The murder of Leiby Kletzky: parents and the desire to protect
Today I have a piece up at Pajamas Media on the Leiby Kletzky murder. You can comment there, or here if you’d like.
The New Neo
A blog about political change, among other things
Today I have a piece up at Pajamas Media on the Leiby Kletzky murder. You can comment there, or here if you’d like.
Very well written, Neo. Thanks.
As for comments: what is there to say? Nothing we say or do will bring Leiby Kletzky back, and nothing we say or do can prevent cases of this sort from happening again.
We parents want to believe that we can protect our children. And we do, reasonably well, most of the time. But absolute protection is impossible. On rare occasions, something unthinkable will be perpetrated by someone who gave no prior indications, against someone we had no reason to think would be a victim. It seems that that’s what happened here… and there is no legislative cure for that. Even harsh deterrent won’t work against the truly depraved.
If ever I feared the spectre of “copycat crimes”, I fear it now.
DiB
What a horrible experience for a parent to bear. While such things are random and extremely rare, the country has changed greatly since I was growing up in the Fifties in a small Ohio city. Strange people used to be locked up in jail or the insane asylum, sometimes unjustly. Now they walk among us.
As a young boy I rode all over town on my bike. That is how I got to school and to Little League practice. Sometimes I would ride a bus downtown to see the Saturday movies, alone. I went trick or treating in the dark without supervision. You wouldn’t dare allow that now.
My daughter drives her children too and from school every day. They are never out of sight of a teacher or parent. The boys can not be out in the front yard without supervision. My, how the world has changed.
Mr. Frank: I wonder.
I agree that when I was a child, we came and went far more freely and with much less fear. But I remember being warned not to talk to strangers and all of that. Stranger abductions existed, and child murders happened, but they were not so well-publicized nationwide by the press.
My question—and I was unable to get an answer to it during the fairly short amount of time I had to research and write the article—is whether the rate of murders of children by strangers has actually gone up all that much, or whether it is a perception that the world is very much more dangerous for kids. I simply don’t know.
Neo,
No doubt the 24 hour national media have increased awareness of child homicide. Separating murders by family or stranger status would be useful. A CDC publication I found reported that among children age 0-14 the homicide rate increased 300% from 1950 to 1993. The suicide rate increased 400%.
One thing that was very different in 1950 was the presence of two parents in the home and the presence of a mother who was not employed outside of the home. Child murders are often committed by a stressed out single mother or her boyfriend. Although many of us wandered around the neighborhood alone, there were many women in the homes looking out the window.
It is not the children who have, or will have “paralyzing fear.” It is the parents, it is all of us, and we can surrender to that fear, delegating the responsibility for safety to the nanny state. Or we can act ourselves.
It serves the nanny state to put on multi-month shows of “justice”, just as does the preposterous, fatuous, pretentious International Court of Justice.
I am very Old Testament about things such as Leiby and his torturing killer. Mr. Frank above testifies to the cultural & moral decline of the past forty years. We are worse off, but we keep surrendering yet more moral territory and authority. M’Naughton, hell.
I wonder if anyone has seen some of the comments left at articles posted (NY POST, CNN, Daily News, WSJ). I was happy to see about 90% of the comments – coming from people of all walks of life – showing support for the family, sending prayers, and speaking with sincere compassion about this poor little boy…then there was the other 10% – imbeciles calling Hasidic Judaism a cult, so it’s no wonder this happened, and blaming the parents for neglect. There always has to be that contingency that chooses to focus blame on the big bad, the external entity – “society” or “religion” vs. the sick bastard who did this.
When I was little, in the South in the early 1960s, we roamed the neighborhood and the local woods like Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher. Rode our bikes everywhere (no helmets or greaves!), walked a mile to school through the woods and across a log to cross the creek, and didn’t think anything of it.
But our mother told us some 40 years later that the mothers of the neighborhood (almost all of them housewives) would keep an eye on the Roving Band of little rascals from the windows, and call each other to send the kids home for dinner.
It was bliss. Such a feeling of freedom! We watched “The Little Rascals,” and apart from some slight changes in clothing styles, felt completely at home with the Gang. I wonder what kids nowadays think of that life?
This is a ghastly story and my prayers go out to the family. This is a tragedy that is as unthinkable as anything one can imagine.
Mr. Frank said, “Strange people used to be locked up in jail or the insane asylum, sometimes unjustly. Now they walk among us.” And “A CDC publication I found reported that among children age 0-14 the homicide rate increased 300% from 1950 to 1993. The suicide rate increased 400%.”
As an old codger I have qestioned why there are so many more child murders today and why it is so dangerous for children to be out on their own. I think you may have offered some good evidence as to why that has happened. The two parent family, mentioned by Beverly, with the Mom at home was also a deterrent. However, I grew up in a fatherless home with a working mother and my childhood consisted of roaming freely along the trout streams and mountain trails that were out our front door. We often hitch-hiked to towns 40-50 miles away with no thought of harm. No stay at home Moms to watch us. Of course we knew if some local adult saw us do something wrong, they would call our mother and punishment was sure to follow. In a small town you are not anonymous and that is a good thing.
Larger towns, a more mobile population, more anonymity, mentally ill people roaming free, and a general coarsening of our culture may all have affected the trend to less safety for children. For a look at the decline of our culture on many levels, check out Laura Ingraham’s new book, “OF THEE I ZING.”
J.J.: unfortunately, Mr. Frank didn’t provide a link. So there was no way to tell what the statistics might mean in terms of stranger murders. For example, the entire increase in murders might have been in murder by a family member, with no increase at all in murder by stranger.
Another thing is that an increase in stranger murders of children, if there is one, could reflect the fact that we’re better at tracking and finding the bodies. It takes effort to do so, and if the body isn’t found, a child could have in the past been listed as a runaway although he or she was actually a murder victim.
It’s frustratingly difficult to find meaningful statistics about this online. I haven’t had any success so far.
Statistics would provide us with more certainty that what we sense is happening is actually so. But anecdotal evidence and a general feel for increased danger is not something to be dismissed as a figment of our imaginations.
Case in point – School attacks. Here are some accounts of known attacks in primary and secondary schools.
Primary school attacks:
http://tinyurl.com/6c5dzzy
Secondary school attacks:
http://tinyurl.com/645gaww
My count shows:
1933 to 1960
Primary school attacks – 7 or .25 attacks per year.
Secondary school attacks – 16 or .6 attacks per year.
1960 to 2011
Primary school attacks – 23 or .45 attacks per year.
Secondary school attacks -161 or 3.1 attacks per year.
Very rough stuff, but it provides a picture that shows increasing tendencies towards violence since 1960. Maybe our senses aren’t lying to us.
Hit submit too soon. I used 1933 to 1960 as a period of my youth, (Birth to age 27) which I remember as quite different from today’s situation. Other than that it has no significant meaning.
One of the talk shows was interviewing a child behavioral expert who said something I hadn’t thought of: Disturbed people sometimes gravitate to religious communities because of the love and nurturing acceptance they find. She also said, when talking of her own practices, that she lives in a neighborhood with forty-six registered sex offenders.
In line with my usual practice of thinking poorly of people when I have little or no direct knowledge, I wonder if some of the acceptance is a matter of looking good. Anybody can tolerate the tolerable. Tolerating the intolerable takes a special and superior form of tolerance.