Parents are charged after their son, 7, is struck dead in a car accident
www.nbcnews.com
Gastonia, N.C., police charged the parents with involuntary manslaughter charges after allowing the victim and his brother to walk home alone from a nearby grocery store.
  • pixxelkick@lemmy.world
    1·
    5 days ago

    What’s not normal is the shift of responsibility from drivers to victims.

    Imagine unironically thinking that if a person jumps out on a busy road in front of a moving car and gets hit, somehow thats the driver’s fault.

    How many layers deep inside your echo chamber are you?

    We can’t keep prioritizing cars, leaving no room for pedestrians and kids to move freely, then blame the victims.

    The answer to this is not to let your seven year old child go wander out into traffic on a road, thats an insane kind of response.

    You don’t get to go “Well because we don’t have enough crosswalks, better just let kids kill themselves, cuz they outta just be allowed to”

    That’s an absolutely insane kind of response to the issue.

    Cars sucking does not excuse the mother’s behavior here. Stroads being dangerous literally means her behavior was negligent. A lack of crosswalks or safer alternatives does not excuse her behavior.

    You’re logic is on par with going “Well this mom let her seven year old wander around on a pier on a lake unsupervised. Her kid fell in the water and drowned. But really the city shouldn’t have made the lake that deep so really the mom isn’t at fault here. Kids should be able to safely wander around unsupervised on piers on lakes without worrying about drowning. In a perfect world every pier is built in a way that makes it impossible for kids to fall off them and drown. So yeah, the mom did nothing wrong”

    Do you see how insane that sounds? No mate, that’s not how the real world works.

    • Showroom7561@lemmy.ca
      1·
      5 days ago

      I’m going to leave this here as my last reply, and I do hope that you take the time to read it: Children’s Independent Mobility: an international comparison and recommendations for action (PDF)

      And I quote the following findings and recommendations from the authors:

      " At age 7, a majority of Finnish children can already travel to places within walking distance or cycle to places alone; by age 8 a majority can cross main roads, travel home from school and go out after dark alone, by age 9 a majority can cycle on main roads alone, and by age 10 a majority can travel on local buses alone"

      “Withholding independent mobility at a young age may expose children to greater risk later in their childhood.”

      Note the following responses below, starting at kids age 7. It’s not a coincidence that the countries who give their kids more mobile independence, are also the ones who Unicef ranks as having the greatest well-being and achieve higher education levels:

      Then I hope you can take some time to read this post, which was written specifically about this child’s death, and how authorities dealt with it.

      And I quote:

      But in fact what the parents did was something normal, rational, and common. “Ten-year-olds and 7-year-olds have been walking to and from school, unaccompanied by adults, for over 100 years,” says Pimentel.

      The implications of this prosecution “are very troubling for parents everywhere who can never provide a guarantee against their kids getting hit by a car, even if they were right there with them,” notes Diane Redleaf, author of They Took the Kids Last Night and Let Grow’s legal consultant.

      I will close by saying that while it may sound “insane” to let kids have responsibility and independence, the reality is, this is normal in most of the world.