Chelsea King — Safety Lessons

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Keeping our kids safe is a slippery endeavor.  Last Thursday, a 17 year-old girl went for a run in a community park in an upscale neighborhood and didn’t come home.  Tuesday afternoon, they found a body.  Chelsea King was an “A” student, peer counselor, and member of the track team.  Smart, alert, going places.  She made good friends, good choices.  As a classmate put it, not the kind of kid you’d expect this to happen to.  All it took was a 30-year old sex offender to take her out.

He was arrested on Sunday and he’s not talking.  The paper says a decade ago, he spent 5 years (of a 6 year sentence) in jail for luring a 13 year old to his mother’s home and then assaulting her.  That victim left her school, her neighborhood and her innocence behind. The court appointed psychiatrist said that he would be a “continued danger to underage girls” because of the lack of remorse for his actions.

Police are connecting him to another assault on December 27 last year.  In that case, he body-slammed a college girl, running in the same general area as Chelsea.  But this girl had had martial arts training since she was young.  She fought him off, with an elbow to the nose, and got away.

Chelsea left school around 2 last Thursday.  By 5:30 her dad was in the park looking for her.  By 6 p.m. her mother had called the police. By nightfall police and volunteers were searching the park — they kept at it all through the rainy night– and on Saturday, thousands of friends, teammates, neighbors and complete strangers were combing the trails and the townhomes with flyers.  We San Diegans are a tight knit bunch.  Two devastating fires have taught us that we are all in this together.

I look at my beautiful 17 year-old daughter, who drives alone to friends’, to sports, to school at odd hours.  I think of her girlfriends whom I have known since preschool and I wonder.  If something evil came at them, would they know what to do?  When they take their graduation trip this summer will they guard their hotel key, hide their naivete.  Her older brother, away at college, engages in his own kind of risky behavior.  Long mountain bike rides alone in wilderness land isn’t risk free.  But there is something in a mother that knows that our sons are less tempting targets than our daughters.

Taking action against Violence

At this emotional moment, there is a loud cry for tougher sentences. John Albert Gardner III did not get the maximum sentence 10 years ago because it was his first violent offense.  Many, including a local Supervisor, are asking for “one-strike” put away for life, for assaults on children.  Changing laws can be done.  But it takes time–too much time for me, for my child, for someone else’s child.

Monday an email started circulating.  A local martial arts school is offering FREE self defense classes for girls, for moms and girls, as a community service.  Their phone hasn’t stopped ringing.

What a movement it would be for us, moms, to take on the challenge of training every daughter to defend herself against the beasts that hide among us.  What can you do right now to make your daughter safe?

Mary Handfelt lives in San Diego and writes about life at stuffuneedtoknow.com.  Check her out at imwritehere.com.

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