Last fall, a 10-year-old boy named Soren Patterson took a short walk from his rural Georgia home to a local dollar store just under a mile away, walking alongside a road known as Mineral Bluff Highway for much of his journey.
The boy wasn't struck by a driver, kidnapped by a stranger, or harmed in any way. With a 35-mile per hour speed limit at certain points and sidewalks giving way to dirt paths in others, Mineral Bluff Highway, which is also called GA-60, isn't exactly pedestrian-friendly — but like many rural legacy highways, it's still common to see adult residents, and even children, traveling on it outside cars.
Soren's mother Brittany Patterson had left him with a grandparent while she took one of his siblings to the doctor, and she had no idea her son had even left the family's 16-acre property. She later said, though, that she would have trusted Soren to manage the walk by himself if he'd asked.
When a passerby spotted Soren walking alone, though, his solo adventure into town would inspire a call to the police — and later that day, it would land Brittany under arrest for reckless conduct.
In a legally-recorded call to her lawyer shared with CNN, prosecutor Emma Harper later said that the arrest had been prompted by the fact that Soren was found walking on “a busy highway with no sidewalk."
"It’s not walkable," Harper continued. "It’s not safe. … That’s not a thing that you do here. Because you’re gonna get hit by a car.”
Patterson's arrest would soon touch off a wave of uproar about whether parents should be the ones held accountable when their children end up in dangerous places — even if those "places" are roads in their very own neighborhoods.
On social and national media alike, most of the outrage seemed to come down squarely on the shoulders of the Georgia police officers who arrested Patterson, rather than the mother herself. ABC News connected her story to the surgeon general's advisory that 41 percent of U.S. parents "struggle to function" due to stress, thanks in part to a culture that demands that parents supervise their children 24/7; writer Lenore Skenazy, meanwhile, held up the case as a clear example of the "criminalization of childhood independence," adding that "Brittany’s 'crime' boiled down to having a child with legs."
Skenazy herself faced controversy when she published a 2008 article entitled "Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Ride the Subway Alone." (Her child was also unharmed.) Today, a Google search for the term "World's Worst Mom" generates pages of stories about her — a brand Skenazy seems to have even embraced, hosting a reality show of the same name, founding the parenting non-profit Let Grow, and writing a book about raising "Free Range Kids."
When children do get hurt on America's dangerous transportation system — and , many of them do, given that traffic violence is still the leading cause of death for children below 12 — the consequences for parents can be even worse, especially if those parents belong to marginalized groups.
In 2012, another Georgia mom, Raquel Nelson – who is Black — was famously convicted on charges of second-degree vehicular homicide and other crimes, despite the fact that her 4-year-old son, A.J., was killed while crossing a dangerous road on foot with his mother and two siblings at his side. The family was traveling outside of a crosswalk, because the closest one was roughly one-third of a mile away, and the family was seeking a direct route between their apartment building and a bus stop directly across the street. Nelson faced up to three years in prison.
Though her most serious charge was later dropped, Nelson was still forced to pay a $200 jaywalking fine; the driver who killed A.J., meanwhile, served six months on a hit-and-run charge, and the designers of the dangerous four-lane road where the crash occurred were not held accountable for supplying insufficient crosswalks.
Patterson's lawyer, David DeLugas worries that his client's still-pending case will also have an unjust outcome – even as he acknowledges that Patterson's race may have played a role in the supportive public reaction to her story so far.
"[Patterson] happens to be an attractive white woman, but you know what? If you're a minority, if you're rich, if you're poor, if you have no education, if you dropped out of school ... it doesn't matter — you, as a parent, have the same constitutional rights," DeLugas added. "Your children have the same rights to go about in our society where we enjoy [the] freedom and liberty to just exist."
DeLugas argues that if the state of Georgia truly believed that Mineral Bluff Highway was too dangerous for Soren to walk on, the state would have at least put up a "No pedestrians" sign, or passed laws clearly prohibiting children his age from walking without adult supervision. (The state's Department of Child and Family Services advises caregivers that children as young as 9 may be left alone for brief periods depending on their level of maturity, but those guidelines aren't legally binding.)
Still, DeLugas fears those types of laws might criminalize what should be a child's fundamental right to basic independence — not to mention a parent's right to allow children to explore the world on their own, rather than serving as de facto chauffeurs.
"Parents around the country are [willing to] let their child go ride off on a bicycle, or go for a walk, or say, 'Hey, I'm going to run down to John's house and play,'" he added. "[But other] parents go, 'Hang on; let me give you a ride.' Well, you shouldn't have to do that. You shouldn't have to burn gas and CO2 emissions. ... We don't need policies or laws that chill our freedom in that way."
For street safety advocates, Patterson's case also calls into question why the designers of Mineral Bluff Highway aren't being held accountable for potentially endangering pedestrians — even if Soren himself wasn't harmed.
Roughly 345 pedestrians were killed in the state of Georgia in 2022; under the national roadway safety plan adopted in 2021, the federal Department of Transportation acknowledged that addressing road design is a critical factor in preventing car crashes, including simple design changes like lowering speed limits to the 20 mile-per-hour threshold that pedestrians are more likely to survive, reinforcing those limits with infrastructure that makes it challenging to break them, or at least adding sidewalks on both sides of the road.
To truly protect children without sacrificing their independence, though, some advocates have argued that we need to more comprehensively decenter driving from our society, and stop relying on cars and parents as our sole protective shield against stranger abduction, crashes with other vehicles, and more. In a 2009 Salon interview later written about in Streetsblog, Skenazy pointed out that "If you don't want to have your child in any kind of danger ... you certainly couldn't drive them in a car, because that's the number one way kids die.
"[But] it would change our entire lifestyle if we couldn't drive our kids in a car," Skenazy continued. "It's a danger that we just willingly accept without examining it too much."
Whatever the solutions, DeLugas hopes Patterson's case will prompt a deeper conversation about what families lose when they're criminalized for simply existing in places the state deems dangerous — even if the state created those dangerous conditions in the first place.
"The kids are the victims and all of this, the unintended consequence is all the parents, now, who say, 'No, you can't go out and play; No, I can't leave you at home for a couple hours while I go do run this errand. [Even if] I know you're perfectly safe, I don't want to get arrested,'" he added. "'That really just has to stop."
