I should have added to this:
Charles Whitman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Whitman
Student shootings weren’t invented at Columbine or V. Tech.
When my mother was a child in the 50s, her mother was afraid to let her and her three sisters out of her sight because of news reports of a corrupt cop and judge stealing babies from poor ‘white-trash’ families and essentially selling them to wealthy childless couples. What they would do is the police officer would find these poor, rural families and take their children on trumped-up charges of neglect. The judge would then ‘place’ the children in ‘better’ families, and then would split the money with the cop. Most of their victims were simply too poor and too far down the food chain to fight them. Finally, one family kicked up a fuss and wouldn’t let it go until someone took notice and realized these corrupt officials were stealing and selling people’s babies. When this news got out it terrified my grandmother that some cop could just pull up in the driveway and take her four daughters.
I do know that rape and abuse (emotional, physical, sexual, child, etc.) was not talked about back in those days. It happened, but it was kept quiet, and most of the time the attacker was not punished.
After doing a Google Books search, I now wonder if the case my grandmother heard about was the black-market baby-selling ring of Georgia Tann, who died in 1950. She sold the babies from the Tennessee Children’s Home Society in Memphis, and worked hand-in-hand with a judge, Camille Kelley.
Don’t forget that poeple tended not to travel as much, move as often, and usually knew who their neighbors were for quite some distance. (Middle-class jobs frequently require moving long distances, and that tends to break social ties.) There might have been as many psychos wandering around, but they may have had to be a little more circumspect and were often killing peole they knew as remote aquaintances.
That would explain why they schedule so few activities at city hall.
= = =
We grew up in the 1950s, well ahead of the curve on paranoia about stranger kidnappings. My Mom was always concerned that we were going to be grabbed on the street.
OTOH, my Mom had a basis for her fears: she was with a group of kids when a guy actually did kidnap one of her friends around 1922, although he was nabbed before he actually harmed the child.
Also the divorce rate - as distinct from the unhappily-married-but-can’t-do-anything-about-it rate - has of course gone through the roof; child abductions per divorce have probably not changed much, but there’d be hugely more divorces now.
Growing up in the late1950s/early 1960s suburbs, no, we weren’t worried about bogeymen. Just let our parents know where we were. There would be an occasional commercial/teacher telling us not to take candy or rides if a stranger approached us for some unspecified reason.
I don’t know that parents are terrified about abductions so much as terrified about perception of themselves as parents. The age at which it is now socially acceptable to let your children walk to school has risen hugely. If I’d been abducted and killed when walking home by myself when aged 8 society would have been sympathetic to my parents. If I let my 8 year old walk to school by himself now and he was abducted and killed I would be regarded as utterly (if not criminally) irresponsible.
code_grey said:
I don’t think it’s quite so simple. My eldest aunt on my father’s side died as an infant when she was being carried across a street by a child and was hit by a car - in the 1930s. And it screwed my grandmother up for life - guilt and clinginess. Even though she had 3 more kids.
I think that expectations are shaped by acceptance of the reality you witness and the perception of the ability to do something about it. When there wasn’t much of a treatment of illness or injuries, then death was more common and there wasn’t much that could be done, so people had to accept that reality. But there also wasn’t much effective birth control, so people had lots of children. They rationalized that they had more children, and as far as the useful aspects of children it was helpful they had lots to spare, but from an emotional standpoint it was a coping mechanism to deal with the reality that a lot of infants and children died.
With advances in medicine we changed expectations from illnesses were rampant and largely untreatable/unpreventable to illnesses can be prevented and treated and largely cured. So with that shift in expectations for child survival comes a greater expectation that we can control other aspects of child survival.
An interesting observation is the change in public attitude across the 20th century, from 1901 when a doctor could possibly tell you how you were dying, to 2000, when people go doctors and be told exactly what is wrong, how it happened, and how to cure it, and are pissed off if the doctor doesn’t know just by examining them once. Okay, a slight exaggeration, but fairly reflective of truth.
Our perception of the ability to control what happens around us is different. Our society’s conception of safety is very different. Contrast 2009 with 1909 for things like worker safety in industrial plants or high rise construction, just to name one issue. Our cultural attitude is different as whole, it makes sense that it is reflected in our attitudes toward children’s safety as well.
Princhester said:
Another effect of the condition described above. With the perception of control over what can happen comes the perception that if something happens, one didn’t do enough to control it.
Truly evil woman. There’s an organization that exists solely to reconnect families she separated. Mary Tyler Moore played her in a TV movie a few years back.
When I was a kid in the late 1970s there was a movie- one I’ve never seen- whose trailer used to scare the bejeezus out of us: The Town That Dreaded Sundown. It was based (how closely I’ve no idea) on a serial killer who murdered several people in Texarkana in 1946. Ross Perot actually mentioned this film during one of his campaigns as he was a teenager in Texarkana at the time and knew (I don’t think especially well) some of the victims; the writer/director of the movie was also a child there at the time.
There were five killings and some assaults in the spring of 1946, then it stopped. (Wiki.) The crime has never been solved, though more than one true crime writer has tried connecting it to the Zodiac killings that began twenty years later due to similar m.o…
Askance writes:
> Also the divorce rate - as distinct from the unhappily-married-but-can’t-do-
> anything-about-it rate - has of course gone through the roof; child abductions
> per divorce have probably not changed much, but there’d be hugely more
> divorces now.
The divorce rate hasn’t gone up since 1981. It reached a peak then and has actually dropped a little since then. (Here I’m talking about in the U.S.) The only change in marriages since then has been the increasing tendency to not get married at all.
I always question these statistics due to the fact that divorce wasn’t “done” for years, but many people had what amounted to functional divorces that didn’t get put down on paper. Great-grandfathers on both sides of my family abandoned their wives and children, but those abandonments weren’t counted as divorces because you just didn’t do that back then.
Given that this probably happened more than we realized, I really don’t know WHAT we can say about divorce rates and their changes over the decades.
Of course there was alway serial killings and mass murders.
Belle Gunness is female serial killer with the most “hits” and she was around in the early 1900s
The largest number of kids killed at school was in Bath Michigan in 1927.
The list goes on and on. In fact it was a heck of a lot easier to get away with it in the old days, 'cause you could simply move and start over.
Nannie Doss, dubbed the “Giggling Granny,” killed four husbands, two children, her two sisters, her mother, a grandson and a nephew and many others. But she did it over a period of decades and she wasn’t caught till the 50s.
Violence has always been part of society it’s just more apparent now. Plus the norm has changed. In my day you saw many children raised by, what we used to term, “the cuff of their parent’s hand,” that is child abuse today.
You have to remember contact in the old days was very limited, and relations went off and it was normal. When you left Europe to immigrate you basically severed all ties with the old countries. You’d get a few letters that took at least a month to go one way. But that was it, you never expected to see your relatives again, or most of them.
Therefore people could get killed and disappear and no one thought of it, 'cause that was the norm.
People didn’t travel as far so there was a sense of community. I’ve talked to some elderly people about life in my neighborhood in Chicago, during the 30s and 40s. And it’s amazing, they say things like “No, it was EASIER to get a gun, it was EASIER to get alcohol and drugs were everywhere.”
But because you stayed in your area there was a sense of community and restraint we don’t have. Ostracism is the greatest way to motovate or change people’s behaviour yet we no longer send people to conventry.
One elderly woman I talked to said she took the streetcar home at 2am. I asked her if she felt unsafe, she said 'No, the streetcar operator would stop the car and wait till he saw me at the door and I gave him the wave." When I asked didn’t the other passenger mind the wait. She was all like, “Heavens no, everyone back there understood, you did things like that. And if you compained you were a jerk and people pulled you back into line quickly.”
In the USA since the 70s we have moved from a community to a sense of total individuality. All this means is we feel more threatened and the preceived threats against us greater.
People have been poisoned, murdered, knifed, even pushed out of windows, for years, but it’s just more apparent today. In reality in most areas violent crimes have gone way down. (This is offset by property crimes and drug crimes soaring). So today you’re more likely to be arrested for drug charges or have your propery stolen or vandalized than you are to be physically assulted.
Some years back, Cecil did a column on crime rates, specifically whether the world has become more dangerous since your parents (or your grandparents, or you) were kids.
Not forgetting this charmer: Fred West - Wikipedia
I’m actually kind of skeptical that modern parents are as overprotective today as Dopers seem to think. During the 80’s most of the kids were allowed to roam more or less at will through the neighborhood so long as we got back before dinner. And observing my gf’s brother and his friends (around age 12 or so), they seem to travel around the neighborhood more or less at will, and a good neighbor walk/bike the mile or so to their school. If anything, I’d think the rise of two working parents has led to kids with more freedom, as its harder to keep tabs on “latch-key” kids since there’s no one there to do the watching.
I think people are over-extrapolating from a few individual overprotective parents that watch too much CNN.
Another '80s kid here who had the same experience. But that’s now a quarter-century ago.
Baby Charles Lindbergh Jr. was kidnapped and murdered in 1932. Bruno Hauptmann was tried and convicted of the murder in 1935 and executed in 1936.
Yea, but people seem to be contrasting to the 50’s and 60’s, so I thought it was worth adding, along with the more modern anecdote about my gf’s brother.
Granted its just anecdotes, but I can’t really think of any convincing way to quantify “parental caution”, so that might be what we have to settle with. But in anycase, I’m skeptical kids now-a-days are coddled invalids imprisoned in their parents houses for fear of child rapists and murders. It just seems like another flavor of “back in the good ol’ days” type stories that the OP is questioning that seem to usually fall apart on deeper examination.
I don’t think so. As the parent of two small children, the social pressures if not the legal pressures are immense not to let them wander around freely. It could land the parents in big trouble if something goes wrong so it simply isn’t allowed and I an not overprotective in the least. I grew up on our own 100 acres in Louisiana that joined hundreds of more acres of woodland and I would go on camping trips by myself or with one friend starting at age nine and we might not come home for two days. I stayed by myself at home by age six for limited amounts of time because I wanted to. My father was a firearms dealer and I had my own .22 rifle by age 8 and basically anything else I wanted to shoot on our ranges.
Times have changed and I think it is for the worst. Kids get coddled and protected a little too much out of fear and ignorance of risk assessment. However, even rational parents have to react to the hysteria of others unless they want to make the local news if something goes wrong and it will sometimes even if it is minor. Every parents fear is Child Protective Services because they respond to hysteria and they are not a court of law whether anything wrong has been done.