Victimhood culture and Stranger Danger

[Playball40]

When I was a kid, I would stay out from 9am and not see my parents again often until 9pm, and did all sorts of things on my own in between.

Me too and a lot of bad things happened to me and other kids I knew.

Yup. There were many more child abductions, rape and murder back in the 'good ol' days' than there is today. You just didn't HEAR of it.

You know what else - kids died for not wearing seatbelts and bike helmets too.

 

[Playball40]

When children are harmed, attacked, kidnapped, or abused it is almost always by somebody they know, not a stranger. There is extremely little risk in letting your kids roam free. Yet I have actually seen young children on leashes.

Leashes are actually a very good idea for young kids. It lets them wander without allowing them to dart away, perhaps into traffic. I've only seen leashes on kids too young to be trusted to keep out of traffic.

Yes, they DO serve a purpose. I had three babies in 15 months so the spiral wrist bands connecting us was a MUST if we wanted to go out. I am NOT AT ALL sorry nor do I care what people think. You know what else, I nursed all three of them...IN PUBLIC

 

[bilby]

When I was a kid, I would stay out from 9am and not see my parents again often until 9pm, and did all sorts of things on my own in between.

Me too and a lot of bad things happened to me and other kids I knew.

Yup. There were many more child abductions, rape and murder back in the 'good ol' days' than there is today. You just didn't HEAR of it.

You know what else - kids died for not wearing seatbelts and bike helmets too.

Yeah, there's a lot of survivorship bias in these 'golden days of my youth' nostalgia trips.

For some reason, the guys who hitch-hiked cross country and never had any trouble are FAR more prolific posters than those who were murdered in 1968 and buried in a shallow grave.

There was a lot less fear back then, but a lot more danger. Those who took a risk and got lucky, and never even knew that they had done something risky, are now telling everyone how safe it was - but their experience is, if not atypical, at least very narrow, and a balanced view of the overall risks cannot be found in such anecdotes. The crime statistics tell a different story.

Like and share, if you were killed in a horrific accident as a child while not wearing a seat-belt...

 

[couch_sloth]

When I was a kid, I would stay out from 9am and not see my parents again often until 9pm, and did all sorts of things on my own in between.

Me too and a lot of bad things happened to me and other kids I knew.

Yup. There were many more child abductions, rape and murder back in the 'good ol' days' than there is today. You just didn't HEAR of it...

According to a PBS program that I saw about 15 years ago:
Local news programs began to face stiffer competition during the 1980's and 90's, so they started to concentrate harder on stories that would boost their ratings.
e.g. Whereas a local news show in the 1960's would probably only talk about a child abduction if it happened locally, their 1990's counterpart might tell of child abductions from any part of the country. And if there were no juicy abduction stories that day, they might tell of the anniversary of some abduction/murder.
The change in reporting styles led people into thinking these types of kidnappings & murders had become much more common.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

When I was a kid, I would stay out from 9am and not see my parents again often until 9pm, and did all sorts of things on my own in between.

Me too and a lot of bad things happened to me and other kids I knew.

That's a shame. I spent many a night as a young teen wandering the very worst districts of San Francisco, and never came to any harm from it. Also (later teens) hitchhiking thousands of miles, sleeping wherever fatigue dictated and still - no problems. Maybe things have changed since the mid-sixties? I always suspected they would, having read about lemmings.

Yeah, things have changed--the threat level is way down.

What's way up in the news level.