Kerre Woodham: Abuse fears flights of fancy

As the mother of a daughter who flew between Auckland and Wellington as an unaccompanied minor for years, I never, ever worried about the prospect of her being brutally assaulted by a paedophile. It didn't even cross my mind. And if that means I won't win Plunket Mother of the Year, well, so be it.

I've read the letters to the editor last week regarding this issue and I've noticed some mothers writing in applauding the decision as they believe it will keep their children safe. Well, for a start, flying is an inherently risky business. If they truly wanted to keep their children safe, they would demand that the plane never flew more than six feet off the ground.

Even travelling to the airport is a risky business. You've got more chance of having a car accident than you have of being interfered with by a paedophile.

Secondly, although the people who work in the sex abuse field believe that around every corner there are paedophiles slavering and slobbering in anticipation of getting their hairy mitts on children, most people aren't paedophiles. In fact, although some people find it hard to accept, most men aren't paedophiles.

They accuse me of naivety when I say the only men I know well are good, kind, loving men who would no more harm a child than they would cut off one of their limbs. I would accuse those on 24-hour paedophile watch of lacking perspective. Working in an industry where the men they meet are bad does not ipso facto make all men bad.

Thirdly, how many children have been interfered with on an Air New Zealand or Qantas flight? Go on, give us the figures. And when one softly-spoken woman told me that men could cause subliminal damage to children by sitting next to them and filling their ears with poison, I would suggest that the overt damage to children caused by inferring that no man can be trusted, is far, far worse than this imaginary danger.

Fourthly, some kids don't like sitting next to women. I received an email from a 21-year-old who'd been flying backwards and forwards across the ditch for years as an unaccompanied minor, and she said she far preferred to sit next to men. They grunted at you, picked up a magazine and then lost themselves in an article and left you alone. Women, she said, smelled far too strongly of Red Door and felt they had to talk to you for the entire four-hour journey or else they had failed in their feminine duty.

The feeling is mutual. Many women I spoke to also said they'd prefer not to be seated next to children and that it was gender bias to make them do so. I could go on, but I'm running out of space. Suffice to say, Air New Zealand and Qantas have handled this extremely badly indeed. Surely there are ways of looking after the children on their flights without offending and alienating more than half of their customers.

And if you have to send your children unaccompanied on long haul flights, where I do concede it's a slightly riskier enterprise, you might like to try Cathay Pacific. Depending on the numbers of unaccompanied minors, they have InFlight Guardians, usually the wives of the pilots, who will travel in uniform and take care of your precious cargo. Other airlines may have the same facility - so check it out.