Little wonder parents hover over their children. Even if those that do not, surely experience just as few serious incidents that impact on children through unanticipated outside sources. The nightmare of being aware that something dreadful could happen to a child through happenstance, a momentary lapse of diligence, or an event that is entirely out of the hands of those tasked to look to the welfare of vulnerable children, is mind-numbing.

Or it certainly would be if that was uppermost always in mind. Most normal people feel that nothing untoward will happen to their children, taking as many precautions as they possibly can to safeguard them from harm. Yet it takes a leap of faith to hand over an infant, a toddler, a young child, to the care of someone other than the parents, in day-care situations. Where physical abuse can occur, where accidents like a drowning, or a child inadvertently injured can occur.

And when parents become accustomed to their older children being driven by school bus daily to attend their local elementary or high school or to take a part-time service job nearby, they certainly do not give a thought to the mental stability and odious thoughts that might exist in the mind of a bus driver. In Cleveland, three teens suddenly disappeared, one by one, in different but close years.

Disappeared, vanished, nothing heard from them again.

And then, suddenly, they are released from a decade of living hell. Who might imagine that in the midst of an ordinary community on a street of normal people living in average homes, one of the houses would hold three young women, shackled to ensure they stay where three men in their 50s want them to be, to be used for one purpose only, to satisfy their sexual appetites.

It presents a mind contest to even wrap your thoughts around the picture of three young girls begging, pleading, entreating to be freed, promising whatever it might take to try to persuade their captors to give them liberty. Discovering that there is, in the end, nothing they can do to help themselves out of a horrible predicament no one would wish on their worst enemy.

How could neighbours not be aware that something was oddly awry in that house? No one might suspect who the house serviced; three men holding three vulnerable young women hostage for ten years because it challenges the mind beyond what it can accept. Yet it would seem that people on the street did report inordinately strange and sometimes very alarming sightings, but that the police in Cleveland did not pursue the neighbours' concerns.

If the police are disinterested, who might be enlisted to discover whether there might possibly be any reason to suspect that young women, eventually given up for dead by their grieving families, were being held in brutally vicious conditions belying their humanity?