Quote:
Originally Posted by MarchHare
I've heard the argument that it's more dangerous for kids these days, but I suspect that's just the fear-inducing media blowing a few high-profile cases (e.g. Tori Stafford) completely out of proportion.
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I think this kind of gets to the root of it.. I don't think it's high-profile cases blown out of proportion though, I think it's just a result of global media.
In the past if some kid in BC disappeared, someone in Alberta would probably never find out about it. If the kid died then it might make the national news or the newspaper.. and the further back you go in time the less you knew about areas outside your local area.
Now though within minutes of a kid disappearing there's an amber alert and parents across the country and globe know instantly.
So while the incidents of violent crime against kids probably hasn't changed significantly, being aware of violent crime probably has increased many orders of magnitude.
And humans are very poor at risk evaluation, at a gut level we probably evaluate the risk against our internal society size intuition (150 people) so the perceived risk probably has increased hugely.
It takes a specific effort to override your gut risk assessment.
The other factor in this that I don't know of is how many kids were actually harmed/killed by the environment in a "go out and play for the whole day" type situation. Anecdotally I know my parents' generation had a number of accidents and deaths due to such things that today would be considered a result of insufficient supervision and would be very serious against the parents.
Only takes losing one kid to drowning while they're out playing to radically change how the next generation in that family would parent.