It's not that I don't believe people can be so stupid as to charge this woman with child endangerment, it's that it's hard to understand what the hell is going on with news reports that seem tailored to rile us up.
I went to the website cited--it's a UK online newspaper--and couldn't read the full story because they wanted me to sign up. No thanks.
So I googled the story, thinking anything this outrageous must have had extensive media coverage, at least in Texas.
The only place I could find the story was at a website called Reason, under the sub-heading of "free-range parents," which this story doesn't seem to have anything to do with imo. So I googled Reason.com, which was identified as a Libertarian site concerned with individual rights.
The story at Reason was more outrageous than I'd thought. The cops were called by a neighbor; the kid was in his home block (the woman, who lived a block away, had actually gone out and asked the kid where he lived). The discussion with the mother was weird: the cops asked her if she was aware of sex trafficking, and had she learned her lesson and never let her kid walk home alone again. She told them she did not know that it was illegal, so they arrested her.
Child services had the family agree to a safety plan, which meant Wallace and her husband could not be alone with their kids for even a second. Their mothers—the children's grandmothers—had to visit and trade-off overnight stays in order to guarantee the parents were constantly supervised. After two weeks, child services closed Wallace's case, finding the complaint was unfounded.
https://reason.com/2022/11/16/suburban-mom-jailed-handcuffed-cps-son-walk-home/
This all I can stand to write. Suffice it to say that this involves some law supported by Libertarians that left a loophole so that the cops could arrest parents in cases like this. Sounds to me like the neighbor was making a political protest of some kind, and like the mother could have avoided all the hoo-hah by simply agreeing with the officers that she wouldn't let her kid walk home alone again (with crossed fingers behind her back). And the job she lost was part-time at a pediatric sleep clinic.
IOW it seems to me that a lot of people were making points about something other than the safety of a kid walking half a mile. And that maybe the Independent isn't the best source for USA news.
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