Great point. If we are going to be somewhere that our son might be separated from us, like a crowded event or venue, we give him a card in his pocket with our first names and cell phone numbers and he knows to ask someone to call us. Haven’t needed it but being prepared is helpful. Mostly people just want to help a lost kid.
I imagine most sex offenders already know there will be serious social and legal repercussions if they get caught. Probably more effective just to make sure your daughter knows what to do if anyone (particularly her stepdad) ever tries to touch her inappropriately, and that your ex knows how to recognize warning signs.
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This just illustrates to me that not only are people really bad at risk assessment, but that the biggest bias is what I like to call “control bias” (If there’s an actual word for this, I would love to hear it!). Basically, people overestimate risks that they have no control over and underestimate risks that they feel they can mitigate.
This is probably best illustrated by losing your child vs. your child being abducted. Losing your child is completely on you, and most parents would estimate themselves as being attentive and good at keeping track of their kids. That said, almost every parent feels that way, and you probably aren’t a good judge of whether you will lose your child or not, and probably a lot of times that children get lost it’s just random circumstances and not a direct result of poor parenting.
Compare this risk assessment to child abduction. You have no control over your child being abducted by a stranger, because strangers are by definition unknown. The perceived risk of your child being abducted is, therefore, heightened because it’s not something you can affect.
It’s similar to people being more afraid of flying than car rides, and I guess it has something to do with fear of the unfamiliar. But I really think that a perception of control and having information figures into how people assess risk.
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Poison Hallowe’en candy does indeed appear to be a myth… Sharp items in candy, on the other hand, are pretty well documented.
Nonfamily includes a lot of stuff — it excludes “stereotypical kidnapping,” which involves an unknown party or slight acquaintance with a higher threshold of harm or duration or both.
So the nonfamily abductions can be, “My ex-boyfriend took the child he considered his daughter for an hour without my permission or knowledge” but without any intent of harm. Because the report doesn’t break that part down, it still represents a fairly low threshold.
As far as vigilance helping? There’s no statistical basis for that, because we can’t measure the vigilance overall. Given that 100,000s of kids each year run away or are thrown out of their homes, it seems reasonable to say that overall vigilance is…not really uniformly high.
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Absolutely. Also, a few kids a year die from being left in a car instead of dropped at daycare (including one outright murder recently).
Maybe. At the same time it is amazing how blind people can be to abuse. A friends brother adopted like 4 or 5 foster kids of various ages who had gone through abuse. They had a lot of training on dealing with kids who survived abuse, had known what to look for, etc. It turned out the eldest repeated the abuse on his siblings. They were kicking the shit out of themselves for not seeing it sooner. And they had way more training and experience than your average person.
I am going to stay positive and just assume she won’t find a douche bag. Or they figure out what I did that she’s impossible to live with.
Waetherman is correct. There’s stereotypical kidnappings and then a larger, more amorphous category of nonfamily abductions. But “nonfamily” includes people who aren’t related to the child, which is why it generally features in non-married couples, and includes, in fact, a person who abducts a child to take the child out of an abusive family without having the rights to do so.
The larger nonfamily abductions category is still very small, and it involves people known to the child, thus people who typically have more opportunity; and the category involves less intent to harm or keeping the child for long.
I would say that the same studies showing the lack of pre-frontal cortex in teens, which affects their driving abilities, affects everything else too.
As a parent, I learned the hard way with child #1 that you can spend a lot of time trying to get a kid to take on a new challenge before they’re ready, or just relax and wait until they are ready, at which point the learning and doing is almost instantaneous.
We are the survivors of all the idiotic stuff done during the teen years. We have to remember that a lot of our compatriots didn’t make it through as well as we did. In particular, driving-while-teen is notorious for causing accidents. My kids don’t have ANY friends who have died in car accidents (a few injuries, yes), whereas I certainly knew quite a few in my teen years. There are a lot of ways to have increasing freedom as a teen without it involving heavy machinery. (In before a reference to farming, which IS very dangerous for every age, largely thanks to heavy machinery.)
But then, my kids have alternate ways to go far from home to get into trouble. They don’t need to drive themselves there. One danger down, ∞ to go!
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Totally agreed. We train our kids to find an adult in authority of any kind, and, failing that, any reasonable adult.
That link — Snopes links to Joel Best’s research, and points out that nearly every incident was a hoax. A very small number over 55 years are true, and those were mostly categorized as “an idiot thinking it was a prank.” So out of a trillion pieces of candy handed out 5 or 10 pieces provably had a sharp object in them.
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“It’s different than when we were young.” --No it isn’t. Stranger abductions are still incredibly rare, albeit terrifying, just as they were when we were young. There was actually an article in Saturday’s WaPo about progress being made in the case of the disappearance of the Lyon sisters, who disappeared walking home from Wheaton Plaza in 1975. So we actually HAD a high-profile abduction locally back in the day and people STILL believe that things are worse now. It is hard to balance the incredibly unlikely risk of something terrible against the likelihood of creating an insufficiently confident and competent adult by helicopter parenting. Bicycle helmets and seat belts have saved far more lives than the complete elimination of kidnappings by strangers ever could.
It’s worth pointing out that people are bad at judging the character of others. Most of the people that you think are good people are actually good people, but most of the people who are actually dangerous? Well, you still think they’re good people.
False-positives and false-negatives like crazy.
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People have a strong tendency to over play unlikely threats and underplay likely threats. There are, however, serious crimes rampant against children, sexual abuse being one of the most popular and extreme of these. As a parent, since the early 90s, however, I am not very aware of these statistics of kidnapping, they never really effected me. Misreporting these figures, however, do no one any good.
There are a lot of real dangers facing kids, and these dangers - their threat likelihood - is going to be somewhat different for each family and their circumstances. Browsing through the article, I do believe it uses some of the very same erroneous reporting methods such as relying on anecdotal evidence (that has special power in people’s minds) for making their case.
When I have run across especially “paranoid” parents, these people tend to be involved in some manner of hyper legalistic cult. Not that this is anything but anecdotal, and maybe I just really do not socialize much with other parents… but I do not recall ever running across any parents (in Texas, California, or Illinois) who have struck me as being especially paranoid of far flung dangers like kidnapping.
Dangers like your kid getting hit by a car are much more common and real.
I lived out in a rural area, and my parents used access to cars as a way to restrict us from going to parties and stuff the people who lived near each other did, so if I didn’t have a car, I would have been just stuck in cow pasture country.
My daughter seems pretty tame but sometimes I wonder how much it’s her natural thing and how much it’s somewhat enforced on her by limiting her access to go out on her own. I did a lot of exploring as a teenager, like going to antique places and noodling around, that also was very freeing for me and less dangerous than the above stuff.
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This to the nth degree. Funny how the “Stranger Danger” programs, along with straight-up hoaxes such as the “Satanic ritual abuse” panic, started popping up just as people started becoming aware of how prevalent sexual abuse by parents and parental figures was.
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I live in a big city and the main reason we don’t let our kids roam more freely has little to do with stranger danger and more to do with traffic danger and/or getting lost. As they get older these risks should hopefully diminish substantially.
I put together a chart from the data from the original study from 2002 referenced in this article. Mostly because I think pictures help.
The left side is the data from the caretaker reported missing children, the right is from the reported to authorities missing children. These are rates per thousand children in a year, you can just look at that if you can grok the numbers or one could take the 9 runaways/throwaway per 1000 children and say that every 111 years your child is likely to be missing because of being a runaway/throwaway. Your actual experience may differ.
If I was to look at this and be concerned for my child having one of these events happening to them, to attempt to ease my mind I might say the following for each:
- Missing but benign doesn’t worry me (except for @XiIE 's experience at Aldi’s).
- We all endeavoring to make our homes ones where our children don’t feel the need to runaway and we won’t want to throw them out.
- Where possible I might try to maintain good relations with an ex-spouse or keep track of them to avoid a family abduction (this one has many dimensions for which I am sympathetic.).
- There is already good advice in the thread for the missing involuntary, lost or injured (be careful out there, teach them their phone numbers).
- Decide how much prep you want to have for the once every 2000 to 5000 years that a given child will be abducted by non-family (some of which definition includes people we might call family members) vs. the 1 every 7 years you will go to the emergency room for an unintentional injury, for example (more stats).
Depending on your risk tolerance this figure may or may not let you sleep well at night if you are a parent.
I have other issues with the numbers from the study such as classifying some incidents in two categories so the percentages don’s add up to 100% or not having the original data to see how the rates change with the age of the missing child.
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It’s just so terrifying to think of someone climbing in a window and taking your child away, or luring them to their pedovan and doing awful things to them. As parents either we can whistle in the dark or try to protect them, even if it is rare.
And anecdotally, there were two incidents that happened with my stepkids that fit the stranger danger category - one they were smart enough to move away from fast (that pedovan parked near the little kid’s park), the other - we got them away from but they had no idea that a 35 year old guy hanging out by himself at the skating rink going up and being jokey with young kids was not OK. And that was scary, that they didn’t see it.
My oldest son’s big step towards independence was when he was 12, and was allowed to take the train to his kendo lessons by himself. In Tokyo. He was very proud of himself, and he is a stronger person because of it.
