Patty Wetterling
speaker
95 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2024
last heard Jan 2024
Patty Wetterling’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And she said, would you like to meet my son? And I was not sure if I was strong enough to do that, but we were right across the street from the hospital. So I did, I went in and he was in a coma, but she knew that he knew she was there. He would squeeze her hand and, and she knew where he was and it gave her, you know, strength to, to visit. And, you know, we could support one another.
She was somewhat, I, it's, it's a, there's crazy dynamics when you have extreme situations, but often though, you might have somebody who had lost a child to cancer and, But they would say to me, but it's not as bad as, you know, and I don't think that's fair to any of us to compare because the loss of a child is that deep, deep, raw, horrible thing. We're not supposed to outlive our children.
And so I think acknowledging the wrongness in the scheme of what we thought life was going to be is it's healthy. It's healthy to acknowledge. Yeah.
And there's a... There's a sense of, you know, you're supposed to protect your children. And then there are situations that we can't protect our kids from.
One second. I keep choking here. What happened with me was that, you know, my being a stay-at-home person, mom, I, kids were my world. And I believe that children have the right to grow up safe and follow their dreams. And I began, that was a big part of my message. We need to build a world where that protects that.
And as you alluded to earlier, child abduction is related to, it's on the, the long line of child victimization and, you know, pornography, uh, Grooming, sex trafficking, child sexual assault. I mean, they're all along this line of child victimization. If we want to stop this, we've got to stop sexual exploitation of children. And to do that, we need to raise kids who would never think twice.
to sexually harm another person. We have to raise healthy children with respectful relationship training. And when some go astray, the good news is children who've been charged with sexual assaulting somebody else, when given treatment, they have the highest rate of Of success and never repeating the lowest rate of recidivism, like 97% in one study don't reoffend sexually.
It's really rewarding to know that if a child acts out that they can get some help. And they're not on a trajectory to be forever causing harm. And so we need to be really cognizant of the big problem. I think this is where public health comes in. We can't wait till it's this. We've got to go upstream and work towards that world. And it is a world that Jacob Nguyen believed in. He
He was an advocate. We had a lot of great friends and he would come home from school and scream if something wasn't fair. You know, it might not have had anything to do with him, but it mattered. when something wasn't fair. And he would stick up for his friends. And I think that that's a big part of it. The other piece, which kept me sane, was the way our community rallied.
Everybody came together and kids were jumping rope for Jacob. And when I met with some... homeless kids and they were trying to give me their lunch money for the reward and search fund um teachers sent notes from children and the notes were so you know never give up stay there for jacob if my parents quit hoping for me i wouldn't want to go home you know it's like
Listening to their take on the story was really important for me and my advocacy work. It's like, I'm fighting for that world that they deserve.
It did. It became a... a personal battle between the bad guy. Like I refuse to let him take anything else. You can't have the world that Jacob knew. I will fight for that till forever. You know, do I lighten up on my activities now that I'm old? Yeah.
But I still, I love believing in the world where kids can dream and go after their dreams and have the support system and the tools that they need to build a healthy, happy life.
which is just... But there's some clarifiers. Often, well, the highest category is a runaway child, and they are at very high risk, especially in today's world, of being exploited. Somebody offering them shelter for favors or food. And that's part of giving kids empowerment and knowing how to find resources that are healthier and not fall for those tricks and lures.
Most kids are not abducted at gunpoint like Jacob was. Most are tricked or lured into a dangerous situation. And I think many of those are preventable. Watch who's watching your children. If my one daughter had a coach who would call the girls and ask about their clothing. And it got really one of those trust your gut, there was something not right about this.
And so we had discussions about, you know, because I can't be with, you know, our, my daughters all the time. So what should they do when something happens and having adults that they can talk to, and it's not always the parent that kids can go to, but Trusted adults. I used to tell my kids, talk to your Uncle Russ. My brother is a hoot. He's funny. He's approachable.
They could talk to him about anything. And so, you know, giving your kids that empowerment. And then of those, you know, the runaway kids, you know, they come home. It's a big challenge for law enforcement because some kids run many times a year. So those numbers capture repeat runners as well. So the number of abduction, stereotypical abduction is about 1% of all of that. It's the smallest piece.
But the thing is, it's the one that has the greatest amount of fear. So we have to watch, you know, about stats and numbers and collecting numbers. Yeah. They've been inflated over time, and then they kind of come back to reality. And I think of stereotypical kidnapping, those have not changed over time. It's pretty much the same each year.
I'd say it's under 100 that are stereotypical kidnapping every year. But the number of kids exploited, especially with the Internet and the social media... games online, that number is exponential. We have to really be careful about that world that we're introducing our children to at really young ages.
But they're also very harmful because you're snatching a child from everything they know, from their pets, their dogs, their friends, their school, their toys, their clothes, you know, and putting them in another world. And it's really traumatic for these kids. Yeah. There was an organization, I'm not sure if they're still active, called Take Root because they're uprooted literally.
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