Pizzas to catch parents , Hungry Kya?

IN THE Indian summer of 2002, ‘Hungry Kya?’ was the advertising slogan for a popular pizza brand whose campaign showed all types, including prisoners in striped uniform, pining away for the product. Some five years later, the Butler County Child Enforcement Agency (BCCEA) in the American state of Ohio is placing wanted posters of child-support scofflaws on local pizza boxes. BCCEA director Cynthia Brown was quoted by AP as saying that the idea struck her while she was ordering pizza at a parlour. “It suddenly dawned on me that most people running from the law don’t eat out, they order pizza.” Absconding parents refusing to pay child support is a problem in the US. While state child-support agencies collected over $23 billion for 17.2 million children in 2005, the cumulative dues since these agencies started functioning some 30 years ago is $106 billion. An alternate point of view has been expressed by American Coalition for Fathers and Children executive director Michael McCormick who says that kids could be affected when they see a parent on a missing poster and know their friends might see it. All of which reminds one of a popular number performed some four decades ago by the late country music singer Johnny Cash for the benefit of the inmates of the San Quentin penitentiary and whose chorus went, “Wanted Man, Wanted Man/Wherever you are going, you are still a Wanted Man!” But, then, Cash empathised with the underclass in America and would have refused to accept that all parents who lagged behind in support payments were deadbeats. The idealist in Cash came through in lyrics like “Lake Michigan wind sure is cold/And I need a jacket for my shoulders/But I’m not bound and I never will be/To a wrinkled, crinkled, wadded dollar bill!” Cynthia Brown says her agency tries to work with parents by trying to help them find jobs and that criminal charges are a last resort. And the pizza is no longer just a snack!

Courtesy: EconomicTimes
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