ABSTRACT
In an episode of the popular US television series Crime Scene Investigation (CSI) one of the investigators, Catherine Willows, confides to her boss, Gil Grissom, her concerns about her twelve-year-old daughter. Willows’s daughter, going through a rebellious phase after the death of her father, thinks she can do as she pleases – even hitchhiking into town. Grissom sombrely asks Willows whether she has told her daughter about the dangers of the adult world – meaningfully turning his gaze to the room where a post-mortem is being carried out on the body of a young girl. The CSI team are in the middle of investigating the death of a schoolgirl whose body has been found wrapped in a bloody blanket in a remote field on the outskirts of Las Vegas. The girl is presumed to have been murdered by a known paedophile (although it later emerges that it was her own brother who took her life). Willows is reluctant to tell her daughter about all the daily horrors
they come across in their line of work, she tells Grissom, ‘because
I don’t want to scare my daughter into growing up fearing life’. Having been told by Grissom that there is a difference between scaring children about the world and preparing them for the world, Willows inexplicably takes her young daughter down to the mortuary, opens the door of one of the chambers and pulls out the body of a young girl. Forcing her daughter to look at the dead girl’s battered face, she asks, ‘Now do you understand why I won’t let you hitch-hike?’ Thank God it’s fiction. The vast majority of real-life adults are
rather more sensible and sensitive. But not many children will be immune to the drip-drip effect of continual – and often barely more subtle – warnings about the risks they face in the outside world. The Times (London) raised an interesting question during 2007’s
Playday: ‘How many people does it take to give a child a taste of what it’s like to play in the streets, just as they did in the old days?’ The answer was:
Their parents, of course, allowing them out on the occasion of the national Playday this week, part of a campaign for more freedom for our closeted kids to romp outdoors. But, at one of the sites, a small residential street in Aldershot, it also required five policemen, three community support officers, a traffic management crew, a CC-TV van and a team of ‘play workers’ from the local council.
