Help! How afraid should I be of stranger danger?

From The Times

June 6, 2007

Alice Miles searches in vain for useful statistics on abduction

We are arguing again about whether children should be allowed more freedom to play outside unsupervised. The report from the Children’s Society, coming as it does against the backdrop of the innocent, wide-eyed face of Madeleine McCann and the daily images of her quietly determined parents, has a particular poignancy. It says that children are being damaged by being tied to their parents’ apron strings because of fear of abduction... read more

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What strikes me each time this argument is aired is the lack of factual basis to most people’s opinions on the matter. So on the Today programme Esther Rantzen, of Childline, insists that it is to children’s benefit that we are more aware of the dangers facing them, and argues that they need more playtime supervised by adults; while her “opponent” Anne Atkins, a writer on childhood, tells us proudly how her eight-year-old son once spent many hours lost in Ireland having got separated from his siblings when they had been sent out playing together, and that it was “a very positive experience” that tested his resources. I wonder if it felt like that to him at the time.

Then there is the old figure trotted out by the vociferous play-awayers that “stranger danger” is no more common now than it was 20, 30, 50 years ago. I cannot track down where this fact comes from: the NSPCC, the Children’s Society, the Home Office do not know. There are no statistics to back it up. What we can all agree on is that abduction and murder of a child by a stranger is extremely rare. It has become trite to declare that the revulsion and horror at the abduction of Madeleine McCann is precisely because it is so rare, but it is true.

It is also true that many more children are killed in road accidents, yet we keep driving them around. But it is the peculiarly horrific nature of a stranger abduction that sends the chill into a parent’s heart, particularly when combined with an element of sexual abuse. The thought that one’s child might be abused repeatedly by a stranger or strangers before being killed in a lonely place is unbearable, and is what has made the McCanns’ pain so hard to contemplate.

 I, like most parents, find the decision hard to calibrate. How great is the danger of “playing out” in an unsupervised public place? You have to look for a start at how often stranger abduction occurs. Here the Government and the police are not much help, for meaningful figures are hard to come by. Attempted and successful abductions, by family members or strangers, are lumped together in a single figure (abduction followed by murder is not included; that is categorised as homicide). The number of abductions has risen year on year, from 390 in 1997 to 1,028 in 2004-05. The Home Office says it may be because of differences in the way it record the figures; well, why doesn’t it try and prove it?

One attempt was made to unpick the figures covering 2002-03. Home Office analysts discovered 59 successful stranger abductions that year, and 377 failed attempted abductions by strangers (out of a total of 843 total abductions), which sounds pretty high to me; well over one a day. Two thirds of the victims, though, were found within 24 hours; the rest no one knows about as the police didn’t record them properly.

Just over half the abducted kids were female; three quarters were white (interestingly, paedophilia perpetrated by or on black people is very rare); the average age was 10 years. Thanks to the Children’s Society report, we know that only a third of ten-year-olds are allowed out on their own. If you knew how many ten-year-old white girls there were in England and Wales, a statistician could calculate the chance of one of them being abducted each year.

Lawyers and police officers involved in the fight against child abuse will tell you, too, that the growth of the internet has without a doubt led to an explosion in paedophilia. The reason is access: where in the past a man seeking images of a young child being abused would have needed to find a dodgy bookshop somewhere, today he can do it online in minutes. The flasher was always out there – I saw him, you saw him – but he is more likely today to have “met” other flashers with an interest in exposing themselves to children. So he has a community of like-minded men. He gains access to images he would not have been able to find 20 years ago. This breaks a taboo. It’s a bit like the soft drugs leading to hard drugs argument; you see, then you want to touch. And other people are telling you it’s OK to as well.

According to the Internet Watch Foundation, last year there was a four-fold increase in reports of sites containing the most violent and severely abusive images of children, nine in ten of whom appear to be under 12. Fewer than 1 per cent of paedophile sites are hosted in the UK. Most are in America and Russia. This presumably is good news for British children playing in parks.

Rising use of the internet has been mirrored by an explosion in cheap, exotic travel. The man now interested in doing more than looking at pictures can easily fly to Sri Lanka or Thailand and find the children he is after. He can probably even buy them, permanently or for a couple of weeks. We don’t make as much fuss about that as we should in Britain, although as one person in the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, the police child protection agency, told me yesterday, apart from the moral duty to try to protect that Sri Lankan boy on the beach, it also makes the traveller more likely to abuse a child back at home.

So there you are – you chew over your facts and you take your chances, or your children’s chances. Personally I would worry less about the perv than the SUV (they can kill a child on a bike at 10 miles an hour, you know; but the Government doesn’t collect figures on 4X4 roadkill either). But it has to be the individual parent’s choice. What I consider liberal you will consider irresponsible and my friend think overprotective. The Children’s Society, my neighbour, your mother, should back off. This is one instance where a mother ought to be allowed to know what’s best.

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