Changeling and Child Kidnap

I came across this old blog post from a blog I used to contribute to, but I was evidently happy enough with my writing that I saved it on my computer!
It isn't a review but the films it covers, Changeling and Gone Baby Gone, are fantastic and heartbreaking and worth at least four stars.

I wrote this piece in November 2010:

Unfortunately missing children are not a rarity in our world, in modern history they are well documented, however in the past they weren’t. On March 10 1928 Christine Collins reported her nine year old son Walter missing to the Los Angeles Police Department, she was told that in cases of missing children it was protocol to wait twenty-four hours before taking any kind of action. This was about 15 minutes into the film Changeling, and I balked at the idea of waiting to find a child. 

Luckily I have grown up in an age when if a child is missing a police officer is despatched to the house right away. This society is more cynical, and also more afraid of what could happen to our children if alone in the world. Quite rightly too, when Changeling is allowed to play out, amidst almost constant streaming tears on my part, the hideous possible fate of poor Walter Collins and countless other boys is enough to break your heart and cheer at the U.S.A’s death penalty.

Reading the actual events of 1928 it appears the film decided upon brutal murder instead of paedophilia in the Walter Collins and Chicken Coop Murders. In the cases of child kidnap you would almost want the child to be killed only and not molested, but it is a hideous fact of the world that sick minds will pervert children and silence them afterward. Or perhaps worse still kept and abused as in such cases as Joseph Fritzl who imprisoned his own daughter for 24 years.

The Police are much more capable of handling missing children cases now than they were 100 years ago, but even now children are kidnapped and never recovered. The weekend I bawled my way through Changeling marked the birthday of a British boy taken from Greece nineteen years ago, who would now be 21 years old. His mother, like Christine Collins, has never given up the search for her son and has relied on tourists sightings of similar boys. However Ben Needham was reliant upon the local island police to discover his fate, many believe an accident is a likely scenario but without proper man-hunt specialists brought in how can even a body be found?

With all this going on in the world it is unsurprising parents molly coddle, keep their children in their sight at all times, and do not let them play alone for long periods of time. And then there are the parents who should never have been allowed to reproduce, as seen in Ben Affleck’s directorial debut Gone Baby Gone. This is another heartbreaker of a film, and also a must see in my book, as it challenges the viewer’s perception of right and wrong in the welfare of children. Ultimately, might the abduction of a child from a disinterested family to put the child in a loving environment be a justified form of kidnap? I sincerely believe couples should be vetted before having a child, but us mammals still adhere to mother nature’s rules, so until the robots take over terrible people will still be able to produce offspring.

Having children in this world is a scary thought, with the fear becoming triple fold after seeing movies such as Changeling or Gone Baby Gone. There are too many situations similar to these still occurring, but that cannot prevent the evolution of the population. The police improve their missing persons systems, learning from cases where things have gone right and the child discovered, or tragically, and more often, a body is recovered. A child is as safe as the people around it, fear of the unknown will never stop us having children, nor will it cure the instinct to procreate and protect.