We emigrated to the US when I was 6, and I started school a few days after our arrival. My parents were graduate students and we lived in a housing complex for foreign graduate students with families, but it would be more apt to call it a commune of sorts; it was extremely safe, collective, elaborately enclosed, and geographically separate both from campus and the rest of the town. I honestly can&#x27;t imagine a safer place for kids. Every one of the 100+ residents had children, and there were lots of stay-at-home moms out in the backyard at pretty much all times.<p>The one thing that all foreigners could agree on, from dozens of nationalities around the globe, was that it was completely normal for a school-aged child to get home from school by themselves and spend the afternoon and&#x2F;or early evening alone, calling on neighbours or others on hand if they needed help. Practically, many of these graduate students struggled to survive on tiny stipends, and took (sometimes not so legal) jobs to make ends meet. They also had to work harder than any American to try to have a chance of staying in America after their studies were complete.<p>Indiana state law and campus law enforcement did not take kindly to this. I was probably the only child of ex-Soviet extraction that was not at some point kidnapped by the university&#x27;s security and turned over to an American foster family for two or three days while they sabre-rattled the parents with child neglect charges. These poor students had no money, no understanding of the US legal system, and they were helpless and scared. Many of them had to go through the &quot;welcome to America, here&#x27;s your middle finger!&quot; experience. It was almost an established hazing ritual to be harassed by CPS&#x2F;social services.<p>This harassment was a routine occurrence, and after a while, I learned that university security were not our friends, subconsciously souring me on police for life when I otherwise had no traumatic experiences on which to base that. They were always watching us, profiling us, trying to identify patterns such as seeing a child out after dark (which is like 4:30 PM in the winter in northern Indiana) routinely. Did they not have anything better to do? It was absolutely bewildering for almost all of the residents to learn that US state law considered it child neglect to leave a child unattended until age twelve; this would be unthinkable in most places around the globe.