Child-Mobbing Avengers

Young children can be off-puttingly cruel to one another, but they can also, when the occasion demands - and it often does - be kind and even solicitous toward one another. It is, unfortunately - particularly among girls - when they reach the teen years that things change, and social competitiveness marches into the equation, when girls become catty and manipulative, shunning those whom they perceive as different or somehow deficient to their constructed norms.

So it was interesting to read about an event that occurred in France, when a little girl's classmates came to her aid when she was in a situation that might have ended quite differently without their vigorous intervention. This was a seven-year-old schoolgirl whom an obvious pedophile had targeted for abduction. He entered the school playground where the children had been out to play, attempting to entice the little girl with promises of sweets.

Young girls have long been forewarned of the approach of strangers in such settings, and no doubt this child, like most, received warning from her mother to be suspicious of someone she did not personally know approaching her for any reason. Somehow little girls, as though by osmosis, pick up, through casual conversations with one another, and by overhearing adult talk, of the possibility of dangers directed toward them.

This child refused the stranger's tempting offer, and in response he dropped all avuncular pretense and began to manhandle her, dragging her toward his car. Doubtless she objected, strenuously. That's when an eight-year old classmate of the seven-year-old, taking note of something dreadfully untoward, ran forward to kick and punch the would-be abductor. The outcry they made in resisting the determined kidnapper, alerted other children.

Eventually dozens of other children from the first child's class converged on the frantic drama, and among them overcame the pedophile. He fled in the panic of both the overwhelming effect of swarms of children plaguing him and shouting to the skies, and a distinctly potential fear of detection by adults who should have been in the area, and the next step - apprehension.

One can only wonder what the outcome might have been had it been a teen-age girl who had been accosted and the attempt made to abduct her. Would her bored and disaffected classmates have assumed this was a family affair they wouldn't interfere with, or just looked away, not wanting to become involved in something unpleasant, or perhaps considering that she wasn't worth bothering over, had she been an unpopular girl.

And then, perhaps not. In the best of all possible worlds, an older girl's peers would have responded with alacrity to rescue their coeval, determined to get the better of a would-be abductor. And in the best of all possible worlds no such predator would exist.