Newsflash: The Kids Are All Right. (Child Safety And Abductions)

[HuckleB]

On another GD thread, I noted far too many posts pushing the theme that the world is more dangerous for kids today than it ever has been. Well, at least in the US and other wealthy nations, the opposite is actually true. Children are exceedingly safe today. That does not mean that there are no dangers, of course. No one can protect themselves or their children definitively. The question is one of balance, in my mind.

The following pieces begin to bring some balance to that equation:

Stop worrying about your children!
http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2009/05/04/free_range_kids/

Our irrational fear of child-killers
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/mar/04/childprotection-bulger

How children lost the right to roam in four generations
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-462091/How-children-lost-right-roam-generations.html#ixzz0hPkG0DqR

The Mean World Syndrome - Case Study: Child Abductions
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BhrNeSJSUE&feature=youtube_gdata

The Reality of Child Kidnapping Data
http://freerangekids.wordpress.com/2010/03/06/george-stephanopoulos-spinmeister-gets-spun/

Child abduction cases by strangers are rare
http://oaklandnorth.net/2009/08/14/child-abduction-cases-by-strangers-are-rare/

:hi:

[Wilms]

1. Seriously. It's not like in Afghanistan.

One Child Dies Every Two Minutes in Afghanistan

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=7856981&mesg_id=7856981

[Chemical Bill]

2. I walked alone to school in the first grade.

Now my mother has taken up the bandwagon of "nature deficit disorder", but she doesn't see the connection with the media's need to sell fear.

Bill

[HuckleB]

3. Indeed.

I walked to school alone as a kindergartner. It was in a small town in the '70s, but it was about a mile to school. Today, parents around us, in a very safe neighborhood, don't let their kids walk two blocks to school, even in much later grades.

[SoCalDem]

7. We roamed as kids..and so did my kids.. but today's are not as free-range

My "across-the-street play area" was a jungle..literally...we lived in Panama, and our street was the last street before the "wild-areas"..

We would have breakfast, and promise to stay close..and then we would head into the jungle for a day of climbing trees and exploring..picking fruit if we were hungry..and trying to catch monkeys & various other critters..

It never occurred to us to be afraid of what might "get us"..even though we once caught a panther on our porch, and I was bitten by a poisonous snake when I was 10 (but that happened in our own carport..with my Mother 5 ft away from me)..

We were brave, adventurous kids..and not knowing any difference, I raised my boys the same way:)..As grownups, they are grateful we gave them freedom..

[HuckleB]

9. Today's kids would be doing good to get half way to that world.

[slampoet]

4. My local police insisted on fingerprinting kids in the early 80's. They then pinned crimes on teens.

They accused the sons of poor families of crimes they didn't commit.

It would have gone on for a long time but they accused the local doctor's son of arson when he was onstage in front of 500 people 150 miles away. When they got caught faking the teen's fingerprints there was a sudden dropping of all the cases that had been drummed up.

No cop was ever disciplined.

[jwirr]

5. Fear is a powerful emotion. I used to live in a senior high rise. Our

community was about 10,000 people. There was a gruesome murder that had women going to a self defense class. The local police told the women that crime had gone up 100% in our community lately. The people in the building started fighting about security and made life miserable. In reality the fact was that there had been only one murder in the community and now this second one was considered a 100% rise in crime. It is what we hear about that makes us afraid even when that is a very isolated incident.

[HuckleB]

6. Unfortunately, your anecdote seems to be one that is repeated across the country.

[Posteritatis]

8. And the backlashes usually hit precisely the wrong targets too

There's a mob war going on in my town.

Well, that's at least how the cops and press put it; while they're technically correct it's more a sad parody of a Hetfield-McCoy feud with more meth and worse aim. A couple of families worth of wannabe mafiosi - one group actually call itself "the MOB," capitalized accordingly - hiss and spit at each other, get in bar fights, etc. There've been about a half dozen shooting incidents in the last year or so tied to them, almost all of which involve some extraordinarly bad shots and an extraordinarily lucky gangster-wannabe. (He was hit a few times, always grazes.) No fatalities or injuries that require more than outpatient treatment, that sort of thing.

Now, to up the sad quotient, most of the participants are middle aged or older. Lucky Guy is in his early or mid-thirties, a few years older than I am, and is by far the youngest participant who winds up in the press or in court, both of which he's a regular at. So basically what this is is all the ferocity and Serious Business of a drug war with all the competence and class of a bunch of drunken rednecks decades too old to be taking part in this kind of thing, on average.

Now while this was going on, we had a provincial election. The Conservatives were doomed, and it was mainly a question of how doomed they were. (It turned out to be very doomed indeed; they got smashed by the NDP in a provincial first.) What do they do when they're in trouble? The same thing the federal Conservatives, or Republicans in the US do - they start campaigning on fear and paranoia, scaring seniors and feigning the whole "tough on crime" attitude as the only just response to our deadly, deadly world. So obviously they jump right on top of this mess. What do they do to politicise it?

They promise, if elected, to impose a provincewide curfew on minors, no exceptions, with vast fines to the families of anyone out past the curfew. The solution to all this violence is to Keep Our Children Off The Streets And Keep Other Peoples' Children From Shooting Us All!

That's a perfectly reasonable reaction to a bunch of forty and fifty-somethings in an area of a few subdivisions trying to shoot each other up in one way in order to get control over the other way of shooting themselves up, right?

They played the statistics game in the way you describe too, of course.