A Facebook friend posted a note giving tips for parents to keep their small children safe in public places. She begins by saying it was safer when she was a child but times have changed and abductions have increased. To prove her point, she cited an example of a stranger who attempted to abduct a child in her area.
But are children really at a greater risk of abduction than in the past? How great is this threat relative to other risks children face?
The vast majority of children that are reported missing are returned unharmed. The abductor is usually a family member. Kidnappings by acquaintances are much less common and stranger kidnappings are extremely rare. The US Department of Justice conducted detailed studies estimating the number of missing children. In 1988, they estimated between 200 and 300 abductions by strangers occurred. For 1999, they estimated 115 such abductions. Due to differing study methodology, these studies do not conclusively prove a decline, but there is certainly no evidence of an increase.[1]
A review of the Center for Disease Control’s charts on leading causes of death reports reveals that children are much more likely to be killed in an accident than be abducted by a stranger. This means automobiles and bathtubs are more likely to hurt children than people they don’t know. [2]
But where did this persistent idea that child abductions are increasing originate? Why do parents fear their children being abducted by strangers more than, say, falling down stairs? When my friend was a child, there were fewer national media outlets and news was not available 24/7. Today the media is capable of distributing news from anywhere in the world to everywhere in the world. A child stolen by a stranger is more likely to receive national or international coverage than a child poisoned by household cleaners. The greater variety of media outlets means more time can be devoted to repeated tellings of the story and exhaustive commentary. As useful as media coverage can be to positive outcomes in child abductions, you could hypothesize that the wide distribution and selected coverage of child abductions also makes these events seem more frequent and a greater threat than they really are.
Another possible reason that parents tend to think of the world as increasingly dangerous is simply that, when they were children, they viewed the world through the eyes of a child.
Parents should certainly take prudent measures to protect their children from all manner of risks. But we pay a price in our personal lives and as a society when we allow fear out of proportion to those risks to guide our actions.
[1] National Incident Studies of Missing Abducted, Runaway and Thrownaway Children (NISMART) Questions and Answers, http://www.ncjrs.gov/html/ojjdp/nismart/qa/
[2] CDC Leading Causes Charts http://www.cdc.gov/ncipc/osp/charts.htm
