Even so, I can’t help thinking that many people–including well-meaning officials of the U.S. government–are overreacting to all of these stories, and the effect will be to continue changing our children’s lives for the worse. The media, of course, are leading the way. Let’s be honest: covering child kidnappings is inexpensive and gets boffo ratings; it’s this summer’s version of killer sharks.
President Bush, taking a leaf from President Clinton (who mastered the art of responding like a fireman to any public concern), is holding a White House conference on missing and runaway children on Sept. 24. That’s fine, but the press attention is not likely to be on the half million teens who run away from home each year. And it will be hard to get people talking about the more than 200,000 “family abductions,” despite the fact that such custody battles are often terribly cruel, with the children forced to live like fugitives and told the other parent doesn’t love them.
Instead, the focus will likely be on what scares but doesn’t truly threaten parents like me, parents who vote–namely, “nonfamily abductions.” How worried should we be? The Web site touted by Bush, missingkids.com, is confusing on the numbers. To make us feel better, the site notes that of the 58,200 kids abducted by nonfamily members in 1999, only 115 were taken by strangers in ways ultimately dangerous to the child.
So who grabbed the other 58,085? Dad’s drug dealer? Mom’s pimp? The site doesn’t explain, beyond noting that “abductions in this category involved forcibly moving or detaining the children for a relatively short period of time, usually in connection with another crime.”
And of course you have to go elsewhere to locate FBI statistics (far more easily accessible through a Google search than through the pathetic FBI search engine) to find that the number of missing persons last year was the lowest since 1992. Juvenile abductions are down 5 percent since 2000.
Obviously, those 115 stranger abductions a year are 115 too many, especially since 40 percent of these kids end up dead and many times that number are molested. But the truth is, in a country of nearly 300 million people, the odds of your child being abducted and killed by a stranger are exceedingly small. LET’S BE RATIONAL HERE
I don’t mean to minimize people’s fears or to suggest that all of the government’s advice to parents on how to protect their children is wrong. We need the advice but we do pay a price, just as we do in protecting ourselves against terrorism.
For instance, the Justice Department’s missingkids.com Web site suggests that younger children should be trained to say: “I always take a friend with me when I go places or play outside.” Always? How about if mom is fixing dinner and she wants you to go in the backyard to work off a little energy? Is that now evidence of bad parenting?
Even teens are advised to “always take a friend when walking or riding your bike to and from school.” What world are these bureaucrats living in? In the real world, that’s impossible, unless your classmate happens to live right next door. Is the Justice Department suggesting that even though the number of stranger abductions is small and shrinking, we can no longer send our 13-year-old to the corner to pick up a quart of milk? Not reasonable. Not rational.
Clearly, the emphasis in recent years on child safety has been a tremendous life saver. For children under age 14, the death rate from unintended injuries is down 46 percent since 1980. Car seats have saved thousands of lives, and bike helmets have contributed to a 60 percent decline in bicycle-related injuries. But youth bike-riding itself is also down, the result of other childhood interests like videogames, but also from a sense of “stranger danger.” The childhood many of us remember–riding around on our bikes unsupervised; going downtown on the bus alone–is fading into the American past. In the name of safety, kids are losing a sense of independence that is fun for them and important to their development.
We don’t need a White House Conference on Striking the Right Balance. But it’s something to think about the next time breathless coverage of a child abduction tempts us to coop up the kids in the house–safe from predators but also from healthy adventures, alive but at a distance from life.
