Manufactured Fear

It's a horrifying video. Children go up to a door trick-or-treating and then inside when the man who opens the door tells them the candy is "downstairs." After finding no candy, they are told by the man there is none, and as he advances on the kids, they start screaming and try to run, only to be stopped by masked accomplices coming out of a closet and down the stairs. They are screaming and crying when the parents reveal themselves and proceed to yell at the kids for putting themselves in danger.

But there was no danger. This is one of those vulgar, fear-mongering, words-cannot-describe-it things that have become the mode lately. There have been a dozen or more made, all showing up on you-tube. Masquerading as "social experiments" or "parental warnings," they posit situations that, when they happen, happen with such extreme rarity that those who want to profit from them have to manufacture the scenario.

They all revolve around a single premise: the danger and threat of a total stranger to a child, the danger almost always, implicitly or explicitly, of a sexual nature.

Why don't they make videos of Uncle Joey conniving to get Susie to sit on his lap while the rest of the family carries on their conversations? Or Bob's older brother's best friend holding Bob down and feeling him up while roughhousing in the back yard? Those situations would at least strike much closer to the reality of how child sexual abuse occurs.

I have a question that I wish someone would answer for me. WHY do not the parents and the makers of those videos--the ones where kids are scared to death by a fake kidnapping or a fake Halloween abduction--why does not everyone involved in those videos get arrested and charged with child abuse and unlawful restraint of a child? They have emotionally devastated their children, created a horror for them that far exceeds anything they are likely to experience the rest of their childhood.

I guess if you are a parent, it's okay to scare the living crap out of your child--just not okay to let them play outside for five minutes unless you are watching them--but then that's for another post.

A Result of Sex Offender “Stranger Danger” Nobody Saw Coming

The entire sex offender registry—indeed, the entire sex offender industry—is built around the concept of “stranger danger,” the idea that children are at high risk of sexual assault from people they do not know, strangers, people who have already sexually offended and are out there just waiting to grab a random kid and do it again. Nothing will produce spasms of eye-rolling and unintelligible

sounds of disgust and derision in the well informed as will the term “stranger danger.”

The greatest part of the American citizenry supports the public sex offender registry. And yet when anyone says that those most likely to sexually abuse a child are those the child knows, those who aren’t on the registry but rather are close to the child in his everyday life, often family members, everyone within hearing distance nods his or her head in agreement. They do know this. It has been written in article after article, talked about ad nauseam by television talk show hosts and pop psychologists, and verified by any personal knowledge they have on the subject. Yet still they support the public sex offender registry.

Three members of a family and their accomplice are in jail because of stranger danger. They apparently had not read the articles or seen the talk shows, and when the mother of a six-year-old child in Missouri felt her son was too friendly and nice to strangers, to people he didn’t know, thus increasing his risk of becoming a victim, the boy’s grandmother and aunt agreed. So they did what any loving family would do; they decided to teach him a lesson.

They enlisted the help of a co-worker of the boy’s aunt who was ready and willing to play the part of Mr. Stranger Danger himself, and his performance was truly Oscar-worthy. He lured the little boy into his pickup as he got off the school bus. There the stranger from Hell proceeded to tie his hands and feet together; he told the terrified child he would not see his mother again; he threatened him with being “nailed to a wall.” He threatened him by waving a gun at him and covered his face with his jacket so that he could not see.

In this condition—bound, vision obscured, terrified and sobbing—he was carried into the basement of his own home. There he had his pants removed and was told he would become a sex slave. This surely begs the question of what a six-year-old child knows about being a sex slave. After four hours in captivity and terror, he was released and told to go upstairs to his mother. There he was lectured by his family about—you got it—stranger danger. This kid would have been safer with almost any stranger I could drag in off the street than he was with his family members.

At school the next day, he disclosed his ordeal to school authorities. The four adults were arrested, and the little six year old victim of the unfathomable ignorance and cruelty of the people who should have protected him from ignorance and cruelty was placed in protective custody and is by now most likely with a foster family.

What will happen to this family and to this child is anybody’s guess; all we can do is keep the child in our thoughts and prayers.

And, lest the irony has escaped anyone, this case proves that, in spite of the myths that persist about bogeymen hiding in the bushes, strangers that will pounce without notice, once again the true bogeymen, the ones so much more likely to bring fear and pain and horror to children, are those close to them in their everyday lives. 

Of sex trafficking and International Megan's Law and cabbages and kings

~~by Shelly

A piece of legislation called International Megan’s Law—HR 4573—passed the U.S. House of Representatives, according to this article, June 20.

The bill’s sponsor, U.S. Congressman Chris Smith, has been pushing this bill, in various forms, for years. It is aimed at sex trafficking in general and will largely affect American registrants traveling out of the country, but named after Megan Kanka, a seven year old child who was murdered twenty years ago, and touted as “…the model needed for the U.S. to persuade other countries to take action to stop both child sex tourism within their borders and protect children in the United States and elsewhere,” the focus perceived by the American public is on the taking of American children for use in the forced sex market.

Sex trafficking is the new buzz-word in the sex offender industry. We have all read of its horrors—huge numbers of “sex slaves” descending on the Super Bowl; vast numbers of children scooped off the streets and forced into a life from which they cannot break free.

I cannot speak for other countries. I know there are some where life, especially a child's life, is very cheap and poverty is overwhelming. But this legislation was not passed by creating fear in our hearts for what was happening to children in third-world countries. It was passed by creating fear in our hearts that OUR children, MY child, could fall prey to the network of monsters scouring the streets of our cities and villages and taking our children.

I know about “throw-away” kids. I know teenagers run away, leave home for various and sundry reasons, and I am certain that a disproportionate number of them become entangled in prostitution, and this is terrible. But is this what people think of when they are told that legislation must be passed that will somehow keep their children safe from being forced into the sex and pornography trade?

Facebook pages declare “Every 30 seconds another person becomes a victim of human trafficking.” Another site says, “Abolish sex trafficking; 200,000 are at risk for sexual exploitation this year.” These are the type of pseudo-statistics that are not based on any study or scientific attempt at measuring or counting. They cannot be proved—or disproved. Facts are so twisted with myth that the reality is impossible to sort out.

As far as children, this FACT is worth noting: several sources, including the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, place the number of actual, real abductions of children and teens in the U.S for any nefarious purpose at an average of 115 a year, and almost all of those are recovered.

The bill’s sponsor, Congressman Smith, said, “The stories of the victims are tragic — ruined childhoods, devastated families, lifetimes of memories of assaults and sometimes worse.”

The implication is that these are families Mr. Smith has spoken with, stories he has heard personally, and tragedies with which he is intimately acquainted.

Really?

This is where I have trouble. As I said, I cannot speak and do not speak to what may be happening outside of the United States. And I cannot speak for anything outside of my own personal experience, but my own personal experience is this:

Like almost all American children, I went to school for twelve years and then college for six. I knew lots of kids and families. I had three children. They all had masses of friends and went to school with even greater masses of other children. I knew their friends and their families. They were involved with sports, which put us in contact with children and youth from schools all over the city.

I now have grandchildren. I know many of their friends and their families. I today have a huge circle of friends and acquaintances and contacts.

I taught high school for 28 years. I taught Sunday School and still do. I was on the Board of Education at my church’s parochial school. The number of young people and of families that I knew over all those years is literally incalculable.

In all of those years, with all of those youth, with all of those people, I never knew of a single child or person who just disappeared and was never heard from again. I never knew of a single child or person who was recovered from forced sex slavery or child pornography and told her—or his—story. I never knew a single family who had a child just disappear. I never knew anyone who knew of a single child or person to whom this happened. I never heard of a family to whom this happened. I never heard a rumor of someone to whom this happened.

Does that mean anything? I don’t know. I do know that what this legislation will do has little to do with children being taken in the United States. What it will do in reality is, again, target a very broad category of people, almost none of whom have ever kidnapped a child or operated a “sex ring” or produced child pornography, and apply restrictions to them which are inappropriate and which infringe on their rights to travel.

And which will do absolutely nothing to “protect children in the United States.” Again.

It's Obviously Not Too Soon to Talk About Sex Offenders and School Bus Stops

School is starting soon across our land, and parents of the type that Lenore Skenazy of Free-Range Kids refers to as “helicopter parents” are girding on their armor and preparing for battle with the massive number of potential threats to their children’s safety.

Not content to have residency restrictions in place that keep registered sex offenders often so far from schools, day-cares, and parks that they can live virtually nowhere, parents are now turning their eyes to bus stops.                                                          

When one mom in Virginia Beach, Virginia, did not get what she wanted from the school board—her daughter’s bus stop relocated due to a registrant in the neighborhood—she went to the media with her complaint and request.

This issue has been brought up as a concern not only in Virginia but also in Oklahoma, Florida, Georgia, Missouri, North Carolina, and California, to name only some. It is a jurisdictional issue, and many counties and districts include school bus stops as a “safe” area. What this means differs as well, depending on the jurisdiction. Some limit the exclusion to registrants who are on parole or probation or to those whose offenses were with children. Some go for a more shotgun approach and apply the restrictions to all on the registry for any purpose. Some do not include bus stops in the restricted areas.

With so many states—there are more than the ones named—and so many jurisdictions within states making this a priority, one would believe the problem must be significant. Just how many kids have been abducted from school bus stops by registered sex offenders—or by anyone, for that matter?

On the other hand, knowing that, according to the FBI, registered sex offenders were responsible for child abductions in less than 1% of the actual cases, and knowing that, according to several sources including the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the number of actual, real abductions of children and teens for nefarious purposes averages 115 a year, I didn’t see how it could be significant.

I was not overly surprised, then, when my search engine, in spite of being prompted with several different phrases having to do with children taken from school bus stops, refused to give me anything. The closest I came was the case of Jaycee Dugard, who was taken off the street walking to a school bus stop in 1991, Brittany Locklear in 1998, taken from her own front yard waiting for the bus, and this year's abduction of 15-year-old Kathlynn Shepard and her friend who accepted a ride in a pick-up after getting off of their school bus. There have been a few other reported attempts but no actual kidnappings that I could locate. And in two of these three cases, the perpetrators did not live close to where the abductions occurred. The identity of Brittany's killer is still unknown.

It would appear that the danger inherent in registrants living in proximity to a bus stop is minute, right up there with the danger to trick-or-treaters from registrants on Halloween.

Why do we keep trying to address problems that don’t exist? Are there no real ones that need addressing? Someone said, “If it’s not broke, don’t fix it.” Isn’t it time we listened?

The Predator Test? In My Opinion, It Fails

I just finished watching a program on the CNN/Headline News Channel program Raising America with

Kyra Phillips, a segment titled “The Predator Test."  It utilized a “sting-like” format, with an adult stranger complete with dog approaching children at a park and asking the children to go with him to his car to get more treats for the dog.  Parents were nearby watching; they had, of course, all agreed for their children to be unknowing guinea pigs in the "test."

I did not find the test very realistic or credible. The "predator" gathered up several children at a time, and the ones that would go with him trooped along together in a procession that included some other adult with another dog whose function was never explained. Some of the children waved to their mothers sitting nearby as they left. Somehow I don't think a true predator targeting a victim in a park, which is a very rare occurrence, would take children en masse and in view of their parents.

The promo for the show included some of the footage as well as written text, and based on that, I put this comment on the comment board before the program aired.

My quarrel isn't with addressing the issue of "stranger danger" but with the skewed proportions with which the entire situation is addressed. The greatest focus and use of resources is on the registered sex offender, and that is who has the tiniest risk of harming a child--less than 1%. The next focus is "stranger danger," and that too is very small. According to the office of Juvenile Justice, it is 2-6 %. 

The only way to address the overwhelmingly greatest risk is through structured programs of awareness, education, and prevention, and, as far as I know, our government spends zero effort and money on that. The only thing that is done is by private agencies and is so limited as to be virtually ineffective in addressing the issue. More simply put, our nation spends 100% of its resources dedicated to this issue on 5% of potential victims and nothing on the other 95%.

Then I watched the program. And I took notes.

I was even more disturbed at some of the misleading inferences and missed opportunities for some facts. For example, one parent asked how prevalent a problem it was that children were taken by strangers, and the "expert" indicated it was a serious problem, even saying at one point, “Families need to practice for that moment when a predator comes,” as though it were inevitable. In reality, according to federal statistics, about 115 children are taken by strangers each year; as a basis for comparison, 250,000 are injured in auto accidents.

One of the program "experts" talked about school starting and the dangers of children waiting for the school bus due to the prevalence of kidnappings from bus stops and how an adult must always, always be with them. I Googled several different phrases having to do with children taken from bus stops, and I was stunned when I couldn't find any. The closest I came was the case of Jaycee Dugard, who was taken off the street walking to a school bus stop in 1991, Brittany Locklear in 1998, taken from her own front yard waiting for the bus, and this year's abduction of 15-year-old Kathlynn Shepard and her friend who accepted a ride in a pick-up after getting off of their school bus. There have been a few other reported attempts but no actual kidnappings that I could locate.

There is nothing whatsoever wrong with teaching children not to go anywhere with someone they do not know; parents would be negligent not to teach their kids that. However, until we are willing to expend a significant amount of resources on education and prevention programs in schools and communities that address the vast majority of child sexual abuse, that at the hands of people already in the lives of the children, we will not make a dint in the problem of sexual crime committed against children.