The Enduring Myth of Stranger Danger
letgrow.org
letgrow.org
I live in a safe suburb far from any major city and I let my 6 and 8 year old take themselves on a walk around the neighborhood when they check in with me first. Literally every time they go on a walk one or two adults stops and asks them where their parents are and sometimes the adult even calls us to warn us of the dangers of kidnapping.
When I mention that we let our kids walk themselves to my parents I get lectured like crazy about how people will steal our kids. I am totally confident someone will lecture me in this thread. The stats don't match the fear.
It's unreasonable and unhealthy to deny your children the experience of self-reliance and exploration.
Sure we don't outlaw cars, but it's reasonable to minimize unnecessary risk while cars are a necessity in most urban areas.
More importantly, there are greater dangers in the form of accidents. Kids aren't careful, they might run across the street where a driver has trouble seeing them. They might touch a down wire. There's a lot that could happen when you don't keep an eye on kids.
I too was given autonomy when growing up, and I credit it to giving me comparatively far better life skills than my peers. I walked home and cooked myself lunch since the 4th grade. I did my own laundry. I spent untold hours in the park. It taught me how to look after myself and make critical judgements, skills that I watched some friends learn and develop in university 10 years after me. The stress of which can lead to drastically worse decisions when you're 20+ than when you're 10.
More pointedly how much harm is caused by not giving them individuated and appropriate but also real independence? Skills take time and practice to develop. What would you expect to result from a failure to actively and persistently develop the independence that a child will require for the rest of their life?
The same dynamic has come up with COVID. There is known harm through infection but also through isolation. In my family we are extremely conservative and careful (probably overly, privileged-ly, and wastefully so) but we ensure regular playdates with a small set of children with careful parents so that our young child can still develop friendships and social skills. And, you know, be a kid. Taking a year off that, particularly at the current age of my child would be extremely harmful so we spend all of our risk chits on that.
Similarly, while never doing anything would reduce many active risks studies have shown being sedentary is more deadly than smoking.
A cost to benefit maximization process is almost always appropriate.
How much of it is because stranger danger is false, and how much of it is because parents no longer let their children out of their sight? I am not making a statement, I am genuinely curious and I am asking a question hoping someone knows the answer. But I wonder if the reason so few children are harmed by strangers is that children's unsupervised interactions with strangers have now shrunk to almost nothing, so there is almost no opportunity for harm anymore.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150216071609/http://www.crimel...
https://www.npr.org/2013/05/07/182000622/majority-of-missing...
Same as there is a >0 number of car crash deaths with optimal policy. And a >0 amount of rat droppings in our food.
And in your personal life, a >0 chance of dying of avoidable accident.
There is a balance in almost anything at the scale of hundreds of millions of people. People die in all kinds of ways. Some drown, but we still build pools. Some die on trampolines, but we still install those. Some die in the tub/shower, but we still clean ourselves.
I don't see any reason to think that there isn't any possible nuance on the balance between freedom to move as a kid and the danger of stranger violence. (I have two kids who aren't yet teens. The concept scares me, but I also let them swim, play on trampolines, ride in cars/airplanes, bathe, etc.)
No because he does not mention the denominator and is thus free to increase it ;)
Edit: when I was growing up (well before 2001!) that was certainly the attitude – we didn't have the phrase "stranger danger" (maybe that's from the US?) but "don't take sweets from strangers" was common.
I also remember, as an adult, watching the film M and that finished with a strong message about not leaving your children unsupervised, and that's from 1931! But that message doesn't prove it was common at the time so I just mention that for curiosity.
Cable news, in turn, started emphasizing singular disappearances/killings (not serial cases), which further exacerbated this fear. When you have 24 hours of coverage on CNN and 10 of them are about "Missing Girl in California", your perception of how common this is gets distorted. It's a singular case, but seeing it all the time causes people to perceive it as a frequent thing instead of the relatively rare thing it is in most of the country.
Imagine for a moment that you are the most evil person ever. Why would you harm/kidnap a child? There is no gain for the most part - the kid's parents probably cannot afford enough of a ransom to pay for your time. and even if they do it is hard to collect without getting caught. There are much better crimes you can commit to satisfy your evil desires.
but your point is definitely in error. if you are the most evil person, and desire to rape, torture, and murder a person, then a child is the best target. they are least able to fight back, and are the most naive so they can be tricked into going somewhere unsafe.
Ask me how I know.
You guys are acting like there's some sort of vetting to become parents, it's bizarre.
This can be interpreted to mean that the ensemble probability of an abduction -- the expected number of abductions from a single walk around the neighbourhood -- is low.
However, the practise of letting your children walk results in many walks over time, and it takes just one abduction to make the situation really bad. In other words, over time, the probability of an abduction will (albeit slowly) go towards 1.
Have you made any attempt at calculating this "lifetime probability" of abduction, instead of looking just at the probabilities of one-off walks?
Not lecturing; genuinely curious because I will soon have to make this decision for my oldest and I want to base it on data, but with a representative model.
(My instinct is, of course, to raise my children the way I was raised and that aligns with my feelings on the subject, i.e. "Let them have walks!" but I'm looking for a nuanced perspective on both sides before submitting to my biases.)
Somehow, I doubt the statistics of this so much that my first reaction is to chuckle.
I edited my original comment to clarify this.
Not just low, very low, for the lifetime probability to be low enough for it to be that number.
They will die of old age long before the chance of abduction gets anywhere close to 0.1 much less 1.
To be conservative, assume that 1% of US children are allowed to go unsupervised walks (~750k children) and that there is 0% chance of abduction by a stranger without allowing unsupervised walks. Each year about 350 children are abducted by strangers[1]. Under those assumptions, there is a 0.04% chance of abduction each year. That would be less than 1% lifetime chance assuming that they do this for all 18 years of their childhood. Even less if you make more realistic assumptions (I certainly hope that more than 1% of 17 year olds are allowed to go on walks and that parents are waiting until after their children can walk before letting them go on walks by themselves).
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-wisconsin-missinggirl-dat...
(I know what "conservative estimate" means, I'm just playing devil's advocate.)
Although I do agree the risk of stranger danger is overblown.
I wonder what it is when adjusted to the cohort of people standing out in the open during a storm that is currently striking things on the ground.
Or to put it another way, 100% of lightning deaths occur when standing outdoors in a storm.
I highly recommend you look up the work of Social Phycologist Jonathan Haidt. Specially his work regarding the book “The Coddling of The American Mind.”
The stand-out statistic is over 90% of missing children are runaways. Working on this risk, reducing the chance that your kids will choose to run away, does look the better risk-reduction strategy.
I wish I could give my kids the same experience, but sadly I live in a much less dense area these days, and there is nothing within a mile or so for them to really do, and no friends. It’s sad.
Child abductions seem to suffer the same problem as "mass" shootings. Most of the research is being done by people who have a vested interest in making them look common so they create a definition that includes a bunch of stuff that most people wouldn't consider to be applicable (gang/drug violence in the case of mass shootings, non-custodial parent taking off with the kid(s) in the case of child abductions).
Of course if the goal is to prevent the named event using a watered down definition that mostly captures other stuff to build your data sets is not going to build you a very informative data set for that goal.
I send my 7 year old to the corner store a couple of times a week (pre British Super-COVID) to buy missing ingredients, a bottle of wine... basically whatever's missing. It takes a village to raise a child, and we're all responsible for society's coherence.
I'm sounding blase. I'm not, they're my kids and as such are as important to me as it gets, but parenting - maybe the hardest thing about parenting - is about letting go, knowing that you're making strong, independent adults.
It has subtle ways of teaching other skills like critical thinking, story telling, decision making, communication, math, and others. I could never go back to the old model.
When I lived in Germany, I would regularly see fairly young kids taking the U-Bahn, though I don't exactly know how young they were. Probably older than 6, but maybe not much older.
I'm glad I wasn't raised and don't currently live in such locales of the US. I knew all my neighbors and a lot of store owners growing up. I know a lot of the neighborhood kids today, and luckily it's never come to this, but I hope they know they can knock on my door if they need something.
I would also throw "rising inequality" in the list of causes, but also a lack of unifying culture beyond nihilism, which isn't conducive to holding people together.
In it he covers the consequences of over-protective parenting on today’s American youth and how those consequences have spilled over onto college campuses in the form of over-protective policies. As a kid myself I feel as though his work really resonates with me and I *highly* consider all current parents to become at least familiar with his research.
- Satanic Panic - Human Trafficking - Murder - Stanford Prison Experiment
etc.
A very common theme is "do-gooders" trying to do what they very naively think is a good thing but without data or rationality to back it up. Or, worse, people who manipulate those do-gooders into accomplishing other, more selfish/nefarious/evil goals.
Really interesting stuff overall.
This used to be the case in the US too, up until the 70s-80s or so, and the advent of helicopter parents. And that in a period that general crime statistics were worse than now, but nobody would bat an eye if kids roamed and played around. The "stranger danger" idea is more cultural (about total control and isolation to private bubble) than about actual threat.
Now, it's funny to see people like the author arguing that "Crimes against children have fallen since the early ’90s." when the 90s were the absolute crime peak and reason why this social change happened. But the crime levels are still nowhere near their base level (first half the 20th, 50s, 60s), that allowed people to trust each other enough to let their kids roam outside...
In France the crime rate peaked in the 2000s, and all parents from the late 90s until now are helicopter parents.
(Also, I am currently being locked up by doctors so let's agree that this is not a good sign that society has improved since then alright. :-))
I agree that crime peaked in the 90s. I’m just saying that crime statistics from 70 years ago shouldn’t be compared to more modern numbers since the non-anecdotal part of my argument (policing is entirely different, violent crimes exist today that didn’t exist/weren’t enforced the same as back then) still stands.
I am very careful when I’m out walking (checking to see where the driver is looking, checking to see if there are other cars/obstacles that the driver might need to maneuver around at the point where he’s passing me, etc), but kids would never be this careful. Partly it’s because they can’t predict what a driver would do because they don’t know how to drive, and partly because kids are more likely to be goofing off and not paying attention. Also, kids heads/torsos are more at fender-level, making accidents more likely to be fatal.
I do think the stranger danger piece is overblown, but I simultaneously wonder if there aren’t other dangers that have started increasing in the half decade or so since smartphones became very common.
Yet we still get constant reminders of stranger danger and horrible crimes in the news. Instead of focusing on those, perhaps we should collectively focus a lot more on making traffic better and safer for pedestrians and cyclists, prioritize them heavily over cars.
Distracted driving especially is something we could do something about, if we chose to do so.
The anti-profit/SV mindset needs to be rejected in favor of a pro-innovation mindset of libertarianism.
We could do this today with current technology, without the drawbacks of trying to get autonomous driving working on roads designed for human drivers.
We could give it a name that signifies that it is for everyone, perhaps some kind of "omnibus" service, where a nominal fee is charged per trip, accessible to everyone.
Personal vehicles face fewer limitations and are more durable in various failure modes. But first people need to shed their utopianist ideals about how society should pursue its objectives, and allow profit-motivated investment and consumer-preference-moderated technological innovation find solutions.
As for the Texas outage, regulations could potentially have prevented, but the question is at what cost.
It is absolutely not an acceptable methodology on public roads, where conditions vary wildly and unpredictably, many different kinds of vehicles are on the road, plus pedestrians, animals and various buildings and structures that are not designed to dissipate forces in the event of a crash. Moving fast and breaking things in a public road context means maiming and injuring innocent people, who have not been consulted on whether they want to participate in semi-controlled tests of self-driving cars.
The advancement of technology is not a goal in itself.
There is an argument for using self-driving technology on motorways, because they are very uniform and simpler than other types of roads. They have traffic flowing in one direction only, segregated from other types of traffic. Get that working properly, and we may consider rolling self-driving tech further onto other types of roads.
RE: Texas, they literally chose to cut off ERCOT from the east and west power grids of the US, in order to avoid regulation. If they had not done so, they could have drawn on power from other states, significantly lessening the impact of the snowstorms, which would have saved both lives and property. By choosing to cut themselves off from the larger interconnected grid, the politicians in power put their constituents in a severely disadvantaged position, for purely ideological and irrational opposition to sensible regulation.
That's a fair point. Making public roads dangerous would go against basic human-rights/libertarian principles, on the basis that the public could never unanimously consent to it.
With respect to Texas, I'm not informed enough to comment on the recent power outages. I suspect there are a huge number of factors involved, and I would need to familiarize myself with most of them, and preferably by reviewing sources that aren't reflexively anti free-market/profit, before I would feel confident in providing any kind of over-arching summary of the main causes.
The answer to this is YES - there has been an increasing trend of pedestrian fatalities, at least in US/UK where i saw the statistics. 2018 was a local high for fatalities. It seems to correlate to smartphone uptake.
The majority of child abuse happening at the hands of someone the kids know could be because we don't let kids out of our sight more. If we let kids out of our site more would that number still be true?
Point #2 reinforces this idea (anecdotally). It shows that child abuse has slowly been declining since 1991. The article says, "yeah well all crime has gone down" but are there any studies that show how that number correlates to increased protectiveness?
I'm not saying the concept is wrong (I believe kids should have more freedom and wish my kids did). Just saying this article could tighten up its arguments better.
The car accident thing is also unrelated. Kids are more likely to die from swimming pools than stab themselves with kitchen knives, but I'm not going to let them play with kitchen knives.
I also have doubt that "crimes have fallen" is a valid reason. Perhaps this is because of the prevalence of the Stranger Danger mindset?
That said, I think it has gone a bit far. Kids and teenagers used to run around several generation ago. I'd rather my daughter take a bike ride outside, than sit in her room playing with Omegle.
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/02/an-updated-le...
Reminds me of how the exceptional case of the Therac 25 shows us that medical devices are generally dangerous: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25
Yes is had critical errors that caused harm, but it was also life saving machinery.
To be taken seriously on this topic, you need to look at harm vs good. And unfortunately perceived harm as well, since we live in a clown land and it affects reality.
Therac 25 did stop a lot of innovation because of societies unwillingness to accept computer errors equivocal to human errors.
Or limit cars so that you can only have one for every 3 families and then nobody can move around anymore. Problem solved.
Oh, but you forgot about those implications of the past, didn't you?
Break out of the car-centric mindset and the better solution becomes "arrange city and traffic planning so that the majority of people don't need multiple cars or even any cars at all."
I can't vouch for the reliability of this source[1], but it will serve for my example here. The murder rate in the US was 5 and 5.1 in 1960 and 2019 respectively. The aggravated assault rate was shot from 86 to 250.
Life didn't get safer, we just got better at saving lives.
Then again, this looks like its probably based on UCR data, which is sent to the FBI from local/state law enforcement. I imagine there are certain demographics, especially in 1960s America, that didn't get crimes against them reported with full accuracy.
There are lies, damn lies, and statistics. Especially regarding crime. "Gun violence" can include suicide in some reporting systems, and not in others. Some will put a shooting at a bank robbery in with the same category as a single mother shooting an intruder in her home, and some wont.
My point is that the subject of safety is far more complicated than "See, less people are dead, it's safer". Imagine a special forces team of 20 conducts 100 hostage rescues in a year, gets in a firefight in every one, takes multiple injuries, but no one dies. Now imagine the logistics unit of 20 that performs maintenance, paperwork, administrative functions, etc, at a forward operating base has one of their members crushed by a vending machine.
1 in 20 people in logistics died, 0 in 20 in the special ops team died. Most people would not reasonably argue that the logistics team was more dangerous.
I picked murder because I thought it would be more straight forward because people are pretty clear about who was killed whereas rapes and assaults might go unreported especially if the victins were minorities.
I think it's pretty clear that it wasn't particularly safe to be anything but a straight middle class+ white person in the 50s.
>= 90% of the US population in the 1950s were middle class white people. Ignoring that, the national aggregate crime rate was lower for non middle class white people then as well. On what are you basing that claim that it wasn’t safe for them?
A substantial minority of that segment now shrunk to more like 17% wish they could have the 50s back for some reason despite how bad the total picture was for most people.
Do you have a cite on the 1950s being substantially safer? Please note an actual and official source of data wherein data collection is to a uniform standard over the time frame discussed. For example a system where figures are collected from some areas and not others and coverage increases towards 100% over time will show an increase in crime rate even when there isn't one. Conversely a system where crimes against minorities aren't investigated or punished will see fewer crimes reported even when reported crimes are faithfully counted.
An example of a bad source is disastercenter.com which doesn't obviously cite how its data is collected, whose frontpage says nothing about who runs it. It is at best a summery of other sources which you aren't at liberty to inspect. Wherever they get their data might be a good source but its impossible for me to ascertain this.
My claims of the safety in america are based on aggregate crime rate statistics since the 1960s from the FBI UCR. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#Cri...
So now you’re rejecting official data without any evidence to support your skepticism. Interesting.
You still have yet to provide any basis for the claim that 1950s america wasn’t safe for non middle class white people. Why not?
If you can't vouch for a source then using it to make a point is wasting your time and mine.
I'm not asserting whether things are safer or not. Im asserting that judging "safer" cannot be accurately done with metrics such as "murder rate".
"A group of 34 of America’s biggest cities suffered a 30 percent total increase in homicides in 2020, according to a new survey published Monday"
5.3 + (5.3 * 0.3) is not approaching 5.1.
- it represents a small increase in the 2020 homicide rate that doesn't change the national situation. The proper topic of our discussion.
- Given a 27 year trend line an increase at a time when our nation is going through a time of extreme crisis logically represents an aberration not a trend.
America isn't meaningfully more dangerous on average than it was in the 50s although it was in the 50s and is now more dangerous than some of our more civilized neighbors.
* Edited for clarity and correctness*
https://www.voanews.com/usa/us-homicides-rose-2020-study-fin...
The lead author things the pandemic is a significant factor.
> One lead author of the study told the Associated Press he believed part of the problem was the pandemic forced police officers off the streets all around the country.
> Even when on the job, social distancing requirements kept officers from interacting closely with the community. He said, “That really reduced the ability of law officers to engage in the kinds of proactive policing that can reduce crime.”
> The study found that the pandemic “has disproportionately affected vulnerable populations, placing at-risk individuals under additional physical, mental, emotional, and financial stress.”
Are we to believe your grasp of the topic is better than the researchers who conducted the study.
According to the chart in the article, it is around 3,000 per 100,000 population.
In comparison, the highest COVID mortality rate in the US is New Jersey with 253 per 100,000. The motor vehicle fatality rate in the US in 2018 was 11.18 per 100,000 population.
Compared to those numbers, the crimes against children rate is extremely high.
When a young child is murdered, the killer is usually a parent or stepparent, not a stranger.
Not only that but you are comparing apples (mortality) to pineapples (crimes in general).
Bad things happen sometimes. It's not a reason to emotionally stunt your kids by sheltering them from being able to leave their homes and experience the world around them.