"Stranger kidnappings" (where someone the child doesn't know kidnaps them) are incredibly rare, a child is at much more risk from traffic, guns, cancer, or swimming pools.
The reason why child kidnappings (non-stranger) are seemingly common is because the vast majority of these are by family members (e.g. parents during a custody dispute, grandparents, etc).
Child molesters are also very rare (although you can make them seem more common by massaging the statistics, as some charities/politicians/media like to do), and on average in a large retailer there won't even be a single one.
There are stories where kids have literally died both because they were scared to approach a stranger, or a stranger was scared to approach them.
I have a kid. I am going to teach them to approach any adult, with a slight bias towards people who work there (simply because they are more likely to know the procedure for lost child, not because they're inherently safer/less safe).
Any adult is fine. The chance of them being dangerous is incredibly low, regardless of gender. Plus the whole "men are bad" thing just mixes a simple message up, what if they spot a member of staff somewhere but they're male. Do they approach or do they not? What if a man is the only adult around?
To be honest the whole "men are dangerous" thing is very much a large part of the core problem. It is stranger danger all over again.
Similar reasoning applies to why you should ignore all the "X doubles the risk of [some rare Y]" stuff you read in the media.
I've given this advice to my children giving "mother with children" > "store worker" > "other person with kids" > "policeman or someone in uniform or someone you think looks friendly" as the hierarchy.
You're right there is far more than money at stake - isn't that even more reason to push the odds in your favour as much as possible.
Perhaps a better analogue is that you can choose between two hospitals for your child's operation who are both very good but one has 10x the mortality rate of the other, you'd express a preference for the hospital with better outcomes regardless of the sex of the surgeons wouldn't you?
I don't understand your last sentence?
They're children. Making the message more complicated makes it harder to remember. The muddling is more dangerous than the .1 percent.
Wasn't that clear?
What do you do? You go to the first available agent.
[FWIW I'm a male who works with kids almost daily and often appear to be discriminated against because of my sex.]
Saying to have a slight bias toward children approaching women than men is a far cry from 'men are bad.'
Yes it was.
They said (paraphrasing): Women are ok. Men are not. "Mommies" (i.e. women with kids) are even better, dads are not.
If that isn't what they meant, that's fine, but that's definitely what they implied. There's no other way of reading it.
> In any case, men would statistically make up a higher percentage of child molesters, etc.
Perhaps, but we're talking astronomically small chances here.
Plus if you look at those offenses the number of child molesters who molested strangers is even tinier than the number who did it at all. The vast majority assaulted friends or family (which your advice does not protect them from).
The risk of a child getting lost and asking a child molester who is willing to kidnap them for help is near a rounding error in unlikeness.
All you teaching your kids to distrust men and male role models is doing is screwing them up, it isn't keeping them safe.
No, they said "bias towards female." Any reading which reads "bias towards x" as "x is ok, !x is not." is a complete violation of both the words and the intent of the statement.
Furthermore, biasing towards women doesn't remotely imply "men are bad." It's simply an established fact that women on average are more nurturing and empathetic, and those are qualities one should seek when one needs help.
I'd argue that most non-developmentally delayed adults are fully equipped to assist a lost or scared child.
This might come as a shock to modern society but men are fathers, grandpas, brothers, and uncles to little kids. They know how to interact with them.
All you're doing is repeating common gender tropes. There are plenty of women that are about as nurturing as a potato, and plenty of men that are extremely nurturing and comforting. But ultimately that is completely besides the point as we're talking about someone who has to take a little kid's hand and bring them to customer services/store security, we aren't asking them to adopt the child.
> I'd argue that most non-developmentally delayed adults are fully equipped to assist a lost or scared child.
No one said a fucking thing about being "fully equipped to assist." Those are your words: not mine, not the grandparent's, but yours. We're talking about a bias here, and biases express preferences. Even among a population of adults "fully equipped to assist" it's reasonable to have a preference for women. Most doctors are "fully equipped to assist" you when you get sick, but some are better than others, and if there were a statistically sound way to pick the better ones, you'd use that. It's the same exact thing here.
> [M]en are fathers, grandpas, brothers, and uncles to little kids. They know how to interact with them.
I know how to interact with them. I've got four children myself as well as a niece and a nephew. As far as I can tell, you're making things up as you go along; I'm actually one of those "fully equipped to assist" men who can and will happily help a lost or scared child. I'm friends with many other "fully equipped to assist" men and women who likewise would help a lost or scared child. As a parent who has to teach my four kids what to do if they're lost or scared, I not just reasoning in the abstract about this problem: I'm looking at the sum total of the people I've seen and making a sound, statistically based decision what to teach my kids.
Like you said, if a lost or scared kid approaches me and needs help, I'm going to make sure they're safely handed off to customer service or store security, then I'm going to go about my business. It's not complicated or hard, and I'm not going to let it impact my day too much: I'll hand off to an authority and move on. I've got things to do, and I have neither the time nor the inclination to spend more time than I must with someone's random lost kid.
Contrast that with what my wife would do if approached by a lost or scared kid. She'd probably first get the kid to calm down with hugs and tear-wiping. She'd introduce him to our kids, find out his name, find out the names of his mommy or daddy, and start tracking down his parents. She'd look far and wide to try to track his parents down before even going to the store employee, and if she couldn't find them, when she went to the store employee, she'd probably stay there and comfort the kid until his parents arrived to pick them up. She'd move heaven and earth to make sure that kid was reunited with his parents before she left.
And you know what? That difference would manifest in every single father/mother pair I know. In every case, I know that even though the father would be fully equipped to assist a lost or scared kid, the mom would be better at comforting the kid and would work harder at helping the kid than the dad would. Heck, one of my friends is a baby/kid/family photographer. His job is to entertain kids. Kids love him. But when I asked him, "Who would do more to help a lost, scared kid in a department store?" he answered without reservation, "My wife. I'd just drop the kid off at security."
> But ultimately that is completely besides the point as we're talking about someone who has to take a little kid's hand and bring them to customer services/store security, we aren't asking them to adopt the child.
That attitude is exactly why I tell my kids to prefer seeking help from women. Because statistically speaking they'll work harder to help the kid and do a better job of making the kid feel better. I don't care if you or anyone else thinks it's a "trope": it's reality, and reality is what I teach my kids.
If your child has a problem, chances are another parent will already have on their mind ways to help, or things they might need (water, band-aid, phone to call mom, change of pants), and at the very least might be inclined to help them more than others might be. They may be more likely to recognize child-related issues ("Bumped your head? let's check your eyes ...") than non-parents, simply because thinking about precautions, worst-case scenarios, and the like are something parents have to consider.
I never used to think about how to find the bathroom in a store, for example, as proactively as I now do once I have kids, and never used to carry water and snacks with me wherever I went. Nowadays I effectively carry emergency water, food, wipes, band-aids, and a change of clothes when we go to the park.
This is not to say that non-parents are bad to ask for help -- far from it! Merely that kids, who often are already anxious around strangers, may be disarmed a little more easily by the fact that someone else is clearly a parent.
Agreed, I am a parent as well. But a word of warning, you'll get mean looks and talk behind your back from playground parents if you take that attitude.
I've seen moms and dads on playground who are way out there in assessing what is threatening and what is not. They'd see a man walking by the playground going by their business and start calling their children closer to them acting all scared. Or make comments about "hmm what are they doing, we haven't seen this person before". Mind you we were not in a crime ridden neighborhood, this is a quiet suburban area. Was going to say "lay of the news people, take it easy" but of course couldn't they'd think I am crazy.
Oh and co-worker's neighbor called CPS (child protective services) on them because they were playing by themselves in the cul-de-sac while the parents watched from inside the house. They of course don't know who did it, and even if they knew there no repercussion they could take against that person. They can always claim "they thought of the children", nobody can argue with that...
When I was a kid I'd hop on my bike and my friends and I would ride into town, buy pizza, come home a few hours later. It was normal.
This trend toward having to stay within arms reach of your children at all times is, in my opinion, very unhealthy for a child as they don't have opportunities to build confidence and independence.
One time as an adult, I got a cop called because my music was too loud. The next day, I went to all my adjacent neighbors and said, without malice, "If there are any issues, I'm receptive to being a good neighbor, let me know if I can help".
I would have done the same thing in the instance of CPS called on my kids. "Hello, I watch my children and they know how to handle themselves on our home street. If you see a dangerous situation, let me know immediately and we'll work to fix it."
Then, if they have any issue with that, we can have it out.
This happens to me all the time in the grocery store. In the past I was a teacher, and now I'm a stay-at-home dad. If I have my son with me, everyone thinks I'm awesome for being a man who takes responsibility for his kid; if he's at school and I'm at the store and happen to be within half a mile of a kid, people look at me like I'm a creeper.
Example: your at the grocery store when a young child wanders around the corner and starts pulling items off the shelf onto the floor right in front of you. A woman could stop the child, ask "where are your parents?" and carry the child to fjnd the parents. A man better back away and ignore the child lest somebody call the cops.
It may also have to do with specific circumstances -- like regional culture. In Seattle, everyone was always cold regardless. In patriarchal northern Utah (in the small town where friends of mine run safe-houses for people fleeing polygamy) I got different dirty looks for being alone than for having my child (wives are supposed to be watching the kids in that culture.) In my part of Denver, being white makes me stand out.
In any case, I have noticed different treatment when I'm with my son and when I'm alone.
You will never please everyone. Ignore strange looks. If you would be surrounded by anti-vaccine people would you avoid vaccination only because they give you weird looks?
It's letting an adult choose to approach the kid first where the stranger kidnapping even becomes a statistical possibility.
The chances of picking a thief are low compared to the chances of a thief picking you.
I live in a fairly well-to-do bedroom community, it's a rural area a short drive from some bigger cities in Colorado. The neighborhood nextdoor.com info is an interesting read. The sheriff (we don't have town police, it's a small place, 5000ish people) is called for ringing and running, that's like the main offense. It seems like there are fears when there are work men of color in the area doing things (building new houses, etc..) it appears that their presence correlates to the crime of breaking in to cars in neighboring cities, at least in the minds of some. I can confess there is a slight feeling of isolation at times, like if you had a problem you couldn't solve, it could take 15-30minutes for a police officer to help you but in 8 years I'm unaware of such a problem happening in the town. For the most part it is insanely safe, like you could leave your doors unlocked and expect no issues.
When my son get's on the school bus, he has to swipe a badge. They can track where he get's on a bus and where he get's off. That's what we've come to. They have 4 different kinds of "drills." There is the fire drill we all grew up with. There is "lock down" where they all stay in their class rooms and lock the doors. There is a harder form of that where they stay in the class rooms, lock all the doors and windows and the try to hide. Then there is a drill where they go in the school basement, being that there are tornados in the area from time to time that's not too unreasonable but the staff is open with parents that it's for the event that there is some sort of a disturbance that is used to draw kids outside to attack in the open. The school itself (this is K-5) has locks on all doors, you have to buzz in, or swipe a badge at any time of day.
It's all in how you look at it, I guess. The technology is fairly inexpensive and if it helps with anything, then maybe it seems worth it. It's definitely playing in to the culture of fear that exists though. What's really shocking, at least to me, is how cool everyone seems to be with everything. We got emails from the school when the did some of the drills, just to let us know our kids might tell us about something odd that they did. I can't imagine how they'd possibly let middle-school or younger kids on public transportation around here.
> The technology is fairly inexpensive and if it helps with anything, then maybe it seems worth it.
I expect they realize that and solved this problem (I'm interested in knowing how), but one of the main thing that worries me with policies of locking everything up is fire safety. When you have a building with many people, there should always be a path from any point outside to the evacuation area that has as little obstructions as possible (preferably zero, but that's not always applicable - e.g. areas handling classified information or dangerous objects). I always cringe when I see locked doors on evacuation path - with a panicking crowd, it's a disaster waiting to happen.
My brothers kids are 7 and 5 and live in Norway where I'm from, and the older is allowed to leave school by himself (the school has no fences and no gates, granted this is a relatively rural school, but unlocked gates is the norm pretty much everywhere in Norway, and 6-7 years olds are generally allowed to go to/from school by themselves - when I was 7 I had a 30 minute walk to/from school every day).
He'll walk to the nearby nursery and pick up his 5 year old sister and they'll walk home together (10-15 minute walk).
I ran away from school into the forest once; came back after a couple of hours. Got a stern talk and a note home.
[1] http://www.pollyklaas.org/about/national-child-kidnapping.ht... [2] http://www.childstats.gov/americaschildren/tables/pop1.asp
Just to share anecdotes, I had a few memorable experiences as a kid (and probably many more that I don't remember).
A very nice person helped fix my bike chain when it slipped off the gears and got wedged against the frame. Without them, I'd have a long walk home with a stuck back wheel.
On another occasion, while I was playing outside my house, a man came by and invited me to attend his church. My parents weren't keen on that, and I was rather uninterested so we never took him up on the offer. I presume he was a Jehova's Witness or a Mormon.