JAMES P. writes:

You may recall the story of Abby Sunderland, who attempted to sail around the world solo at age 16 but who had to be rescued in rough seas.

Dutch girl Laura Dekker succeeded in sailing around the world solo. She is now 16 but was 14 when she began the journey. She may not return to the Netherlands because “Dutch authorities tried to block Ms Dekker’s trip, arguing she was too young to risk her life, while school officials complained she should be in a classroom.”  You will note that the “best rated” comments in the Daily Mail article cheer the “talented brave woman.” The worst rated ones say that her parents were irresponsible to permit her to do this and the Dutch government was right to discourage her.

Note also that,

 unlike other young sailors who recently crossed the globe, Ms Dekker repeatedly anchored at ports along the way to sleep, study and repair her 38-foot sailboat.  [JP: Ports where she stopped included the Canary Islands, Panama, the Galapagos Islands, Tonga, Fiji, Bora Bora, Australia, South Africa and St. Maarten.]  During her trip, she went surfing, scuba diving, cliff diving and discovered a new hobby: playing the flute, which she said in her weblog was easier to play than a guitar in bad weather.

Thus, she was not merely exposed to the dangers of the sea, but the dangers associated with being a young woman alone in foreign cities, some of them in Third World countries. She is lucky not to be another naive white girl murdered overseas. Allowing her to sail the ocean alone was insane, but normal parents would never even allow their 14-year-old daughter travel safely, by aircraft, to Panama or South Africa for an unsupervised holiday by herself.

Her lawyer said, ‘Her wish to do this was something that came from her heart and soul and no one was going to stop her.’ Someone paid for her boat and paid for all that scuba diving and having fun in foreign ports, and that person could certainly have stopped her.  Children often want to do things that “come from the heart and soul” but parents have a fundamental responsibility to prevent children from doing things that are unsafe and inappropriate however much children desire to do them.

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