- Because a lot of people wouldn’t want to take chances and been involved in a crime, so wouldn’t check if they heard someone yelling “help” or “rape”. While they would probably check if they heard “fire” since there would presumably be no risks.
2)Because there are quite a lot of morons (especially teenagers, IME) who scream “help” for no reason at all (not necessarily as a prank, just because it’s fun at the moment…for instance a friend is pretending to chase them and they’re pretending to scream). So a lot of people wouldn’t even bother if they heard “help”.
I’d like to offer one observation about children being trained in “stranger danger” here that can in some cases be detrimental to the child.
I volunteer at a local science and technology museum and of course, we deal with hundreds and hundreds of kids every day. We also deal with our share of lost kids and lost parents.
Every so often, we get a youngster that has become seperated from mom or dad that knows to go to the front desk or to a uniformed staff member for help, but then clams up tight when it comes to giving a name, a parent’s name, etc.
All we can do in these instances is get a good description of the child oout over the radio and hope that staff members around the museum can find the panicked parents who seem to be missing someone.
I’m not sure how you’d go about training a child to give up vital information in situations like this, but we find that sometimes, kids are so well drilled in the “never talk to strangers” thing that that’s exactly what they do - even when the “stranger” is someone they came to for help.
Just an observation -