Fighting the Culture of Fear
Marlin: “I promised I'd never let anything happen to him.”
Dory: “Hmm. That's a funny thing to promise.”
Marlin: “What?”
Dory: “Well, you can't never let anything happen to him. Then nothing would ever happen to him."
From the Disney/Pixar movie Finding Nemo
OK, I admit it. Sometimes I get sucked into it. As a newer parent, it’s very tempting to encase your kids in a bubble, literally and figuratively, in an attempt to keep every ill of the world, real or imagined, from descending upon them. Don’t touch that. Stay away from the stairs. Don’t go out in the front yard alone! And, my two kids are just three and barely crawling, respectively, so I have many years of potential panic ahead of me.
But, then again, there are days when I just realize that our kids are going to fall down, they’re going to play hard and hurt themselves and there’s not a damn thing I can do about that. They’re going to get older, more independent and are not always going to be under my control. Welcome to parenting, right?
Well, a letter to the editor in the local paper last week stopped me in my tracks. I still can’t tell if the writer’s intent was literal or sarcastic. After numerous reads, I’m thinking it was literal, which is what’s frightening. You can judge for yourself. Here’s the text:
“As we cruised down the road on our Sunday joy ride near the lake, my 7-year-old son said he wanted a summer house at the lake. My husband and I jokingly said he would need to get a job — or two or three.My son replied, “OK, what kind of job can I get?” I said, “Paperboy,” then I thought: No, he can’t do that because someone might take him. He asked, “Lemonade stand?” No, I thought, even sitting out by the road is too dangerous and invites child predators.
I told my husband how times have changed. What can our children do? We all know childhood obesity is a problem, and it’s no wonder! We live out in the country and I’m afraid to let my son ride his bike by the road, let alone down it.Even with adult supervision the thought of someone knowing you have small children at your house worries me because the wrong person might be paying attention. I raise the thought about childhood obesity: Children being lazy? Or parents being cautiously paranoid?”
What’s frightening about this reader’s attitude is that it’s intellectually easy for the majority of the sheep-like public to nod their head and say “Yeah, that’s right. There’s sex offenders everywhere. There’s black vans driving around snatching kids off the street. I’m not letting my kid out of the house.”
The simple fact is, it’s not true. Do a little work, as I did here, and you’ll see that’s the facts don’t jive with the conventional wisdom. And, in this day and age, that’s scary. ‘Cause it seems that, more and more, opinions often outweigh facts. But, read a little. Put some brainpower into it and you’ll see that our kids, and adults for that matter, aren’t really being terrorized at the rate in which the media is portraying.
About seven in ten female rape or sexual assault victims stated the offender was an intimate, other relative, a friend or an acquaintance. Males were more likely to be violently victimized by a stranger than a nonstranger, and females were more likely to be victimized by a friend, an acquaintance, or an intimate. Seventy-four percent of males and 48 percent of females stated the individual(s) who robbed them was a stranger. Intimates were identified by the victims of workplace violence as the perpetrator in about 1 percent of all workplace violent crime. About 40% of the victims of nonfatal violence in the workplace reported that they knew their offender. For murder victims, 43 percent were related to or acquainted with their assailants; 14 percent of victims were murdered by strangers, while 43 percent of victims had an unknown relationship to their murderer in 2002. Two thirds of murders of children under the age of 5 were committed by a parent or other family member. Source: U.S. Department of Justice-- http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/cvict_c.htm
Dory: “Hmm. That's a funny thing to promise.”
Marlin: “What?”
Dory: “Well, you can't never let anything happen to him. Then nothing would ever happen to him."
From the Disney/Pixar movie Finding Nemo
OK, I admit it. Sometimes I get sucked into it. As a newer parent, it’s very tempting to encase your kids in a bubble, literally and figuratively, in an attempt to keep every ill of the world, real or imagined, from descending upon them. Don’t touch that. Stay away from the stairs. Don’t go out in the front yard alone! And, my two kids are just three and barely crawling, respectively, so I have many years of potential panic ahead of me.
But, then again, there are days when I just realize that our kids are going to fall down, they’re going to play hard and hurt themselves and there’s not a damn thing I can do about that. They’re going to get older, more independent and are not always going to be under my control. Welcome to parenting, right?
Well, a letter to the editor in the local paper last week stopped me in my tracks. I still can’t tell if the writer’s intent was literal or sarcastic. After numerous reads, I’m thinking it was literal, which is what’s frightening. You can judge for yourself. Here’s the text:
“As we cruised down the road on our Sunday joy ride near the lake, my 7-year-old son said he wanted a summer house at the lake. My husband and I jokingly said he would need to get a job — or two or three.My son replied, “OK, what kind of job can I get?” I said, “Paperboy,” then I thought: No, he can’t do that because someone might take him. He asked, “Lemonade stand?” No, I thought, even sitting out by the road is too dangerous and invites child predators.
I told my husband how times have changed. What can our children do? We all know childhood obesity is a problem, and it’s no wonder! We live out in the country and I’m afraid to let my son ride his bike by the road, let alone down it.Even with adult supervision the thought of someone knowing you have small children at your house worries me because the wrong person might be paying attention. I raise the thought about childhood obesity: Children being lazy? Or parents being cautiously paranoid?”
What’s frightening about this reader’s attitude is that it’s intellectually easy for the majority of the sheep-like public to nod their head and say “Yeah, that’s right. There’s sex offenders everywhere. There’s black vans driving around snatching kids off the street. I’m not letting my kid out of the house.”
The simple fact is, it’s not true. Do a little work, as I did here, and you’ll see that’s the facts don’t jive with the conventional wisdom. And, in this day and age, that’s scary. ‘Cause it seems that, more and more, opinions often outweigh facts. But, read a little. Put some brainpower into it and you’ll see that our kids, and adults for that matter, aren’t really being terrorized at the rate in which the media is portraying.
- Kidnapping composes less than 2 percent of all violent crimes against juveniles reported to police.
- 49 percent of juvenile kidnappings are perpetrated by family members, 27 percent by an acquaintance and 24 percent by a stranger.
- Acquaintance kidnapping involves a comparatively high percentage of juvenile perpetrators, has the largest percentage of female and teenage victims, is more often associated with other crimes, and has the highest percentage of injured victims.
- Source: U.S. Department of Justice—http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/ibrs.htm
That second bullet point is really striking. More than 75 percent of kidnappings are being done by someone who knows the victim. Kind of flies in the face of the media’s portrayal of all these random, taking-kids-off-the-street kidnappings, doesn’t it? There’s more. Take a look at these stats on the victim/offender relationship.
During 2005 –
So, having looked some of that over, where does that leave us? Am I being a polyanna? “If I just ignore it, that means it’s not true.” Absolutely not. Do we need to be vigilant with our kids? Absolutely. Just like we should be vigilant with our own personal safety. But, should we push the panic button every time our kids go outside? No way.
It’s an exciting world out there and it’s our job as parents to expose our children to that exciting world. To help them understand it. To help them get out and see it, live it and learn from it. And, to help them leave it just a little bit better than when they found it. That’s what makes life interesting.
posted by W.S. Wuori at 11:07 AM
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