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Comment by stevecalifornia | Hacker News Reader

Of all the missing children, less than 1% is non-family abductions. [1]

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.

[1] https://www.missingkids.org/footer/media/keyfacts

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> Of all the missing children, less than 1% is non-family abductions.

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.

This is not a new trend, it's always been the case. My quick search shows in 2001 in the US of 50,000 minors reported missing, around 100 were abducted by strangers. I didn't immediately find any older data but I've heard this same thing since I was a kid.

https://web.archive.org/web/20150216071609/http://www.crimel...

Does it mean that all of the missing cases apart from that hundred were resolved and confirmed as not abductions by strangers? Otherwise, how many of the remaining cases were? I suspect this number might make a world of difference.

I believe most of those cases were resolved, including adults there are only a couple thousand unresolved missing persons cases per year. Using different years of data for this, which isn't ideal, but in 2012 ~99.6% of missing persons cases were resolved. Those remaining cases wouldn't make a significant difference.

https://www.npr.org/2013/05/07/182000622/majority-of-missing...

Yeah, but that's still 100 kids!

Yeah, 100 is waaay too many

Disagree, there is a >0 number of stranger child abductions we should expect with optimal policies.

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.

This ain't LessWrong, I'm allowed to complain about a single child abduction as a stain on humanity. But yes, I appreciate your math.

You're allowed to complain about anything but that doesn't mean they are good complaints.

If the head of a self-driving car company exclaimed "100 car accident deaths per year is too many," we wouldn't say his opinion is wrong, we'd be throwing money at it. It's just that, an opinion.

I was not arguing that we should make laws or set policy. I was just saying, wow, 100 kids a year taken!

Is there any non-zero number that's not too many in a real sense?

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.)

"Is there any non-zero number that's not too many in a real sense?"

No because he does not mention the denominator and is thus free to increase it ;)

Again, you cannot make this argument in a world where cars are legal.

"Stranger danger" as a concept is far older than 20 years, so you're just looking at the same type of statistic as OP. I'm guessing you need to go back well over 50 years for a meaningful difference in attitudes.

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.

There has been some level of distrust towards strangers in society forever. The comment I was replying to is about the rather recent complete segregation of children from possibly interacting with strangers.

I believe the major US panic about "stranger danger" arose in the 1980s and early 1990s—in particular, there were a couple of high-profile cases of children going missing in the early '90s that were sensationalized far beyond what made any sense. As a child growing up in the '80s, I was allowed to poke around the neighborhood unsupervised, but by the time I was a teenager, I was already hearing about children being strictly watched at all times as "the norm".

There were a few cases of multiple children missing in major cities (like the Atlanta child murders, 28 dead in two years), and also the proliferation of cable news. The former was a valid, regional, concern but people let it blow up into a more national fear.

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.

Why would a stranger be a problem?

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.

i generally agree that stranger danger is overblown

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.

Oh, please, terrible people who enjoy abusing children just create their own children to abuse. Why would anyone abuse other people's children when they can make their own and have complete control over them?

Ask me how I know.

You guys are acting like there's some sort of vetting to become parents, it's bizarre.

You're assuming this person would be thinking rationally about a crime they'd like to commit, when it's often a very specific urge that overcomes their fear of consequences.

Personally, all I can say is thank you and keep it up. I am almost 18 myself and my parents have been raising me in manner where I had little meaningful responsibility delegated to me during my earlier years. Because of this and with college just around the corner adulthood feels incredibly overwhelming.

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.”

Thank you for the book suggestion.

I think the ratio is likely much greater than 1% simply because what most people consider an "abduction" doesn't include "non-custodial parent took off with the kid(s)."

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.

When I was young I lived in a semi-urban area (circa 1990-1996). From about second grade on, I was free to roam to neighborhood, and I did. I spent most of my time playing unsupervised with neighborhood kids, walking to the comic book shop, the book store, the convenience store, the hobby shop, the pool, the playgrounds, the parks, and so on. I never once had any kind of issue.

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.

If you restrict it to abductions, the picture is less rosy: around 1 in 6 abductions are non-family abductions.

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.

> Of all the missing children, less than 1% is non-family abductions.

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.)

Haha, I can not tell if this is satire or what.

Somehow, I doubt the statistics of this so much that my first reaction is to chuckle.

I'm not sure what's funny. I'm looking for nuanced perspectives on both sides before I default to my biases, and I prefer arguments to be based on evidence. That's all.

I edited my original comment to clarify this.

I'm sorry, I did not want to sound mean, but the statistical claim made just felt so wrong to me as to be amusing. I can not formally prove it wrong, it just... Triggered the hummour detector.

> 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.

Not just low, very low, for the lifetime probability to be low enough for it to be that number.

Consider for your analysis: if you're walking in the same neighborhood, even for many many walks, those walks' risks will actually be quite correlated. So it's not like the probabilities combine the same way they would for independent random samples. The vast majority of children could not force an abduction to happen to them in their life even if somehow they spent all their waking hours outside. Thinking the probability approaches 1 is pretty absurd, and I suggest reflects some poor probabilistic thinking.

Approaches was probably the wrong word. Moving in the direction towards 1 was what I meant to say.

You’re far more likely to walk your child straight into death by teaching them to drive.

Notice that demand for abducted children is inelastic in regard to number of children walking around the neighborhood. This means there are two equilibrium points of walking children market: first is letting them play as much as they wish, making probability of abduction of _your_ children as small as it can be; second is letting them out almost never, with probability of abduction for a walk being 1. Which of that do you prefer?

> 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.

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...

Though with three children under the same policy, you get just over 2 % risk that at least one of them get abducted. The upside is hard to quantify (especially for me who view it as obvious that children should be allowed unsupervised walks) but I can totally see how the 2 % number with a very serious downside can get someone to doubt.

(I know what "conservative estimate" means, I'm just playing devil's advocate.)

My parents raised me this way. And I must admit it was beneficial. I don't know if I'd be willing to do the same thing. I think as low as the prospect is, it might be because people tend to keep an eye on kids. Predators might be more likely to target kids who are around by themselves. Or prospective predators might be tempted by a kid they see walking around alone. If nothing else for the purpose of grooming.

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.

You've managed to turn a lived experience into an irrational fear. 100% safety cannot be guaranteed, for anyone in any place, but denying others the privilege for "what if" is in many ways a far worse suppression.

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.

I don't buy the dichotomy that many are presenting in this thread. The either your parents let you walk around on your own or you'll have less life skills. I think you can teach kids life skills and independence while also keeping an eye on them.

How much harm is caused by not teaching them to be safe in such circumstances?

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.

I walked a mile to school and back every weekday, mostly in a group with neighbor's kids, when I was 6. Americans are weird.

Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/795/

Although I do agree the risk of stranger danger is overblown.

That’s certainly the nationwide stat.

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.

That last point is factually incorrect. There have been lightning fatalities indoors via phone lines and plumbing.

So, nearly 100%.

About 1/3 of lightning injuries occur indoors, per the CDC: https://www.cdc.gov/disasters/lightning/victimdata.html (that's admittedly an injury figure, not a fatality figure, but it's probably wildly more common than you'd guess)

That’s really interesting, thanks.

I believe that the real risk here isn't that your kids will be taken by a "stranger", but that they will be taken by social services.

social services are strangers, aren't they?

Dutch parents salute you

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