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| Casino-related child abandonment: the Simpsons saw it coming (S05E10, 1993) |
As casino gambling in Pennsylvania amps up, so too, apparently, do instances of parents leaving children unattended - sometimes for hours - in casino parking lots while they gamble.
It's happened – that is, the parents have been caught – at least five times in the last two months at Parx casino alone. In one case, a man left a 15-month baby in a running car.
Most recently, Sharon Belek, 35:
... was charged Thursday with child endangerment for leaving her 8- and 15-year old daughters in the parking lot on Aug. 1 while she played the slot machines - for six hours.
The teenage daughter - stuck with a nonworking cell phone - flagged down a passerby at about 12:30 a.m. and borrowed a phone to call her father.
Enter the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board, which announced at a meeting this month its displeasure with the instances of child abandonment.
The Board might have used this as an opportunity to reexamine how much of casino activity is, in fact, what most of us would consider problem or compulsive gambling (a prominent study suggests as much as two-thirds).
But that would be, well, un-Board-like. The PGCB, after all, has the dual mission of regulating gambling on the one hand and ensuring its profitibility and success on the other.
Instead, the Board focused on parking lot security – which is well and good – but not, Parx claims, its responsibility.
Parx is apparently only responsible according to state law for security inside its facility. And so the casino pointed its finger, in turn, at local police, who, in turn, said they cannot patrol Parx' 7,000-car lot.
Commented Bensalem public safety chief Fred Harran:
"We've had calls through the years with kids left in shopping center, but what's making this hot is that we've had five in just a two-month period," said Fred Harran, public safety director in Bensalem. "The gambling addiction, the glitter of it all, people go into gamble and forget the kids. I just don't get it."
It's a revealing statement, and one of the first times we've seen public officials come out and say that casinos are attracting (perhaps creating?) addicts.
While the Gaming Board and casinos try to figure out how to make this ugly little problemo disappear, maybe the rest of us ought to start asking if the problem isn't so much what's happening in casino parking lots as inside slot parlors.
Child abandonment is child abandonment, whether the child is ignored while mommy gambles or while mommy empties a bottle of vodka. The state's responsibility is to punish the offender, and when it comes to kids, the best move is to take the kids away, first offense.
Child abondonment isn't a "first-time" crime. These lovely parents just didn't abondon their kids for the first-time in a casino parking lot. Its been going on for years at home and now we have an opportunity to find the offenders and correct the actions. You would silly to believe otherwise. I say this is a BOON, not a bane.
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