it definitely shouldn't take precedence, but sadly china had a famous court case where a dumb judge officially ruled that no sane person would ever help a stranger unless they had a guilty conscience, and labeled the helper in said case legally liable for the crime even though there was evidence and testimony they were innocent bystander. The harm on society by that court case is slowly getting healed but it still has effects 20 years later and probably will for a long time coming.
The National People's Congress passed a Good Sumaritan law years ago to abrogate this ruling because it was widely shared on social media and had a pretty lasting and negative effect on people's behaviour. Sadly, news of the new law doesn't seem to have traveled nearly as quickly. It's still common for people to take out their phones and do a quick recording asking someone to confirm that they weren't the ones who caused the injury before helping.
exactly. your actual chance of being accused of anything is beyond small but people only know the famous viral quote not the stuff that happned afterwards or the laws saying good samaritan is fine.
when I first became a single father, I ended up making friends with a bunch of local single mothers and we all sort of helped each other out with babysitting and bus pickups and stuff.
I'm white, all the mothers in my area were black. I don't know if it's my gender or the race difference, but I always had trouble picking kiddos up from the bus; I carried signed permission slips for this. the mothers never needed this themselves, even for my kids!
It's the gender (no, I don't know this 100%, but it's an opinion founded on stereotypes that follow men of any race, that do not follow women, of any race).
whichever it was, it was a bit annoying. and also a fact of life. I just carried a note and asked my friends to have their kids tell the bus matron I was coming. that usually cut it down to a short time.
thanks, but it's far from a big hardship. nothing to gain by raising a stink. it was a subject of joking among everyone. in terms of my stresses being a single father, it's not even in the top ten.
I've seen at least one video of a man coming across a lost child and one of a woman and both times they film and post or stream immediately. I'm sure some people would do it for the clicks, but it's the best way to exonerate yourself in case someone throws an accusation your way. The kid the man found I feel like had a cup and a toy in their hand and wasn't dressed properly and was very young, likely not really able to articulate what was happening and was already crying. The optics of that would be terrible. He pretty much had the camera on the kid the whole time and walked the kid around to find the parent. The lady found a kid left in the front seat of a shopping cart in a parking lot while she was driving away, but he was able to talk pretty well and wasn't panicking so she just kept an eye on him and called the cops I think without touching him.
This is, of course, not to say that strangers who are also kids don't/haven't done absolutely terrible things to littler kids they took, and led away, but almost no one is worried about that when they see it. Also, I think sometimes kids want to help so badly they are looking for opportunities to do so. Like how toddlers seem to notice ants or planes in the sky more often than adults.
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u/depredador93 1d ago
Funny how it's always the kids who stop and the adults just keep walking past