As far as adults being afraid to go around children, and the hysteria about potential child molestation:
About 20 years ago I was visiting a business source in Fargo, and he was busy with a long phone call that he couldn't drop. He had his wife ask me if I could take a quick run to the convenience store for him, to pick up a pack of Camels. I asked where the convenience store was, and she suggested that Naomi come along with me to show me where. Naomi was (at the time) their nine-year-old daughter.
I went there with Naomi, she waited while I went into the convenience store to get my friend's cigarettes, and we returned to their house right away.
This was a routine errand, nothing more was thought of it, and the visit continued as anticipated.
But years later, as I saw the absolute HYSTERIA which more or less suggests that a child being around an unrelated adult alone is always a molestation or kidnapping in progress, I asked myself questions such as:
1. What if my "friend" had been an extortionist who wanted to set up the situation, or
2. What if, for some reason, Naomi had been the least bit angry with me about something?
In other words, if she had said something like "Frank touched me down there when we went out for your cigarettes, Daddy" - and whatever her reasons would have been for making such a false statement - my ass would have been grass. I would probably spend the rest of my life with a prison record, and on the sex-crime registry (which says NOTHING about what the crime is, therefore letting everybody assume you're a serial child rapist) for life, etc. Basically, my life would have been over, IF ONLY anybody in that family had been unscrupulous in a malicious way.
Though the quick errand was entirely routine, I would not duplicate such an errand, in ANY possible way, anywhere in the United States. (I may make an exception if there's a life-or-death medical emergency which somehow involves a drive to hospital or elsewhere accompanied only by a minor child.) Among things that I will never do again, or consider ever doing for the first time, I consider this to be nearly as dangerous as Russian roulette.
