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As the mother of a daughter
who flew between Auckland and Wellington as an unaccompanied minor for years,
I never, ever worried about the prospect of her being brutally assaulted by a
paedophile. It didn't even cross my mind. And if that means I won't win
Plunket Mother of the Year, well, so be it. I've read the letters
to the editor last week regarding this issue and I've noticed some mothers
writing in applauding the decision as they believe it will keep their
children safe. Well, for a start, flying is an inherently risky business. If
they truly wanted to keep their children safe, they would demand that the
plane never flew more than six feet off the ground. Even travelling to the
airport is a risky business. You've got more chance of having a car accident
than you have of being interfered with by a paedophile. Secondly, although the
people who work in the sex abuse field believe that around every corner there
are paedophiles slavering and slobbering in anticipation of getting their
hairy mitts on children, most people aren't paedophiles. In fact, although
some people find it hard to accept, most men aren't paedophiles. They accuse me of
naivety when I say the only men I know well are good, kind, loving men who
would no more harm a child than they would cut off one of their limbs. I
would accuse those on 24-hour paedophile watch of lacking perspective.
Working in an industry where the men they meet are bad does not ipso facto
make all men bad. Thirdly, how many
children have been interfered with on an Air New Zealand or Qantas flight? Go
on, give us the figures. And when one softly-spoken woman told me that men
could cause subliminal damage to children by sitting next to them and filling
their ears with poison, I would suggest that the overt damage to children
caused by inferring that no man can be trusted, is far, far worse than this
imaginary danger. Fourthly, some kids
don't like sitting next to women. I received an email from a 21-year-old
who'd been flying backwards and forwards across the ditch for years as an
unaccompanied minor, and she said she far preferred to sit next to men. They
grunted at you, picked up a magazine and then lost themselves in an article
and left you alone. Women, she said, smelled far too strongly of Red Door and
felt they had to talk to you for the entire four-hour journey or else they
had failed in their feminine duty. The feeling is mutual.
Many women I spoke to also said they'd prefer not to be seated next to
children and that it was gender bias to make them do so. I could go on, but
I'm running out of space. Suffice to say, Air New Zealand and Qantas have
handled this extremely badly indeed. Surely there are ways of looking after
the children on their flights without offending and alienating more than half
of their customers. And if you have to send
your children unaccompanied on long haul flights, where I do concede it's a
slightly riskier enterprise, you might like to try Cathay Pacific. Depending
on the numbers of unaccompanied minors, they have InFlight Guardians, usually
the wives of the pilots, who will travel in uniform and take care of your
precious cargo. Other airlines may have the same facility - so check it out.
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