Even though events like this are incredibly rare, I still don’t let my 7 yr old son go to a different section of the store on his own. Now I have maybe moved over one aisle, but that is very rare, and I am very aware of our surroundings. Good for Brittany for fighting back. She’s a brave, strong girl.

There’s no need to worry about what will happen when they turn 18. At that point, there will still be 12 more years to make the transition.
http://www.salon.com/2012/01/16/get_used_to_living_with_mom_and_dad/singleton/

My 8 and 4yos go all over the store by themselves. When we go into a supermarket, they have their own list of things they have to get. It keeps them occupied and teaches them how to be in the world: how to ask for help when it’s needed, how to talk to people they don’t know and how to figure out when those people are taking advantage of them.
Last year, I when my 4yo had just turned 4, I took him to a Walmart and had McD’s for lunch with him. As I was putting the garbage away and gathering jackets and bags, he said he was going to look at the toys. I was maybe 1min behind him and assumed he was beside the counter looking at the kid’s meal toy display. He wasn’t. I came around the corner and he wasnn’t there. I looked around and thought, he just went to the actual toys. I stayed calm and walked over to the toy section. He wasn’t there. I double checked all the toy aisles and he wasn’t there. I started to feel a bit panicky. I went back to the front of the store and the McDs to make sure I hadn’t missed him and then asked for help at Customer Service. They initated a Code Adam: locked the doors and only let out people without children and shared my son’s description with the staff. Within a minute my son was located and the staff on the phone were instructed to accompany him to customer service. They called back and said he wouldn’t go with them and I was asked to join them in the toy section. Turns out, he overshot the toys and went into seasonal goods where he got lost. When the staff approached him he verified his name but when asked to take their hand to “go see mommy” he said very loudly “No! Don’t touch me! I’m going to look at Lego.” They followed him and stayed with him till I got there. My son did exactly what I taught him to do if a stranger ever approached him and asked him to go anywhere with them. In fact, we had practiced it a few weeks before!
That incident hasn’t changed my mind about letting my kids move around the world unaccompanied. I just make sure we role play that exact sort of scenario so they never go somewhere with a stranger, even one they may know from the neighbourhood because the rule here is “noone will ever ask you to go anywhere with them except mommy, daddy, brother, aunts and grandparents – if anyone other than those people asks you to go with them anywhere, whether it’s “home”, to get a candy, to see a cute animal or anything at all my kids are instructed to scream “don’t touch me!” pull away and run to the nearest safe place (in our neighbourhood, that’s home or the pharmacy or the corner store a few blocks away where everyone’s known my son’s since infancy and who we told were our chosen safe places).

In these exceedingly rare situations, I’m going to teach my children how to react. Then I’m going to trust them to do it. Because an abduction like the one spoken of in this article happens to 1 in 10 million kids, maybe? Those are fantastic odds. Better than they were in my day, in fact. What the above video shows is that resistance works.