tim's experiment

The Ocean Park non-kidnapping is a fascinating piece of sociology. Consider: we have an expat lady in a bar who is listening to two friends. She was later quoted as saying she was “in and out of the conversation” which I take it means that when the subject of kidnapping came up she was eavesdropping. She then goes home and, still presumably Brahms and Liszt as we Cockneys used to say, she sits down at the computer to churn out a few emails. She tells friends that her fellow bar-goer nearly had her sprog kidnapped in Ocean Park. The infant disappeared and was later discovered in the companyof two Chinese women. The email is widely circulated, as tends to happen with emails, and the story turns out to be entirely fictitious.

Oddly enough something similar happened to me many moons ago. As a small kid I often lost my parents. They had two to keep track of and I had not yet been fitted with glasses, so I was as blind as a bat. According to family legend the worst incident occurred in a department store in Frankfurt. I was missing for about half an hour before being discovered, in some distress, surrounded by German housewives who were anxious to help but of course could not understand a word I was saying. It would have been understandable — this was about 1948  so Anglo-German relations had recently been a bit rocky — if my parents had feared the worst of my rescuers. They did not. In those days it was assumed that any adult talking to a crying child was trying to help it.

I suspect there was an element of what we may politely call cultural prejudice at work in the Ocean Park rumour fest. Expat mums are perhaps more willing to believe ominous things of Chinese ladies than they would be if their brat had been rescued by a gwai por. A more interesting, and less disputable, point is what this incident tells us about parenthood and fear in the West.

Statistically, life is probably safer for children than it ever was. When I was a kid, for example, nobody wore a crash helmet on a push bike. The number of kids who are molested by total strangers is minute: most such incidents take place in the home and are perpetrated by relatives. Actually being seriously harmed by a stranger is somewhat less likely than being struck by lightning. But that is not the way people see it. There is a curious conspiracy: on one side we have militant feminists of the Dworkin persuasion who believe that all men are rapists: the ones who are not in prison just haven’t been caught yet. If you haven’t been molested you are letting the side down. Their odd assistants are tabloid journalists who relish a good child abduction as providing a stiff dose of sex and violence. So incidents or suspected incidents are assiduously reported. The result is a climate of fear. In my day we played in the street; modern kids are not left unsupervised in the back garden. I am told by recent arrivals from the UK that they would not risk trying to help a distressed child in a public place because of the danger of misunderstandings.

New expat arrivals should perhaps be advised that this particular piece of toxic Western culture has not yet arrived in Hong Kong. This is a safe place and people know it. Most adults are kindly disposed towards children – many are incurably sentimental. The Cantonese phrase for a child ia actually, translated literally, “small friend”. People who see you smile at their offspring do not think you are a pervert, and children in trouble are much more likely to meet kindness and help than exploitation or danger. So if you see someone talking to your kid, don’t jump to conclusions.