"In recent years, there have been reports of people with twisted minds putting razor blades and poison in taffy apples and Halloween candy. It is no longer safe to let your child eat treats that come from strangers." –Ann Landers
It’s never safe to let your children eat anything given to them by a stranger, I decided to do some research to see if children have been victims of confectionary tampering at Halloween. Apart from some people using Halloween poisonings to cover their own crimes and schemes it looks like “only” 5 children have died from eating tampered Halloween lollies.
That’s 5 children too many.
In one case reported on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoned_candy_scare a father used Halloween as a cover to murder his child for the life insurance by giving him cyanide laced lollies. The father then gave out poisoned lollies to other children to try and cover his crime so there’s an example of children being endangered by tainted lollies.
Whatever the motivation behind the poisonings it’s still the child on the receiving end of the poisoning, not a nice place to be. Saying its all someone else’s fault for giving out poisoned lollies doesn’t help the affected child.
And even if there were no or very few Halloween poisonings there can still be other potential consequences such as children accepting lollies from strangers at other times of the year, given children’s logic and simple desire for lollies, if it’s ok at Halloween there must be other times it’s ok.
That it’s never ok and there are no exceptions is what we need to teach.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
.jpg)
2 comments:
which is why responsible parents accompany their children trick-or-treating and inspect the bags of goodies afterwards. you teach your child that this is a special day; they grasp that, like they grasp only getting gifts on their birthdays and christmas. and yes, there are cretinous people who harm children out there, and they're going to do it 24/7. but you can't live life afraid or you'd never leave the house.
Unfortunately a lot of parents don't accompany their kids, I saw a few groups of kids walking around unattended. And yes kids grasp things but it depends on the child. Some will, others will look for ways they can justify (to themselves) doing the wrong thing. And I certainly don't advocate being afraid to live life, just taking reasonable steps to help prevent the bad things from happening
Post a Comment