TSA telling children “pat-down is a game” sends a wrong message

“Teach your children well,” the ancient song lyrics advise.

And if you don’t, the new “lesson” being imparted by the TSA may have disastrous repercussions should your little ones cross paths at some point with a sex predator.

So says Ken Wooden, founder of Child Lures Prevention, regarding a new TSA technique for getting children to cooperate with airport screeners by telling them that “pat-downs are a game.”

Wooden notes that the touching-is-a-game line is one of the most commonly used ploys by sexual predators to initiate inappropriate contact with a child.

Following a spate of recent TSA horror stories, including the circulation of videos showing TSA personnel crudely patting down toddlers, a regional director for the agency insured the public that Homeland Security was on the case. The director, James Marchand, told Chattanooga TV newsman Steve Simon:

You try to make it as best you can for that child to come through. If you can come up with some kind of a game to play with a child, it makes it a lot easier.

Simon’s 3-year-old daughter Mandy was the unwitting star of a YouTube video that went viral in which the child, squirming and sobbing, screams "Stop touching me!" as a TSA employee continues to grope her.

Children, Ken Wooden told The Raw Story website, "don't have the sophistication" to distinguish between a pat-down carried out by an airport security officer and an assault by a sexual predator, adding that the TSA policy could

desensitize children to inappropriate touch and ultimately make it easier for sexual offenders to prey on our children.

Wooden further emphasizes that TSA pat-downs could be particularly traumatic for a child or, for that matter, an adult who has been the victim of unwanted touching.

In response, TSA administrator John Pistole noted that the agency may change its screening rules for victims of sex abuse. How precisely that painful and highly personal information would be shared with TSA agents he didn’t say. One supposes that upon arrival at the airport, passengers could be asked to fill out a questionnaire asking them to detail their most intimate and/or traumatic life experiences so that TSA screeners would know who to handle with kid gloves. Certainly that approach would be no less invasive than the techniques currently used.

It is worth remembering that Pistole claimed last month that children under 12 are not subjected to pat-downs. That was before the video of young Many Simon’s ordeal hit the fan. Could it be that perhaps Pistole is not the man for this job?

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