Just before Christmas, our nine-year-old son was nearly abducted.
It was 4.45pm, and he was walking home after Minecraft club. He had stopped to stroke a cat that lives near our street when a van drew up beside him. The man inside leaned across. "I've got some sweets," he said. "If you get in, you can have some."
Our son said, very politely, that he lived just round the corner and had an appointment to get back for. The man scowled at him and drove off.
Our boy watched to make sure the van was out of sight before running for home. When he got back, he was breathless. I suggested he use his inhaler – which was when he casually mentioned that he'd been running because a man in a van had offered him sweets.
It's odd how your brain works in situations like this: I was simultaneously shocked and blasé. Here was my son, safe at home – I couldn't believe that someone would be stupid enough to use the sweets line. In fact, I could barely comprehend that it had even happened.
I did know, however, that I had to raise the alarm. I dialled 999, and then posted a message onto a school Care and Share site. I emailed and phoned his school.
While I went through these steps, I felt like a bit player in a soap opera. I spend so much time persuading myself that it is extremely unlikely that anything bad will happen – avoiding scaremongering, hysteria, TV crime dramas and detective novels – that I could hardly believe that this had happened to our child, in our neighbourhood.
The immediate surge of comments responding to my post brought the impact of the situation home. It showed me how frightened people are of this kind of event – and it also confirmed our son's story: another boy had seen the same man just before, and had also been frightened enough to run home.
After speaking to the school and the police, news spread fast. I was repeatedly asked by other parents whether I would let him keep walking. To start with, I stoutly asserted that I would, aware of the look in other parents' eyes. As the days trickled by, though, both my son and I lost our nerve. I went back to picking him up.
After a few days, the investigating officer called. He suggested that perhaps it hadn't been what I thought it was. He said, "Can I ask what your son was doing, walking home at 4.45pm?" I couldn't take it in. Was he really insinuating that it was my fault that my child had been approached? That by encouraging my son to walk home independently, I was essentially setting him up to be assaulted?
I live with a constant feeling that I am being judged as negligent as I strive to give my children greater independence. The policeman's words only reinforced this worry. I'm so tired of the negative scrutiny levelled at mothers, explicitly and implicitly, bullying them into overprotective behaviour which, in the end, actually harms their children. And, at least in my experience, it does always seem to be mothers who are seen to be at fault. The policeman didn't say anything to my husband.
Am I frightened of our boy being approached again? Of course I am – it's my job to worry about our children, as it is my husband's – but it's also our job to let them go. Children need to seize their independence. How else will they learn how to handle it? Our children are taught 'stranger danger' – and they also instinctively know when someone's a wrong 'un. Our son took it in his stride. Why are we trying to take that victory away from him?
We are letting him walk alone again now. He's very happy, and has been thriving at school. Last week he ran to help an elderly lady with her heavy bag on his way home.
I don't think the streets are the preserve of a handful of predators: I think the streets are for everyone, especially our children. I'm going to live by the advice of the policewoman who came to our house the night of the attempted abduction. She looked my son in the eyes and told him not to stop walking to school: "Never forget," she said, "your independence goes forwards, not backwards."