text: Photo by 1000 Words/Shutterstock 
   
   
   
   Debra Harrell, 46, let her 9-year-old daughter play outside alone at the park. The South Carolina child had a cellphone she could use to call her mother in case of emergency. On the girl’s third day alone at the park, someone asked her where her mother was. The girl said her mom was at work. (Harrell works at McDonald’s and didn’t want her daughter to have to sit inside the restaurant for hours on a beautiful summer day.) The result? Harrell was arrested for “unlawful conduct towards a child” and put in jail; her daughter is now in the custody of the department of social services. 
   
   Most commentators—save for a few busybodies interviewed by the local news who nattered on about the possibility of the child being abducted by a strange man, something that’s extremely rare—think that authorities went way too far in arresting Harrell. It angers me, as a citizen, to see the police overreach this way. How is it benefiting this child to be put in the custody of social services? And since I'm a parent, Harrell’s arrest scares me: How can I appropriately parent my child when doing something that seems relatively safe, if out of fashion, can get you arrested? 
   
   Advertisement 
   
   
   
   I asked Dorothy Roberts, a professor of law, sociology, and civil rights at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare, if state laws give any specifics about how parents should behave. As in, if you leave a child of X years alone for Y amount of time, it’s a crime. Roberts responded via email: 
   
   The short answer is that every state has its own child maltreatment laws and definitions of neglect—and they are all very vague with no specifics. Most include within neglect failure to provide adequate supervision. South Carolina's child welfare law is actually more specific than most, but still doesn't specify the age—"supervision appropriate to the child's age and development." But how does the judge/jury determine what's appropriate? I don't know of any law that specifies the age or the precise nature of failure to supervise. 
   
   Roberts further explained that states determine whether to treat neglect as a crime or as a child welfare matter. She says it is “recent and rare” for the parent to be charged with a crime and adds that the vagueness of the statutes leave “a lot of room for discretion by social workers, police, judges, and prosecutors, to determine which/whose failures to supervise to pursue. This allows race, class, and gender biases to influence decisions in both the child welfare and criminal justice systems.” 
   
   Certainly those biases could be at play here: Harrell is black, and class is definitely behind how her situation came to be in the first place. As Jonathan Chait points out in New York magazine, when welfare reform was passed in the '90s, single mothers were pushed into low-paying, full-time work that did not provide enough income to afford child care. ||||| 1) Parents ought to enjoy broad latitude in bringing up their children. There are obviously limits. The state ought to intervene if a child is being abused. But letting a 9-year-old go to the park alone doesn't come close to meeting that threshold. Honestly, it seems a bit young to me, but I don't know the kid or the neighborhood, it doesn't sound as though the mother had any great option, and as I didn't give birth to the kid, support her, and raise her for 9 years, it isn't my call. 
   
   2) By arresting this mom (presumably causing her to lose her job) and putting the child in foster care, the state has caused the child far more trauma than she was ever likely to suffer in the park, whatever one thinks of the decision to leave her there. Even if the state felt it had the right to declare this parenting decision impermissible, couldn't they have given this woman a simple warning before taking custody? 
   
   3) The state's decision is coming at a time when it is suffering from a shortage of foster families, as well as a child protective services workforce so overwhelmed that serious child abuse inquiries are regularly closed in violation of policy. 
   
   Perhaps most concerning of all are the surfeit of cases where child protective services censures parents for ostensibly jeopardizing a kid's safety in a manner that is totally disconnected from any statistical realities about the actual dangers faced. This point was made superbly in a Salon article written by a mother who was cited by police for leaving her kid in a car while briefly running into a store–even though it wasn't a hot day, she was gone for mere minutes, and the kid was in no danger. She relayed a conversation she later had with a Free Range Kids founder. 
   
   “Listen,” she said at one point. “Let’s put aside for the moment that by far, the most dangerous thing you did to your child that day was put him in a car and drive someplace with him. About 300 children are injured in traffic accidents every day—and about two die. That’s a real risk. So if you truly wanted to protect your kid, you’d never drive anywhere with him. But let’s put that aside. So you take him, and you get to the store where you need to run in for a minute and you’re faced with a decision. Now, people will say you committed a crime because you put your kid ‘at risk.’ But the truth is, there’s some risk to either decision you make.” She stopped at this point to emphasize, as she does in much of her analysis, how shockingly rare the abduction or injury of children in non-moving, non-overheated vehicles really is. For example, she insists that statistically speaking, it would likely take 750,000 years for a child left alone in a public space to be snatched by a stranger. “So there is some risk to leaving your kid in a car,” she argues. It might not be statistically meaningful but it’s not nonexistent. The problem is,” she goes on, “there’s some risk to every choice you make. So, say you take the kid inside with you. There’s some risk you’ll both be hit by a crazy driver in the parking lot. There’s some risk someone in the store will go on a shooting spree and shoot your kid. There’s some risk he’ll slip on the ice on the sidewalk outside the store and fracture his skull. There’s some risk no matter what you do. So why is one choice illegal and one is OK? Could it be because the one choice inconveniences you, makes your life a little harder, makes parenting a little harder, gives you a little less time or energy than you would have otherwise had?” Later on in the conversation, Skenazy boils it down to this. “There’s been this huge cultural shift. We now live in a society where most people believe a child can not be out of your sight for one second, where people think children need constant, total adult supervision. This shift is not rooted in fact. It’s not rooted in any true change. It’s imaginary. It’s rooted in irrational fear.” 
   
   The cultural shift certainly doesn't seem to be rooted in empiricism. ||||| Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period. ||||| A North Augusta mother is behind bars after officers said she left her 9-year-old daughter alone at a park while she went to work. 
   
   Debra Lynn Harrell, 46, is charged with unlawful neglect toward a child, according to the North Augusta Department of Public Safety. 
   
   Officers responded to a park on Old Edgefield Road around 2 p.m. Monday, according to an incident report. A woman told officers that a girl had been playing in the park since 9:30 a.m. with no adult supervision. 
   
   The woman told officers that she asked the girl where her mother was and she told her that her mother dropped her off before going to work, according to the report. She also told the woman that her mother drops her off at the park all the time so she can play while her mother is at work. 
   
   The girl also said that she sometimes walks over to the McDonald's inside Walmart to buy lunch, according to the report. 
   
   Officers took the girl to police headquarters and contacted her mother. Harrell confessed to officers that she left her daughter alone at the park. She was arrested and booked into jail. 
   
   The Department of Social Services took custody of the child. 
   
   Copyright 2014 WFXG. All rights reserved.
target: – Should sending your kid to play alone at a local park land you in jail? Because that's what happened to Debra Harrell. The 46-year-old South Carolina mom repeatedly sent her 9-year-old daughter to a well-trafficked park while she went to work at McDonald's. When the parents of other children at the park found out, they called police, who arrested Harrell and charged her with unlawful conduct toward a child. The daughter has been placed in state custody. Local news outlets first reported the story on July 1, but it's been getting wider attention lately thanks to an indignant post on Reason from "Free Range Kids" advocate Lenore Skenazy. And so far, pretty much everyone agrees that the arrest is senseless and wrong. Some reactions: Skenazy notes that the original news reports make it sound like Harrell "committed a serious, unconscionable crime," as locals speculate that the girl could have been kidnapped. "To which I must ask: In broad daylight? In a crowded park? Just because something happened on Law & Order doesn't mean it's happening all the time in real life." "Since I'm a parent, Harrell’s arrest scares me: How can I appropriately parent my child when doing something that seems relatively safe, if out of fashion, can get you arrested?" asks Jessica Grose at Slate. One law professor tells Grose that the statutes for child welfare laws are often broadly written, giving police lots of latitude—and allowing "race, class, and gender biases to influence decisions." That could be the case here, because Harrell is black, and her poverty helped cause the situation. "The story is a convergence of helicopter parenting with America’s primitive family policy," writes Jonathan Chait at New York. "Our welfare policy is designed to make everybody, even single mothers, work full-time jobs. The social safety net makes it difficult for low-wage single mothers to obtain adequate child care. And society is seized by bizarre fears that children are routinely snatched up by strangers in public places," which is actually an exceedingly rare phenomenon. "The state has caused the child far more trauma than she was ever likely to suffer in the park," writes Conor Friedersdorf at the Atlantic, and they're taking the child at a time when the state has a shortage of foster families. And there's no empirical evidence saying the child would be safer, say, sitting at McDonald's. "The actual safety of a given kid is not being rigorously determined. State employees are drawing on their prejudices to make somewhat arbitrary judgment calls."