abduction by random strangers is exceedingly rare, and it’s a shame that fearmongering has made people feel like it’s likely to happen to their kids
even by conservative estimates, between 4, and 20 thousand children are abducted by strangers in the US annually. that’s between 100 and 500 per state every year.
by non conservative estimates it’s something like 800,000. so you may have some argument towards that number, but that shit fucking happens, especially when parents are fucking completely negligent and don’t pay attention and let their kids roam throughout giant crowds.
sorry, but before you spout off on shit like this, we’re not talking about letting your kids go outside and play ball or ride bikes.
by non conservative estimates it’s something like 800,000
There are roughly 80 million children in the country, and you’re telling me 1% of them are abducted by strangers per year?
Yeah. Those sound like Q-Anon style numbers from the “underground tunnels full of children” era.
that shit fucking happens
a lot of bad things happen in the world, this is not a common one which should take up space in your brain or influence your decisions. if you want to keep your kids from being abducted first make sure they never go anywhere near their family members lol
Maybe there’s a middle ground between “don’t start a moral panic” and “don’t let your kids hang out at the dog track unsupervised.”
Egg on face time: Fewer than 350 people under the age of 21 have been abducted by strangers in the United States per year between 2010–2017. sauce
Ah yes, the child should feel perfectly calm wandering around the race track unsupervised.
there is an important question in what counts as supervision. if there’s someone who knows what area you’re supposed to be in and that will expect you to report back to them by a certain time, that is a form of supervision. it is, in fact, all the supervision i had at many points throughout my childhood, whether it was at a ball game or a zoo or the neighborhood i lived in or whatever. in any of these situations, any random stranger could have grabbed me and walked off. however, there are several things which make this unlikely
-
first of all, no one wants a random upset child in their custody, often not even the parents who are legally responsible for them. it takes a very specific kind of very knowledgeable criminal to kidnap random children and not get caught and also do anything with them that would make it “worth” kidnapping them
-
more people = more chances at such a criminal walking by, yes, but also more risk involved in doing so. if you grab a random child from a crowd and try to walk, like, hundreds of meters out of the facility and back to your car or whatever, somebody’s gonna think it’s weird that the child you’re carrying is shouting for help and saying they don’t know this person
-
because of point 2, anyone who is going out with the intention of kidnapping children is not going to be showing up to the race track or ball game or whatever. they’re going to target people they know will be more isolated and more vulnerable … like children they know, whose schedules they are familiar with
in short, of course it happens and it’s a tragedy. but it happens so seldomly that there really is no point worrying about it. this is america, you’re probably more likely to be randomly shot to death by a stranger than to have your child kidnapped from a public place by one
Zoos, ball games, and neighborhoods are all places designed with children and families in mind. The race track is not. My point is that a child would obviously become frightened when alone in this environment, and fear of being captured is just an expression of that. I’d also imagine you wanted to be in those places you mentioned, I don’t think the other person wanted to be at the race tracks. So being dragged to an unwanted location and left to their own devices, they became terrified, which makes sense.
If there are no child kidnappers in the crowd…yes. What you said is 100% true.
