Hacker News Reader

Comment by coldcode | Hacker News Reader

I really wonder if the actual vs imagined crime rate against children has changed since I was a kid in the 60's. I rarely got driven to schools unless I took a bus. Often we walked or rode a bicycle. Perhaps it's related to more media coverage of crimes causing more fear and back in those days we had little understanding so we weren't worried.

I was mugged once walking on Halloween when I was 6-8 or so by a group of teenagers who took my candy and pushed me to the ground. They then continued to walk down the street (toward my house) and I ran home crying, told my dad, he confronted the teens, identified their parents (not sure how) and called them. In the end I got something of the candy back and I don't know what happened to the teens. I don't think I ever liked Halloween much after that experience.

View on HN

> I really wonder if the actual vs imagined crime rate against children has changed since I was a kid in the 60's.

I'm not sure if the data exists for that period, but violent crimes against children in the US are declining sharply. Assault is down 33% between 2003 and 2011, rape down 43%. Matches up with the broader collapse in violent crime in the US.

Now you asked about the 60s, and for murder as a whole (other violent crime follows the same trend), the 30s and 80s were peaks, and the 60s and right now are valleys; if we assume violence against children tracks violence as a whole, it's probable that the the crime rate against children right now is roughly the same now as it was in the 60s (ie, tied for the lowest level since the great depression).

Conversely, I think it's pretty clear that the imagined crime rate (for everything, including children) is basically at an all time high. Polls routinely show that overwhelming majorities of people believe crime is getting worse, even as we settle in for another decade of collapsing crime rates.

So in short, while I'm not aware of any research that answers your question exactly, the answer is very clearly "yes".

Go over to this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10365463 and see how many people are calling walking with cash dangerous and foolish. It is mostly imagined given the CDC stats. I was a kid in the 70's and both of us were in much more danger than a kid today.

Media has 24 hours to cover things today as opposed to an hour or two back in the day. We hear about everything today and ratings are made by scaring the crap out of us. Welcome to the shutin world for children.

I was definitely nervous when I sold my last car and was rolling around with $20k in my pocket. My brain knows the odds are very low, but my instinct knows the expected loss is very high.

Those kind of risk are hard to evaluate.

It seems if you were selling a used car for $20k that you might have the forethought to request a cashier's check from a reputable bank. Easier in many ways than living with the terrible toll of worrying about walking around with 20k in your pocket...

Well coldcode & sliverstorm, I guess you don't have to visit the other thread to see what I was talking about. Its almost as if crime had gone up instead of way down since the 60's and 70's, or everyone is really confident everyone else can avail themselves of all the financial instruments a bank offers.

In general checks cannot be trusted, no matter the bank it claims to be from.

I’m now 19, I grew up in Germany, and I was never mugged or anything – there were some people who jumped in front of my bike to annoy me, but never actual muggings. Nothing of my stuff has ever been stolen.

And as kids, even just 5, we walked to the bakery and bought bread rolls for the family breakfast.

+1 Its the same in Finland. Now my kids walk to school every day.

Obviously. Often kids start to have to walk to primary school here with 6, so they start to walk alone to library, bakery, etc with 5.

And when they start to have to use public transit to get to secondary school with 10 every day, it makes sense that they start by going shopping or similar places with 8/9 by bus/metro/etc.

What's the furthest you reckon they walk?

I was driven to school, though I walked 250m to a neighbours house half the time for the lift. Walking to school would have taken over half an hour at a good, adult pace.

(The fear was probably traffic more than strangers.)

My elementary school was 1.4km away, the nearest bakery was like 800m, the grocery store was next to the bakery, the library was next to the school.

From 10 on I had to go to a secondary school which was 4.5km away, so I usually used the bike, but walked sometimes. At that age I also started using the bus to get to the other side of the city, or to take the bike and go to a cinema 12km away with friends, etc.

We obviously had almost no traffic here – except for busses and bikes. And construction vehicles.

Ah, getting mugged for your candy on Halloween - an annual tradition in my neighborhood.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com