Today I Learned
What did you learn today? Share it with us!
We learn something new every day. This is a community dedicated to informing each other and helping to spread knowledge.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must begin with TIL. Linking to a source of info is optional, but highly recommended as it helps to spark discussion.
** Posts must be about an actual fact that you have learned, but it doesn't matter if you learned it today. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.**
Rule 2- Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding non-TIL posts.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-TIL posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.
If you vocally harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.
Partnered Communities
You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.
Community Moderation
For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.
view the rest of the comments
The cops just found a guy who was on a trip repairing pianos with a kid that slightly looked like the one they were looking for. They arrested him and took the kid. Even when the mother came to town to attest that it was her kid, they gave her the run around and, since she was too poor to fight it in court, stole her kid. Those kids didn't even look anything alike... People nowadays don't seem too bright on average, but I think maybe people back then were extra stupid.
Stealing poor children was common back then:
Georgia Tann (1891-1950) was an American child trafficker who, through the Tennessee Children's Home Society, operated an extensive black-market baby ring from the 1920s to 1950. Though her methods were criminal and involved kidnapping children from poor families to sell to wealthy ones, her practices inadvertently shaped key aspects of the modern adoption system.
Sealed Records: Tann championed the practice of closed adoptions with sealed records to hide the children's true origins and prevent birth parents or adoptive parents from challenging her sales. This became a standard practice in the U.S. for decades.
Agency Adoptions: Before Tann, adoptions were rare, often arranged informally or through orphan trains. Tann professionalized the process through an agency model, which increased the rate of adoptions but also allowed her scheme to thrive due to a lack of oversight.
Focus on the "Best" Home: She promoted the idea that children should be taken from low-income families and placed with what she called "people of the higher type," which removed much of the social stigma previously associated with adoption in certain circles.
The exposure of her crimes in 1950 led to widespread adoption reforms and stronger legal oversight in the United States to protect children and parents.
She would literally drive her limo through poor neighborhoods, attracting the kids to her car, lure them into the car with bribes, then just drive off, and sell them to someone.
While her crimes were discovered and investigated, she died of cancer before ever facing trial. It is estimated that she stole over 5000 children, of which at least 19 died of abuse or murder.
Despite several states vowing to investigate the adoptions, no children were ever restored to their original families.
Did Bobby Dunbar's parents not point out that he wasn't their kid? Or were they just like, "Fuck it, close enough."
The boy was 4, not like this was two infants being swapped. The parents had to know.
Yeah, according to the wikipedia article, they were dubious, but just rolled with it, apparently, maybe out of desperation and wishful thinking. I have a bit of face blindness myself, but I would like to think I would remember my own kid if I had one. Even the real mother of the kid made some kind of show of not being sure from the way it reads. That is what made me think all these people were loonies. Both mothers stripped down the kid and looked for scars and moles like they couldn't tell by looking at him.
I suspect that the parents either knew or suspected that Bobby drowned in the lake and had gone with the kidnapping story from the start, then had to double down when the police presented them with some kids.