Good intentions must allow for good judgement

It was with the best of intentions that members of the Surrey B.C. community reached out to assist a distraught three-year-old who witnesses say was slapped across the face by an adult and abandoned at a bus stop, wet and not dressed for the weather.

Shoppers at a liquor store across the street from a bus stop in the city on Saturday noticed a child all alone, wandering near traffic. When a store employee went out to him, he came to her with his arms up, wanting to be picked up.

From there, common compassion took over. He was being cared for so well at the liquor store that police let him stay there for hours while they sought after the person who struck him and left him cold and alone. Representatives from the province's Ministry of Children and Family development came later, and the child was reunited with his mother.

A man, said to be the boy's father, was found and faces a number of charges, including for the theft of a few juice containers from a nearby store.

If ever there was an incident than can be red-flagged for more details before people render judgement, this is one of them.

In none of this has the boy been identified by name — for which we should all be thankful. In the end, it was a blessing the child barely spoke to his amateur protectors, who obviously only wanted to help. They did not learn his name before they could publish it without consent.

These Good Samaritans violated a cardinal rule in dealing with vulnerable people, and especially minors. You never, never, identify a minor without consent of a parent or legal guardian. You just don't.

Never mind that the youngster had been slapped around and left in the rain at a bus stop wearing only a swim suit and light clothes.

But smartphones and social media overtook good sense and the customers at the store snapped his photo and spread it around on both Facebook and Twitter.

Several news reports on the incident say the people wanted to help locate the child's mother. A laudable thing, except that their method violated an unwitting child's right to personal privacy.

To make this worse, police praised the help of the people who did this. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Further compounding the violation, the CTV news bureau for B.C. got the photo (easy enough since it was floating in both Facebook and the Twitterverse) and published it on their web site, only partially blurred. Anyone who knew the boy could recognize him from that photo, I'm sure. I wonder if legal advice on this was sought before publishing. In any case, they should take it down, now.

I've been in the news biz since I was 19. I was a news photographer for 12 years and back in the day, I probably violated this rule. . . I don't know how many times. I won awards for this stuff.

I would ask for a parent's permission to take a photo of a kid in the park, say. But if the parent wasn't around, in those days you shot anyway.

For a short while at this newspaper (I would say 1977-1978), we were required to publish the full name, parents' names and address of children we photographed. Rules of the managing editor at the time.

All of this, we know now, was totally and utterly wrong.

These days, every school board, every social agency that deals with minors, has extensive FOIP training. That also includes news agencies.

Freedom of Information and Privacy has been a verb for so long, people barely remember it was ever a noun. “Has that child been FOIPed?” That's a question that a reporter must be able to answer, along with the Five W's of news gathering.

No FOIP, no photo. Probably no story, unless it is carefully edited.

Yet in the age of social media, a helpless crime victim can have his or her identity published around the globe at the speed of light. By people who only mean well. But it's a picture that can be seen by thousands who may not mean well — or really have no right to know in any event.

What if that child has been the victim of a sexual assault, prior to the incident at the bus stop? Do we now splash the face of rape victims all through the Internet without consent?

To all those kind and loving people who helped the child, bless you, thank you.

We see so few news stories that redeem humanity’s basis instinct for good, that many people wonder if it even exists anymore.

Let us all hope no further harm comes to this child because of outside interventions, and that he grows up happy, healthy and as anonymous as anyone else could be.

And let us all keep in mind, that in our compassion, we do not use poor judgement, which could cause even more harm.