Sunday - February 18, 2007
How to catch a Child Molester
I read in the news today about a man who was
convicted of molesting an 8 year
old girl on a Southwest Airlines flight. It sounded exactly like a
man I met on a flight last year. The modus operandi was about the same.
On my flight, the creep stood two
people behind me in line. The person immediately behind me was a 20ish year old
woman who was very, very cute. He started making lewd comments to her while we
waited for the gate to open. She left the line and boarded later. While we
were boarding the man started chatting to me, expecting consolation for the
"rude" treatment he got from the woman. I told him that she thought he was a
creep and so did I.On the flight, he
sat in the seat across the aisle from me in a seat next to two children, a
brother and a sister. The girl was probably 12 or 13 years
old.Here's the difference between the
creep on my plane and the creep in this news article:
In the news article, the man got caught. On my
flight the man got stopped.
I paid
the man no further attention until about half-way through the flight the woman
in the seat behind him started shouting and pounding on the seat back. She told
the creep to get back in his seat and get away from the girl. I had noticed the
man was talking with these two kids and that he was moving into the girl's seat
as though he were looking through the window, but I didn't pay enough attention
to see that he was practically sitting on top of the girl. The woman behind him
didn't miss that detail and started howling at
him.
The creep was resentful, but after
several minutes of howling, the flight attendant finally came by and asked him
to remain in his own seat. By now the girl realized that something was
wrong.
So my question is, which is the
better way to handle the situation? In our flight the flight attendants had
security waiting at the gate to be sure the kids were safe, but the man was not
arrested, so far as I know. In the news account, the man was arrested and could
get 25 years in jail.
By taking action
did the woman save the girl on our plane, only to allow him to attack again on
another flight?
Do the unassigned seats
of Southwest Airlines encourage child molesters to seek out children to sit
next to?
If I were the parents of
these children, I would never allow my children to fly unaccompanied on
Southwest. I'd trust random seating over unassigned seating any day. In
unassigned seating on Southwest, a customer gets to choose, to a certain extent,
whom they sit next to. If you fly Southwest frequently, like I did last year,
you'd see a very noticeable trend. Few want to sit next to fat people because
they take up their neighbor's space in addition to their own. Many people don't
want to sit next to old people, people different from themselves, or people with
bad hygiene.
If you're a pretty girl,
you can be sure that you will not have an empty seat next to you.
All of this is, I guess, natural and
just the way the world works. It's a big problem, though, when it also enables
people interested in kiddie porn to pick whom they sit next
to.
Southwest is successful for many
reasons, one of them being the unassigned seats which encourage passengers to
board quickly. Reducing aircraft time at the gate is critical for
profitability. The downside is not only that passengers are treated like
cattle, but that predators can operate
freely.
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