they can and will spring. And it can happen in the blink of an eye.
When Shannon and I were justice majors in college we’d play a game I dubbed “spot the pedophile.” Whenever we were in a public place with children – a mall, a playground, the skating rink, a movie theater, etc.. – we’d case the area looking for the guy. And it’s almost always a guy, by the way; evil women have a different modus operandi.
We’d look for a lone male on the periphery. He could be young or old, age matters little. He’d be watching, always watching. In those days he’d sometimes have a camera or camcorder, nowadays he pretends to be using his phone but he’s really recording. He’d show up at church picnics, the guy nobody recognized. He’d be at kids’ movies, high school sporting events, the beach, and you could identify him by what he stared at. He’d watch the children. He’d hang around the bathrooms, the parking lots, and fast-food joints, waiting, always waiting for an opportunity. If none presented itself, he’d take his pictures and be on his way. Until pictures no longer satisfied his perversion, because these demons are always seeking to up the excitement level.
If you made eye contact with him, he’d leave, because he’s also a coward. If he gets his snatch, he wants to be gone forever before anyone even knows what happened. He wants an easy target, and there are plenty of them around.
Seven-year-old Sherrice Iverson ran into an arcade women’s room. Nobody knows why, we only have the surveillance tape to go on. Eighteen-year-old Jeremy Strohmeyer casually entered after her. Several hours later she was found raped and murdered in the stall. Multiple people had opportunity to intervene but weren’t paying attention to the little girl being stalked by a monster.
They’re out there. Right now, as I write this, a guy is watching a little girl at a park. A man is buying a burger at McDonalds and pretending to be there for the food. A trans kid is trying to get a classmate to join he/she/it into the “gender neutral” bathroom of a school that doesn’t care about children’s safety. But pedophiles don’t merely exploit lazy parents and foolish schools with idiotic policies. They’re also in church.
Safe Houses
Did you know that churches are full of registered sex offenders? They’ve got unregistered ones too. Sexual predators are everywhere, or can be, and we need to recognize their patterns even in those places we generally feel safe, like places of worship or our own homes.
Ever notice those single men who get up in the middle of the service to use the bathroom? Ninety-nine percent of them are guys who just need to go to the bathroom. But count them next time and you’ll be surprised how many there are. What if one of them is routinely perched in a stall for ten minutes waiting for an unescorted child to show up? Maybe every week he goes fishing, like those guys at McDonalds, waiting. How long would it take him to do irreparable harm to a child before casually walking out the church door never to be seen again? How long would it take your church security team to discover the child was still in the bathroom?
The security team at the casino where Sherrice Iverson’s family was staying didn’t discover her lifeless body for hours after she was already dead. That was in the late 1990’s, and folks, nothing has changed. In fact, it’s gotten much worse. The perpetrators are more brazen, the crimes’ frequency merits less outcry. And it can even happen in your own home.
Two teenage boys forced their way into a suburban home in the middle of the day. The mother grabbed her daughter and locked themselves in a room. The scum stole, broke down doors, raped, slashed, and stabbed before leaving. Middle of the day, in the mother’s own home, no defense, no plan, and it happened that fast.
This is the reason why my wife has a weapon on her desk, sometimes several. Be alert and be ready to defend your life and those around you. Your wife or child doesn’t have to be prey for your neighborhood monsters. They need to be smart and so do you.
Go to a public park and I guarantee you’ll find several parents staring at their phones, oblivious to what their kids are doing. I know because I take my kids to the park, and I’m always amazed by it. None of them ever size me up, a 6’2” 215lb guy who’s almost always packing a concealed pistol. Of course, I’ve got kids there too, but they don’t know that unless they see us arrive or until I interact with them. Often, I’m just standing off on the perimeter playing a zone because my boys like to play on different equipment, and I need to keep them both in frame. I also keep an eye on the parking lot and the surrounding tree lines because you never know. Those parents aren’t paying attention. Their children are vulnerable.
We need to put away our phones and pay attention – in the McDonald’s playcenter, at the grocery store, at our kid’s baseball game, and even in the church lobby during the service.
Living In The Yellow
Security minded people use a color code to assess their environment:
Condition White: total unawareness. The news is full of these oblivious victims.
Condition Yellow: a relaxed awareness, the optimal everyday state of being.
Condition Orange: a specific alert has triggered your full attention. If you haven’t done it yet, thinking through your plan of defense or getaway happens here.
Condition Red: ready to defend your life.
We like to call everyday situational awareness, living in the yellow. Be alert, assess your situation, locate the exits, map out an alternate emergency exit, and form a plan in case X, Y, or Z happens. It literally takes less than a minute to formulate that plan. And X, Y or Z is always happening to somebody somewhere. Don’t let it happen to you or your child.
My daughters are older now. They’re often armed and know the basics of how to avoid an attack and how to fight back. But even with that level of awareness they can’t account for every eventuality. They need to be smart and pray, and hopefully there are others out there to watch over them as well. We all need to be engaged.
Last summer my daughters went to a large outdoor event full of guys and testosterone. Their grandpa was performing there and even though it’s considered a “family friendly” environment my wife and I can pretty much guarantee that at least one sexual predator is there on any given day. It’s just basic math with living in Alaska. What are the numbers in your neck of the woods? If you haven’t checked, do so. Ask a cop and your jaw might drop when he tells you of all the things going on in your community.
I prepped my girls. They were alert, watched each other’s backs, and had a plan in case something went wrong, and so should you. Live in the yellow and you’ll be ready when the orange light starts flashing.
Be Offensive
I mean that as in being pro-active, but we also need to get over being offensive to other’s feelings when it comes to personal safety. Lives are at stake. Here are a few simple things you can do to avoid becoming a victim:
Above all, pray in every circumstance. God, what do I need to be aware of in this situation?
Use your eyes. In every situation take in your surroundings and note who and what is there. Keep your kids in your line of sight. Use your eyes and let sketchy characters know you’re alert and oriented to their presence. Snap a picture of them. They’ll likely move on to an easier target.
Use your head. Keep your head on a swivel and put away the dang phone. Watch the people around you and ask yourself if they have a reason to be there. Look all around before you start buckling the toddler into the carseat and practice now what you’d do if someone grabbed you from behind.
Use your voice. Again, predators want easy prey, be the opposite. Look the sketchy guy in the eye and tell him to back off, loudly. Tell him to get away from your kid and don’t worry about being offensive. Mama bears don’t. You can always apologize later if need be. If he won’t back off, scream at him and make a scene.
Use your legs. Get the heck out of there as fast as you can.
Have a plan. Know your exits wherever you happen to be. Stay in public whenever possible. Arm yourself and train with your weapon.
It’s a brutal truth that we need to talk about this. I’m sorry, I really am. But a predator is watching through his window as a girl or boy walks home from an afterschool job; another is watching the driveway ready to pounce when the man of the house leaves for the day; and still another is standing behind a bathroom door pretending he’s washing his hands, waiting for a four-year old girl to stumble in. Take measures to mitigate them, learn how to spot them, and prepare to confront them. If we don’t, women and children we care about may pay the price, and it will only take a few seconds.
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