So it’s fairly well established that kids today are victims of crimes far less than they were 30-40 years ago. Some use such statistics to show that parents are over protective and should not hover around their kids and allow them more freedom. I wonder though…
Is it possible that the main reason that kids today experience less crime because parents never let their kids out of their sight? If a kid is never allowed to walk to school alone there is much less chance of a guy in a van luring your kid in and molesting them.
As I understand it a huge percentage of girls my age, like up to half, were the victim of some sort of sexual crime and it strikes me that you only have to miss once for your kid to fall victim.
So do you think that kids today are just inherently safer or just appears to be true due to the work of over protective parents?
The number of sex crimes against children perpetrated by strangers is, while not insignificant, a small fraction of the number committed by people the child knows. So it’s doubtful that being out and about alone presents a substantially elevated risk to a child; they are much more likely to be molested or whatever while sitting at home with a relative or caregiver.
Crimes are down across all age groups. It’s not just crimes against children. The stranger in a white van is, and always has been mostly a myth. The majority of missing kids are runaways and generally come back with in 24 hours.
There’s far more problems, IMHO, from parents hovering over their kids. My eleven year old can not use a knife, she’s not allowed, even a butter knife. Neither of my kids much like leaving my sight, even though I’ve tried to get them to go play by themselves.
I’d like to see support for your “understanding.” I would suspect that that would require an excessively broad definition of what constituted a “sexual crime.”
As was noted, violent crime is down pretty much across the board. Back when I was a child (the 60s) and when my kids were kids (90s), Stranger Danger was pretty much a myth, along the lines of tainted treats on Halloween.
My favorite related recollection was when my 3d grade daughter started in girl scouts, which met at the school after school. Our kids always walked the ~4 blocks to/from school. The leaders called, and said they would not release our dtr to walk home alone. To which we said, “Fine, we’ll send her brother to meet her and walk home with her.” They were fine with that. Of course, we didn’t tell them that her brother was in 1st grade!
When I was a kid (1950), we all knew who the town weirdos were, and we followed them around and made fun of them. They were absolutely not any danger to anybody.
There was a pharmacist in town, my mother told me he was “a fairy”. She did not elaborate. I did not know what that meant, but I knew that I should be aware of something about him. I hung out in his drug store every day after school at the soda fountain, never saw him do anything out of the ordinary. No overt action was required, to defend anyone. But “the danger” was present.
I am one of those middle aged old farts who remembers the days when all the neighborhood kids left on a Saturday morning, had a sandwich at whoever’s house was close for lunch, and came home sometime before dark and were all just fine.
But call it *lack of confirmation *bias or something. News was very limited. You did not hear about the murder in Little Rock, the robbery in Boise, the guy who slaps his kid in New York, the honor killing in some place, etc. So it only seemed to be a safer time. There were creeps around, there were kids who disappeared, and most importantly of all you never really heard about any, or almost any, crime of a sexual nature on the local news or in the paper. It might have been called an assault but rape was not a word used in polite company. So your little area seemed safer then than now, but it probably wasn’t.
Today, even with the 24 hour news cycle that must be filled, some day’s news is really boring with all the technology we have available.
5 shot in Florida, 8 dead in France. And the bad guys are almost instantly identified, dealt with, and removed as a danger to the rest of society.
Who knows what a 1970’s world wide day’s events would look like had there been today’s level of internet information. I would be willing to bet the picture would be much, much, worse.
This also explains, imo, why so many are so pessimistic about the world’s state of affairs (and their direction) despite reams of evidence to the contrary.
In my day (1940s) I came home from school (crossing US 1 on the way home*!), I threw my school bag into the living room and then went out and played till it got dark. Much the same all summer, except we couldn’t wait till dark. I am sure there was an occasional crime against children, but we never heard such cases. Now kids are never allowed out unsupervised and I wonder how they grow up. I guess one answer is that they get driver’s licenses at 16 and are now on their own.
*It was just an ordinary city street–57th St., in Philadelphia for about a mile between Baltimore Ave. and Chestnut St., but it really was Route 1. There was a traffic light.
Yeah, but doesn’t the opposite hold true as well? Due to the news coverage, today your little area seems more dangerous than it is…
Add in the fact that many folk nowadays act as though they expect their lives to be risk and injury free. Cops should protect them against all evildoers, every product should be perfectly safe, every malady should be cured.
I’m reading Peyton Place right now (surprisingly better read than I expected.) Certainly not a documentary, but I’d wager you could go back to the stone age and find there have always been any manner of evil and twisted folk acting poorly towards others. Just because it is published more widely these days does not necessarily mean it is more prevalent.
