Cecil’s column is a response to a question about child safety etc, whether they can ride on public transport and so on.
Cecil answers as if an absolute rise in crime figures is the beginning and end of the question.
More interesting to me is the fact that (at worst) violent crime has just increased from 2/5ths to 3/5ths of hardly anything at all. Double almost zip and you get almost zip.
But perceptions of danger seem to me to have increased as if crime has actually gone from barely significant to extremely worrying, and that is just not bourne out by the figures.
And I think it’s sad, because nothing is more likely to make crime in the public arena increase more than the retreat of normal law abiding people from buses and parks and footpaths (sidewalks), based upon unjustified fears.
Indeed, without a doubt the OP reflects what I believe is the true issue. Our perception of threat and danger is greater than in the past. So, by definition, “danger” is greater.
Now, why is that? Has crime and violence increased? Are we able to accurately measure changes over time?
IMHO, I suspect that television has a great influence on our perceptions. Generations prior to the 1950s were not subject to the constant exposure to violent images. They, therefore, did not perceive their immediate world to be as dangerous, even if measurable statistics might argue otherwise.
I think it’s relevant to the issue of perception of crime that, in the original letter that was the basis of Cecil’s column, the people who thought the world was a dangerous place were women while the writer, who rode transit in the city in his youth, was a man.
For reasons both valid and not, women seem to (1) be warned more about crime, (2) worry more about crime, and (3) actually change behavior, great and small, in response to the perception of crime.
I’ve never been told not to ride an elevator alone with a person I don’t know, or not to walk to my car at night unescorted, or to be home by dark, or to wear only plain clothes. All this advice I’ve heard directed at girls and women. I would imagine that merely being given such advice, even with the best intentions and even though it may be useful, makes the world seem more intimidating and scary.
On the very issue raised in the Cecil column, my mother had very different attitudes on myself and my sister riding public transit into the city. Her response to me was “Grand. Have a nice time. Call when you need a ride from the station. Bye!” But if my sister went out AT THE SAME AGE, she went into a near-panic of various warnings interspersed with “Is this trip really necessary? Why not meet your friends out here in the suburbs.” :rolleyes: Meanwhile, my father had the same unconcerned response towards both of us; “They know what they’re doing, and they’ve been in the city dozens of times before without trouble.”
Perhaps your mother was overreacting a tad. On the other hand, it is a clear fact that women are less safe than men in the same situations. They are typically smaller and weaker, or at least perceived as such, and are more often the targets of abduction, rape, and violence. So while as a young man (even if not fully adult) you might be fairly safe, a young woman might be under more threat. You yourself point out the extra advice given to women to help them remain safe. That is not just histrionics, it is important advice learned through trial and error.
It is valid to notice the gender difference in attitude that is perhaps shaped by this difference in perception, but is the perception wrong?
If it’s the perception that women are more likely to be victims of violence then that is false. In Canada at least women are lot less likely to be homicide victims according to Stats Canada
And here’s a U.S. Department of Justice website saying outside of rape men are 42% more likely to be victims of violent crime.
Another false perception reflected in the “helpful” warnings is that women are more likely to be sexually assaulted by some stranger in the parking lot than from someone she already knows. Elsewhere on that same US justice dept website is an article on victim-offender relationship that states :
The baffling one for me is this one “Seventy-four percent of males and 60% of females stated the individual(s) who robbed them was a stranger”. That means 40% of the time they knew the guy that robbed them? Crazy.
Perhaps they should be worried about other things instead. According to the Department of Justice web page referenced above, there are more than five times as many violent robberies as rapes, and almost thirty times as many cases of simple assault. And, as others have noted, rape committed by a stranger is rarer still.
I’m not saying rape isn’t a terrible problem, but popular perception makes it out to be a bigger risk than it is. Moreover, I believe that girls suffer real psychological harm by being raised to think of themselves as potential victims and all strange men as potential predators, especially when the actual figures don’t bear this out.
A study of the rise/fall of murder rates does little to answer the question of whether children are safer today than in past.
When thinking about their safety, we are most likely thinking of child abduction.
I would be interested in seeing abduction stats; I would suggest that most if not all of the increase in child abduction is as a result of parental abduction.
If that is the case, children of parents who have not been involved in a custody dispute are likely just as safe as in the past.
Assuming that violent robbery happens as often to women as to men, and that a negligible fraction of rape victims are men, that would mean that there are two and a half times as many violent robberies of women as of rapes of women. I think that most women would agree that a rape is more than two and a half times as bad as a robbery, even a violent one. In that case, it’s still appropriate for women to worry more about rape than about violent robbery.
I think Icarus has the right idea. Our imaginations are being overfed. To wit: every time some psycho does something perverted in some backwater, we all get it shoved down our throats live on CNN.
I’m all for being vigilant and careful and informed, but we don’t need to know all this.
Unfortunately we can’t go back to our idyllic naiveté. I tried once. I canceled my subscription to Time and Newsweek and stopped reading the newspaper. Hopeless.