In case you missed the “Boy in the gorilla enclosure” story this week a three-year-old boy fell into the Cincinnati Zoo enclosure when his mum wasn’t looking. Harambe, the gorilla, was shot dead even though it was uncertain whether he was being aggressive towards the child or not.
The shooting of Harambe has inspired outrage, and it is indeed a terrible shame.
Initially, the Cincinnati PD did not press charges because the boy climbing through one-metre enclosure and falling four-metres into a moat was a terrible accident that occurred when a mother turned her back on her child for a few moments. However, now there is talk of criminal charges of negligence being laid.
Social media has, as social media does, tried this mother and found her guilty of practically killing the gorilla herself. One online petition demanding the parents be held accountable states:
“We believe that this negligence may be reflective of the child’s home situation.”
The aspersion is a giant leap but not surprising when we consider the amount of vitriol we love to heap on people whom we know nothing about. Public opinion aside, the thought of actual criminal charges against them makes me feel sick for the times I’ve turned my back on my children for that split second that could lead to tragedy.
My daughter, Kiki, was barely toddling when one day I popped her on the pavement behind me while I searched for something in the car. We were parked on a busy main street, and I was madly searching for my new sunglasses when suddenly I heard cars madly beeping on the road.
I looked behind me, no Kiki. I looked to the sound and there was my baby girl standing the middle of the road surrounded by cars at a stand-still.
I am not alone. Alison Hallworth also has an incident at the zoo, not with an endangered silverback gorilla but with an escalator.
“I saw a toddler heading to the escalator and I couldn’t see any parents, I said to my girls to say put and went and stopped the small person, and then returned her to her heavily pregnant mum who had just not kept up with her as they came out of the bathrooms. I would have been distracted for about ten seconds, turned around and found my eldest daughter hanging onto the OUTSIDE of the escalator, dangling about half way up. We had to get her to drop into our arms,” she recalls.
Frightening? Yes. Dangerous? Definitely. Negligent? Nope.
Megan Blandford also knows the sinking feeling that comes with this particular type of “neglect”. She has not committed this crime only once, but twice.
“I’ve lost my now-seven-year-old twice. Once was at a science museum when she was five – we were looking in the shop and I was just at the other end of the short book rack, and I turned around and my daughter and her cousin were gone. I asked the museum staff for help to check outside for me while I looked inside… turned out the kids had walked to the car (through the carpark, down a couple of side streets) to try to find me. I hugged them, and then shouted!”
“The other time I lost her was when she was two and we were away on holidays. She was playing inside our locked hotel room while I had a shower. I came out of the bathroom and she was gone.
Turns out a cleaner had come in and grabbed her – not maliciously, but because she thought my toddler was cute and, being Samoan, she hadn’t thought this would be a problem – and she was carrying her on her hip while she vacuumed another hotel room. Shows it can happen in even the most secure of circumstances.”
Kids don’t just leg it the second you turn your gaze, they also get their sticky mitts into stuff. Sometimes it is stuff that is cute like your favourite limited-edition lipstick all over the new expensive wallpaper, or impossible to remove nail varnish on the freshly cleaned carpet.
And sometimes it’s something more dangerous than your unbridled fury. Kids don’t know the difference.
“This isn’t about losing my child but taking one’s eyes off them,” says Renee Meier. “My daughter was running a fever so I put the Panadol on the bench in front of me while I rummaged through the drawer for a syringe. I looked up to find my stealthy two year old had grabbed the Panadol, taken the bottle out of the box and removed the “childproof” cap! All too often our children manage to defy the barriers put in place to protect them, and sometimes even defy logic, to get what they want.”
Of course no one wants to lose their children or endanger them. The feeling you feel when they are lost is one of sheer gut-wrenching terror, and the thought of a car hitting them, someone abducting them, or some other horror befalling them is enough to keep you awake at night. So how can the law possibly see this as a case of neglect?
Neglect is not putting your kid’s seatbelt on because it takes too long, or not feeding them three times a day because you can’t be arsed. Neglect is when you fail to take care of something.
A slippery child sneaking from view while a mother looks the other way is not neglect, it’s parenthood.
Danielle Colley
Danielle Colley is a writer, blogger and mum. She is a regular contributor to The Weekly and other online and print publications.
You can see more of Danielle on her blog, Keeping Up With The Holsbys
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