We arrived, entered the dorm, and found the team and coaches sitting around in boxers and socks, playing cards. No supper in sight, and funny thing, the exit doors were now locked. “Open the door,” my friends said, “let us out,” and the coaches just laughed. I did not like this one bit. My friends had blank stares, the deer-in-the-headlights look. It was like they were more or less frozen.

My reaction was (edited for a family blog), “The hell you say,” and I dragged my friends to a window (only one floor), opened it, and pushed them out, all the while giving the team and coaches some withering comments in two languages (neither of which they spoke, but I think they got the message). I was prepared to break a window with a chair, if necessary. A couple of guys followed us out the window, but backed off when confronted.

Why do people fall for such plays? Is it the Good Guy thing? It seemed so transparent to me. Why do people freeze? I hear what you say about authority. But where does this helplessness in the face of baleful intent come from?

Sara: A disbelief that people could actually be so cruel? I don’t know. Even now, reading this story, part of me is simply amazed, despite all the cruelty I’ve witnessed and heard about in my life.

Alex

You write “statistics on this are hard to find, but many law enforcement authorities believe most non-family member kidnappings are committed by men.” Well, profiling based on sound statistics is hard enough to swallow, but profiling based on mere “belief” is intolerable. And profiling it is, make no mistake.

I live in Japan—a nice, but sometimes a bit xenophobic country—and once something disquieting happened to me. As I was walking along on narrow road, a little girl—the only other soul around—playing with her anti-kidnapping buzzer made it ring. Luckily, nobody came out to her “rescue,” because if somebody had, they would have immediately misinterpreted the situation as: male middle-aged foreigner (standard description for bad guy) molesting little girl. Given that children’s accounts are often unreliable, as they seem to tend to please those who question them, and given that Japanese police have the nasty habit of convicting almost everyone they arrest—as Amnesty International has been pointing out for many years—I could have easily ended up losing my job, expelled from the country, and labeled forever as “child molester.”

By the way, though I am not able to point to the sources right now, I know there are experiments comparing children and chimpanzee that suggest an innate tendency in humans to obey to authority.

Andrea: Point well taken.

Alex

jstele: Practicing those skills is an excellent idea.

Alex

An extract: “The helmeting and monitoring, the corralling of children into certified zones of safety, is in part the product of the Consumer Reports mentality, the generally increased consciousness, in America, of safety and danger. To this one might add the growing demands of insurance actuarials and the national pastime of torts. But the primary reason for this curtailing of adventure, this closing off of Wilderness, is the increased anxiety we all feel over the abduction of children by strangers; we fear the wolves in the Wilderness. This is not a rational fear; in 1999, for example, according to the Justice Department, the number of abductions by strangers in the United States was 115. Such crimes have always occurred at about the same rate; being a child is exactly no more and no less dangerous than it ever was. What has changed is that the horror is so much better known. At times it seems as if parents are being deliberately encouraged to fear for their children’s lives, though only a cynic would suggest there was money to be made in doing so.”

Jonathan: Thanks for the link. I always enjoy Michael Chabon.

Alex

Thanks for your enlightening columns.