When did the 'stranger danger' fear begin?

In My Humble Opinion
61

I think you could substitute very much of Recreational Outrage and the same thing is true. From the looks of Great Debates and my Facebook Feed, we really should be preparing fortresses against the End of The World as We Know It, whether that be because we’re going to be raped in our beds or fracking is going to kill us or the honeybees are going to stop pollinating flowers next week. While all of these are of concern, when one steps away from the computer, the sun is still shining, the water is still drinkable, and I still carry an EpiPen in case of bee stings. Life goes on.

But my kid *is *totally crap at climbing trees for lack of practice and fear of falling. :wink:

62

I agree. Not sure why people are so prone to freak out over every little thing- maybe the internet creates this weird echo chamber where a ‘small’ concern gets blown into a huge one, simply because you are seeing people talk about it so much?

It also seem to reall tap into the more frustrating nature of parenting. Parents are always in these arbitrary lose-lose scenarios; either they’re raising Latchkey kids or they are Helicopter parents. Not involved enough in their education or micromanaging it. Trying too hard to be their ‘friend’ or being too cold.

It seems so hard for people to evaluate situations; is this kid playing outside simply because its a nice day, or are they playing outside because their horrible parents are too busy playing with their Meth Lab? Is that kid with a scraped forehead abused, or did he just fall on his bike trying to do some stunt without a helmet?

63

I remember the don’t talk to strangers grilling in 1980s public school. I didn’t get that treatment at home, and roamed free.

64

I agree. I never heard of the concept of a “play date” until I had been an adult for quite a few years, and my first reaction was “Huh?! WTF is a play date?!”

65

Another problem with “play dates”. I’m a Dad and because of my wifes and my schedule I was free during the days and their is NO WAY I could ask a Mom for a playdate because it would look like I was trying to hit on her. Hence my kids rarely got play dates.

66

As for our own kids/grandkids/nephews/neices/etc, I think the best way to educate them to prevent bad things from happening is to teach them a lot of common sense situations. Children are much more likely to get molested (and kidnapped) by someone they know. The idea of a creepy guy driving around in a van offering kids candy is strongly ingrained in our heads, but realistically the most likely ‘risks’ come from the people that are closest to our children, not strangers.

67

Yep. And that’s the risks parents don’t protect their kids from, even when they have a pretty good idea that it’s going on. People like to say their kids come first, but when push comes to shove it’s easier to discount what a kid is telling you, especially if it means having to pay a stiff price, like coming to grips with the fact that your brother, husband, boyfriend, best friend, sister, is a pedophile.

68

Bunged-up just means getting hurt or injured in Australian-ese Bozuit! Sorry for the confusion. :slight_smile:

69

John Wayne Gacy probably had a lot to do with the clown issue in regards to stranger danger here in the US.

Growing up, my grandmother always harped on stranger danger to my sister & I.

There were child molesters & kidnappers in the news in the area (were only lived 2 hours from Chicago by interstate) we were living in so warnings were everywhere.

I’ve had my own issues dealing with predators growing up so their worries were in no way unfounded.

70

Homey The Clown urban legend from early 90s.

71

It means that in some places in the US as well. I wasn’t confused. I think it’s because some little kids come up with “bung” as a past tense of “bang” when they are at a particular stage of language learning. Same way they come up with things like “brung” instead of “brought.”

72

That’s a new one for me. Here (UK) only your nose is likely to be bunged up, as it means “congested”. I guessed you meant it another way, but couldn’t resist the comment.

73

Completely agreeing here, from the perspective of a fellow Illinois native. JWG totally made the difference. There actually was a molester in the town where I grew up, and we all learned to avoid the guy, but the second Gacy was discovered, it was cocoons and cotton batting.

74

I grew up in the 70s and was warned against talking to strangers, before Gacy was famous.

75

Oh, I was warned against talking to strangers, but my parents still weren’t as paranoid as parents are now.

I think every big media story, true or not, steps up the paranoia, and it never really steps down. The first was Charley Ross, who vanished in 1874 after he and his brother took candy from strangers, and got into a carriage with them. His father got a ransom note, but even though he tried to comply, the child was never returned. The ransom note implied that the kidnappers were planning on making a career of holding children for ransom. That’s where the specific warning about not taking candy from strangers comes from.

In the 1930’s, there was a guy named Albert Fish, who kidnapped children for his dinner. That news story set off a mini-wave of paranoia, but maybe the fact that so many fathers were away during the 40s, and mothers were working forced people to allow their children more freedom once again.

TV, and later videogames, made it easier to keep children inside, so maybe that’s why the latest paranoia following the media-created Satanic Panic, and the paranoia following the publicity over the Adam Walsh kidnapping never faded.

76

I grew up in the '50s and '60s (suburban Sydney, about as far on the fringes as it was possible to be back then).

Maybe my mother was more paranoid than most but I remember her doing the ‘never talk to strangers’ thing with me. I walked to school (about half a kilometre from home) from the second day of school onwards, so things were a lot freer then than they are now. One time, a man in a truck offered me a lift to school. I ignored him and kept walking faster and faster. It was my father. :smack:

I guess you could say my mother’s warnings had taken hold.

77

I seem to recall someone (Rifftrax?) riffing a PSA from what looked like the '50s or '60s warning male teenagers about getting rides from strangers. The kicker was that it was actually a PSA about homosexuals, but it definitely played like a proto-stranger danger video. I’m trying to see if I can find it.

78

I was born in 56, and the same MOL applied to me. There was ‘stranger danger’ fear, even then.

Starkweather, the Leopold and Loeb murder (even then it was not forgotten-at least not among my connections), etc… In the mid-60s, we had a few children disappear, with tragic results, etc… which highlighted our wariness-for a while.

And, I also remember a film about talking to strangers, etc… in about 1962 at our school. We were generally warned about strangers on a regular basis.

I think that the ubiquity of the news reports make it seem like it is more prevalent, but, I still know of people who let their kids walk to the store, down to the park 1/2 mile away, etc…
In other words, nothing has changed, except for the reporting, and your perceptions of the perceptions.

79

No, elementary school dismissal has changed. They watch who picks up each child, and there are schools that don’t let children walk home, or at least don’t unless the parent makes a stink about it, because children have to be “released” to a registered parent/caregiver. They won’t even release a child to a non-custodial parent without written consent from the custodial parent on file, and either a schedule of visiting days, or a blanket permission. If a babysitter, grandparent, respite care worker, whatever, picks up the child, the person’s name needs to be on file, and they ask for ID if the school employee doesn’t know the person by sight.

Kids get marched onto buses, or herded over to car lane pick-ups. If you can’t pick you kid up, and no one you have registered can do it, you have a dilemma. You can’t just call a friend and ask them to pick up the kid, or call the school and say the kid needs to walk today, and if the kid doesn’t have a regular bus, he can’t just hop one for that day. He can’t even go home with a friend on the friend’s bus.

And the ridiculous and counter-productive sex offender registries are another result of an over-reaction to “stranger danger.”

Besides, there is a difference between making children aware (“Don’t talk to strangers”), and making them frightened and paranoid, which is what established “Stranger Danger” curricula in schools have done.

It used to be that children were merely aware that the occasional stranger might be a threat, so be cautious. In the 1980s, in became, at least to the children to whom it was presented, that every stranger was an actual, not possible, threat, that they were constantly surrounded by people with designs on them.

Actually, in that sense, I think it’s eased up a little, in that helicopter parenting replaced making children paranoid, so parents took the responsibility for being wary upon themselves. Maybe it was as the first wave of “Stranger Danger” kids (I mean kids who got the full-blown treatment in school) became parents. They didn’t want their children to have the same fear they lived with, but they still had that paranoia, and it affects how they parent.

80

Here’s an example of the school policy foolishness. We have a community called Lehigh Acres and it’s criss-crossed with significant drainage canals that make getting around difficult since there are few streets crossing them.

In one place, there’s a school that’s on one side of a canal while one of the neighborhoods it serves is on the other. because of the lack of connection, the kids have to be bussed a mile to get to a school that abuts their neighborhood. In some cases, it’s across the canal from their actual homes. So a county planner, as part of creating walkable communities suggested that the DOT put a pedestrian bridge over the canal so the kids could walk right onto the school property from home.

The school district response? “No. It breaches our perimeter.”

Investigating this further, I find the fortress mentality is rampant in our school district. High, barbed-wire topped fences suround the school with only one entrance. At another Lehigh Acres high school, the school campus abuts a county library. This is not accidental since the county likes to co-locate facilities and make it easy for the kids to get to the library without needing a car. Again, the school district will not allow a breach in their perimeter and if the kids want to walk from the school to the library, they have to walk down grass next to the school driveway, (no sidewalk. Why would you want a sidewalk?) walk into the actual shoulderless roadway where the fence hits the driveway, and back onto the grass of the library parcel. I’m waiting for a kid to get hit by a car at the chokepoint so that the parents can (Rightfully!) sue the district for the idiocy of the site design.