My oldest daughter is already old enough to fly as an unaccompanied minor. She has a couple of friends who have already logged thousands of miles in the air traveling without parents.

Lately, stories of airlines putting kids on wrong flights or losing track of their charges makes me think we’ll wait a few more years before sending her off on her own to visit the grandparents. A recent article in the SF Weekly has given me something else to consider (and truth be told, it has crossed my mind more than once): sexual predators on planes.

I’m not one to panic at what is very, very uncommon. In the past two decades, a database search turned up 10 reported incidents. Though there were certainly more, hundreds of thousands of kids fly without their parents every year, so it’s still relatively secure to let kids fly alone.

However, there are no Department of Transportation rules regulating minors flying alone and paying extra for unaccompanied minors can mean different things to different airlines. Then there’s the plane itself. Lawyers who have handled these sexual assault cases say, “the controlled and confined yet anonymous environment is well suited for a child predator.”

From SF Weekly:

In a majority of the instances, a man switched seats to be next to a child traveling alone. Also, a significant number of the reported molestations occurred on evening flights, when the victim and any potential witnesses were asleep. Several children reported that when the touching began, it seemed accidental or even well intentioned, and only later crossed the line.

And that’s just what happened to a California girl. Her mother paid $99 extra for a special service ticket and flight attendants got her on the right plane. After boarding, she got up to use the restr0om. When she came back, there was a man sitting next to her: he had switched seats. The girl fell asleep on the overnight flight but woke up when the man’s elbow was rubbing her stomach. She eventually stuck her teddy bear on her side but the man continued moving into her space.

Suddenly his hand was on her thigh, and he was tugging at her seat belt. Then he was pulling on her underwear. Emily said she pushed his hand away, and he put it back. She pushed it away again, took her seat belt off, and resituated her teddy bear between herself and the man. She moved as far as she could toward the aisle.

That’s when the man put his hand inside her pajama pants and underwear, Emily later told the police, and he began moving his hand back and forth over what she called her “privates.”

With that, Emily jumped up and made for the front of the airplane. “I want to move! I want to move!” she told a flight attendant, who noticed that Emily was shaking and later said so to the police.

The man, Jackson Senyonga, is a minister in Texas, but also travels frequently to Uganda, where he is from and where (horrifyingly!) he owns a village where 1,000 orphaned children live. Charges were filed against Senyonga but the case was declined, even though Senyonga admitted he had been touching the girl (though he denied sticking his hands down her pants).

In one case where alleged attacker Ronald Evan Mays was convicted, the judge overturned the case due to improperly admitted evidence. But mostly, airlines settle with the victims.

So what’s a long-distance grand-kid to do?

I, by no means, want to blame the victims — what happened to them was just awful. I would have assumed any kid wearing the special “unaccompanied minor” tag would be checked on a few times throughout the flight by the attendants — a girl leaning over the edge of her seat with a teddy bear crammed into her side is something of a red flag.

Since you apparently can’t count on the airlines, when we’re ready to send our kids off alone on a plane we’ll be sure to sit down and have that very special talk about personal space, trusting their instincts and getting the hell out of any questionable situations no matter what the seatbelt sign says.

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Photo: SF Weekly

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