To ask this man if this child is his daughter?

[wildsummerdreams]

I just saw a man carrying a child (she 3-4) against her will. She was throwing a tantrum and trying to free herself. It would seem like a normal scene if you have kids, but I could not help but think the worst, so I followed them and ask him if he was her dad. He stopped (good sign) looked at me and when he realised what I was thinking, told me to not be ridiculous. I asked the child directly if that was her dad, but she kept on crying. Then they wen off and he continue to carry her against her will. I watched them for a bit and took a picture of them just in case. Please tell me I'm not a total nutter and what would you have done or what to do if something like this happens.

The girl didn't have any shoes on and they were crossing Kentish Town high street.

Its hard, whenever I see something like that I always feel I should check, but never do.

Exactly, @Caribbeanyesplease! There's always millions of "would you have done that it if it was a woman?" But statistically, most abductions and murders of small children are carried out by men

I actually have never heard of an abduction of a child where a man isn't involved somewhere and it has been solely a woman. There probably has been. I have just never heard of it.

Actually most child abductions aren't by strangers but family members.
There's actually a good chance the abductor IS the child's dad or mother.

Many abductions of babies are solely by women although there is generally not an intent to harm the child.

Beggars belief that people are calling OP a nutter what if it was a kidnapper you would all be calling her names for ignoring

Sorry I've never heard of an abduction of a child where the child ends up being sexually abused or murdered or both, being carried out by a woman alone.

The sort of abductions that make the headlines are the truly terrible ones, and yes, those are almost exclusively men. They are still very very rare, but remain in the memory because of the abject horror of them.

I still think it is better to be considered a busy body than to to end up as one of the people that let the Bulger killers go... feeling bad for a few days is small fry to feeling regretful for a lifetime.

ScrubTheDecks

I have a different response to your story. You have shown that asking 'is this your child?' can stop a kidnapping in its tracks. How do you get from there to 'ineffectual'??

IAmAPorcupine: yes but in that example there was a clear reason to suspect something. The woman had observed the child being publicly denied an ice cream in the company of his mother. She then observed him with a man not previously present eating an ice cream. And she did something. She put her foot in tne train door to stop it leaving with the child aboard. (She removed it when he let go of the child and took tne child to the office).

But it is a fair point that the man relinquished the child and prepared to scarper because he was challenged.

The child, by the way, was happy as larry, eating his ice cream. Probably told ‘Mummy said we should get an ine cream and the meet her in tne train ‘ or something.

I am on the other side of London from Kentish Town but this happened to me last night with my daughter (4). Myself, my wife and our two daughters (7 and 4) had been at a church ceremony and then a related event at a friends' house a few suburbs away which had run a lot later than we expected (partly due to World Cup viewing). We don't have car and it being a Saturday night minicab and Uber availability/pricing were not good. So we got a train back and then had 5 minutes to walk from the station to our house. We needed to pick up milk for the morning so my wife and 7 year old went into the 24 hour shop beside the station. This was about 11.45 p.m. I had the length of our road to walk, that's all.

My 4 year old was not happy about walking and was crying a bit (very tired as you would expect after having been woken up after a sleep on the train, but it was a 5 minute walk and really there was no better alternative. She is 23 kg so too heavy to carry the full distance (I already had a backpack). She wasn't running away or anything like that. I was in a suit and shirt because of the church ceremony.

About five houses away from ours two 20 something women ran up from behind us, grabbed my daughter and started shouting at her asking whether I was her daddy. As you can imagine, she went completely hysterical. I told them to take their hands off my daughter or I was going to call the police. I said we lived four doors away and had lived here since before my daughter was born. The commotion was such that the people in the house we were in front of, who know all our family, came out and told these women that I was my daughter's father.

At this point, I just walked to our house went in, and put my daughter down. My wife witnessed the commotion from the other end of our road although she didn't know that it involved us. She walked past the two women walking the other way and when she got home and I filled her in she told me that she recognised them from a house on our road that was recently bought by the council divided into flats and rented out and said she regularly sees these two women outside smoking - which might have been what they were doing when they saw my daughter and I. My wife said that she's pretty sure that neither of the women work (my wife is a SAHM) and don't have husbands/partners of their own.

We live in a fairly mixed area. If we had been a few streets away where it is all £1.5m houses of City professionals like ourselves this would never have happened because 90%+ of children in those houses are being raised by married mothers and fathers and there is nothing strange about a father being on his own with one or more children. However, statistics show that among the white English lower income group (which these two women were from) 65% of children under 16 don't have their father living with them. So they see a man with a child and they think they can barge in and try to grab the child off him. From the posts here it's very obvious that it's a class thing among English people. Upper-middle income fathers much more likely to be on the scene, lower income fathers not so much. Also, although not related to what happened to us yesterday, for families like ours it's completely normal for my daughters to preference their mother over their father especially when they are tired, stressed or looking for comfort. I work 65 hours a week so that my wife can be a SAHM - a choice that is more hers than mine but which I am happy to support. They hardly see me from Monday to Friday.

My DDs used to think it was hilarious to cower and cry "please don't hit me again mummy" in the middle of Sainsbury's or somewhere equally public.

Luckily we live somewhere smallish where people tend to know people

Bad things happen because good people
Walk by and do nothing OP

I would have maybe done the same

Mormontsraven,
This really feel this has nothing yo do with class.

Wow, the posts on here just make me shiver. Thinking if my child had been abducted and taken in this manner (not saying the man in the OP had abducted the child) he would have no chance in todays mind your own business climate.

And fwiw I would not have been offended at all to have been approached like this and neither would my husband. What’s to be offended about, that someone had shown concern for my child?

I'm not in the habit of physically grabbing other people's children away from them and shouting at a four year old as to whether the man whose hand they are holding is their father.

However, judging by posts on here this seems to be acceptable behaviour among the low education low IQ and profoundly irrational English chav class.

I think you did the right thing.

You did the right thing. I would not be offended if you asked me.

In all fairness to the op, I remember a woman being interviewed after the Jamie Bulger case who lives with the guilt of not taking that child when she stopped those boys in the street. I can kind of understand her why she done it. On another note I had to leave a shop recently with my 6 year old autistic son as he was having a meltdown, he shouted the whole way out the store 'child abuse, she's doing child abuse to me' luckily most shoppers had just seen him kick me and give me a mouthful prior to this, think the next time I'm just going to shout 'parent abuse' see what happens!

Mormontsraven,

Are you saying that only "the chav class" Are concerned for the safety of children and only they have the guts to speak up and say something? I don't think that's correct. You just sound very bitter. Get over it someone was looking out for your child, were they wrong, yes. Did they go about it the wrong way, absolutely. You very well could have been a kidnapper though.

Didn't help the McCaans much did it? Nobody is safe from abduction.

Wow you have proof that MM was abducted? You should get on to the police, they could probably do with your help.

Mormont

What a load of rubbish!

I think what Mormontsraven is trying to say is that it's more unusual to see working class fathers with their children, so a working class person would be more likely to stop a man accompanied by a child.

But that's a load of rubbish!