You are off on your percentage by several orders of magnitude. On the high side. I agree with you on this point, but your statement about understanding numbers just got fucked.
One evening last week, I was walking my dog at the park - it was pitch dark (6PM, UK, winter) - my little dog has a bright LED collar and loves to chase a glow-in-the-dark rubber ball. Everyone finds this interesting and many people comment on it.
So I was standing in the middle of a dark field and a young boy appeared at my side - maybe 7 or 8 years old. He started talking to me about the dog breed, the glowing dog toys, the weather, etc - all completely normal stuff. Then his younger sister appeared and joined the conversation. They both asked for a turn throwing the ball, and if it was OK to pet the dog, etc.
All the while this is happening, my thoughts are:
Where are the parents?
Does the fact that I am looking around for the parents appear furtive?
If I ask where their parents are, could that be misunderstood to mean ‘are you alone here?’
Is the very fact that I am not reacting with concern, suspicious-looking?
Should I stroll toward the most likely spot where the parents would be (the community centre and car park)?
What if that’s not where they are, and I appear to be leading the children away?
I had no bad intentions - I don’t mind kids and in fact I often find their viewpoints on life to be interesting. It should have been a perfectly nice and innocent encounter, but it seems like that just can’t happen.
There’s a sort of game theory thing going on here though. Whilst the action of an adult talking to a child is not in itself evil, it is amongst the sorts of things an adult with evil intent might try. Therefore:
If you are suspicious of strangers, and the stranger is evil, you win.
If you are suspicious of strangers, and the stranger is innocent, you lose nothing
So I guess it’s completely understandable how this all came to be. The world is poorer for it though.
BigT, I understand numbers just fine, thank you. I know that the percentage is smaller than other percentages. What I also understand is what it is to be a parent–something you don’t need to explain to me, thanks.
So yeah, you had some pretty good unintentional irony in that post–but sadly, you don’t win the prize. That goes to TokyoBayer’s wonderful description of my overreaction:
Yes, the dreaded hairy eyeball! What will this world come to when a parent gives someone the hairy eyeball? DOOMED I TELL YOU
0.0034% works out to about 1 in 30,000. To put this probability into context for people who aren’t so good with numbers, your odds of dying in a car crash (in the US) are about 1 in 10,000 (your odds of being severely injured are probably far worse). As traumatic as child molestation may be, it’s hard to argue that it’s worse than dying in a car crash - and happily, it’s also far less likely, especially if you’re taking even tiny protective measures.
If parents is willing to regularly expose their kid to the risk of death by putting him in a high-speed metal box, then maybe they should relax a bit about the risk of being molested by a stranger.
In the park.
On a bright sunny day.
With dozens of witnesses in the area.
Worth reading: The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things
How did it come to pass, in this enlightened republic, that sickness is presumed the norm? That civility and socialization are construed as evidence of predatory pathology.
I’m a single woman who often engages children in conversation if their adult is nearby. I usually start by saying “hello.” If the child responses, I ask “How’s your day going?” If the chid doesn’t respond, I don’t say anything further.
I have conversations with children in the check out line where I cashier. I notice they usually look to their adult, who nods or says “It’s okay.” If I see a child standing alone in the store, I follow store policy: Ask the child who they are with and where is that person? If they don’t know, I get the child’s name and immediately page the person (Will Adam’s caretaker please come to the register? He’s looking for you.) And always keep an eye on the child until their adult shows up
You better not be engaging in friendly conversation! That’s not cool!
What’s next? Sharing and cooperation? Not on my watch!
:rolleyes: Whatever.
I’d rather make an unintended stupid mistake on a message board than go through life making stupid mistakes in basic reasoning and living in constant fear. YMMV.
I was going to post something like this:
The fear that something something is going to happen to their precious snowflake child:
In the park.
On a bright sunny day.
With dozens of witnesses in the area
Is only a little less crazy than worrying:
If I talk to a child for 30 seconds without making eye contact with other people
In the park.
On a bright sunny day.
With dozens of witnesses in the area
Then it’s going to freak people out.
Sad, isn’t it?
I was back in the States recently and having been away from such paranoia for 30 years, was going to let my eight-year-old daughter take the car keys, walk 30 feet out into the parking lot of Wendy’s and get her sweater all by herself. My mother was very concerned. Not for the child’s safety because my mother can actually do math, but that someone would be overly concerned and call the police.
I thought she was crazy. After reading this thread, I think America is crazy.
There are reasonable precautions. Back in the mid 70s, the janitor at my school told me that he was ever asked to take a kid somewhere for some reason, that he would bring along another kid. Why not.
On an unrelated podcast, one of the contributors is a former prosecutor who specialized in crimes against children including abuse, rape and molesting.
His take was that it was the people around you that you needed to take care of. However, it wasn’t that you needed to be all paranoid about everyone. It was the people who were really, really into children, far too much. People who befriended children to the exclusion of adults.
This isn’t talking about 30 seconds of conversation in parks, in plain view of everyone, with dozens of witnesses around.
He said that he just doesn’t allow his kids to go for sleepovers. Period. That could be an occupational hazard just because he’s seen too many. I don’t know. We haven’t had to face that yet ourselves.
Back to the point about the odds of children getting into trouble being much higher for children without good love, supervision, and protection in their lives, look at the children that Michael Jackson and Jerry Sandusky picked. It wasn’t the children from stable homes, it was those from troubled ones.
A friend of a friend “Bob” was incarcerated for molesting young boys. He would meet kids, befriend them, buy them presents, play video games with them at his place and slowly groom them. That’s got to be the vast majority of stranger sexual abuse of minors.
Not 30 seconds of conversation, in parks, in plain view of everyone, with dozens of witnesses around.
Well, car trunks were bigger back then too.
:p:o
I left out a point on Bob’s story, which should be obvious, but any parent with a reasonable interest in their child is going to catch on to the existence of Bob far sooner than Bob is going to be able to make a move on the child.
Even back in the free-range days of my childhood, that would have been picked up on.
Bob’s victims were children from broken homes, neglected, abused or otherwise troubled. Families where parents didn’t ask their kids where they were spending all their time or why they had new toys.
You do realize that when I put my children in the car, I take measures to keep them safe there as well, right? There’s a lot of excluded middles going on here.
This being an excellent example. There’s a third path, one that I take, and that neither involves stupid mistakes on a messageboard nor living in constant fear. Keeping kids safe doesn’t mean living in constant fear. It just means being aware of what’s going on, and minimizing potential dangers when it’s reasonable to do so.
But it’s lovely to be lectured by people who don’t know what they’re talking about, so by all means continue! 
Do drug dealers still hang around parks asking random kids to try weed?
This. It comes across as weird because a) I think it’s actually pretty rare for an adult to talk to a child for no reason and b) there is often little reason to in the first place and c) there is often little reason for that adult to be there in the first place. So when you see someone acting in a manner that is unusual and unexpected (particularly around children), it sets off some red flags.
Sorry if that offends anyone’s delicate overly PC sensibilities. I’ll keep an eye out for your kids on milk cartons and AMBER alert texts.
Maybe I’m wrong though. My 2 year old seems to know EVERYONE around town. I go for a walk with him and people are all like “hey!”. I’m like “how do you know my boy?” Usually it’s like “he’s in yoga class with my daughter” or “oh we hang out in the coffee shop.” Apparently my toddler is a 26 year old hipster. So obviously someone is talking with him.
Anyhow, you can’t make blanket statements like “adults can’t talk to kids” without some context. A lot of it boils down to what we call “social skills”. People are naturally wary of strangers entering their space. The presumption is that they want something from you. So if you are not able to provide some context for being there and prove that all you “want” is a bit of casual social interaction, it’s going to put people off.
Let me give you an example. Every now and then, I run into a real estate salesmen whose son plays in the same playground as mine. Being naturally friendly, we chat about usual chitchat stuff. The same dude hanging around a children’s playground by himself, at best, I would think he’s just trolling an affluent neighborhood playground for sales leads.
The average cost of treating strangers with suspicion is less than the average cost of not doing so.
How many of these cases happened in a park, in daytime, surrounded by other parents and kids?
I would dispute this heavily. Society depends on treating strangers with respect and freely interacting with them, openly and with a certain amount of trust. Once we start treating everyone we meet like they’re a deadly monster until proven otherwise, society ceases to exist and we’re just a bunch of wild animals, kill or be killed.
It certainly is not a very Christian attitude. Well, you know, real Christianity.
Figured I’d address this funny post again :).
Turns out that there are about 20 million kids under age 5. Since I was talking about under age 9, let’s assume no population boom in that time period and multiply that number by 9/5, getting a little less than 40 million kids. We’re talking about every year, 2,500 of those kids being sexually assaulted by a stranger, or one in 16,000.
Someone brought up kids who drown in bathtubs as something that presents an equal threat. Well, yes. That’s why I sit in the bathroom with my three year old and read a book when she takes a bath, to prevent her from becoming one of those statistics. This is the recommendation of the American Academy of Pediatrics:
(Actually, I note that by reading a book, I’m violating their recommendations. Living on the edge here!)
Your numbers, as noted above, are wrong about half. But we haven’t talked about your “death in car crash numbers.” In 2014, 602 children under the age of 13 died in a car crash. Multiply by 9/13, you get 417 kids under the age of nine. Clearly kids are at much greater risk of sexual assault by stranger than they are of death in a car crash, something like 6 times more risk.
Obviously there are many more kids who are in car crashes than there are kids who die in them. Numbers of child fatalities in crashes have dropped hugely over the past few decades – because parents are taking more precautions.
It’s super fashionable to mock helicopter parents, but some of y’all are at risk of throwing out the baby with the bathwater and then mocking those of us who check the bathwater before tossing it out the back door.
This is the basic premise for my opinion- strangers who initiate contact -do- want something from you. And you, as a kid, are presumably not a reliable source of spare change, nor of directions.
My original statement had -nothing- in it about kids approaching you/your dog/etc first. Kids say hi, or wave, or ask to pet your dog- that’s great, you wave/say hi/say yes or no, then -move on-. Heck, husband gets that on occasion, when walking our furry Dumbo.
The statement also had nothing about talking to kid and his/her parents as a unit, or relating to parents on the basis of their kid, especially in a playground setting.
The statement was simple–> there is no good reason for an unfamiliar, unrelated adult to seek out company of a child. Guess I should’ve put in “unaccompanied child” to make it clearer.
According to your stats, over 2,500 children were victims of sexual assault, 14% of which were committed by a stranger. Therefore, parents should be wary of every strange man they see?
In 2012-13, over 4 million white people were victims of a violent crime, 14% of which were committed by a black person. Therefore, I, as a white guy, should be wary of every black person I see?
That about sum it up?
If it were really just a dispassionate assessment of risk, you wouldn’t be letting your children speak to their uncles or fathers either. But uncles and fathers aren’t “scary strangers”, so you don’t go that far. Despite the fact that the vast majority of sex crimes against children are committed by people they know and trust. Like Dad, or Coach.
But when you connect those dots, you realize that society can’t function like that. Parents and coaches, almost by definition, have to be allowed to speak to their kids. But you don’t take the final step and conclude that treating strangers like criminals is just as dysfunctional.