Tag: stranger danger

National Center for Missing & Exploited Children Warns About Unsafe ‘Back-to-Schooling’

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Source: reason.com 9/9/22 You’re more likely to be struck by a meteor than to have your kid abducted by a stranger. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) gets about $40 million a year in federal funding. It spends at least a few of those bucks crafting unnecessary emails like the one I got last week with the subject line: “Are your kids safely back-to-schooling?” Not only is “back-to-schooling” not a verb, but also the question seems geared less toward making kids safe and more toward making parents…

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Fear in the Heartland

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Source: slate.com 8/9/21 How the case of the kidnapped paperboys accelerated the “stranger danger” panic of the 1980s. By Paul M. Renfro In the early morning hours of Sunday, Sept. 5, 1982, 12-year-old Johnny Gosch vanished while delivering copies of the Des Moines Register. Two years later, 13-year-old paperboy Eugene Wade Martin disappeared under virtually identical circumstances on the south side of Des Moines. These cases terrified residents of Des Moines and Iowa, many of whom believed that the Midwest—a “safe,” and implicitly white, place—ought to be immune from “this…

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Stranger Danger: A Conversation with Historian & Author Paul Renfro on March 5 (Zoom)

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Join Paul Renfro as he discusses his book: Stranger Danger Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State (Oxford University Press, 2020). March 5 8:15 AM Pacific Time Click here for more details and to register Beginning with Etan Patz’s disappearance in Manhattan in 1979, a spate of high-profile cases of missing and murdered children stoked anxieties about the threats of child kidnapping and exploitation. Publicized through an emerging twenty-four-hour news cycle, these cases supplied evidence of what some commentators dubbed “a national epidemic” of child abductions committed by “strangers.”…

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How the “Stranger Danger” Panic of the 1980s Helped Give Rise to Mass Incarceration

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[jacobinmag.com – 5/18/20] The missing-child panic began with Etan Patz. Plenty of kids had gone missing before, but Etan’s case seemed specially designed to provoke a mass hysteria. In 1979, the six-year-old boy’s mother arranged for him to walk to the school bus stop on his own. She watched him depart from her Manhattan fire escape. Another mother was waiting two blocks away in an apartment overlooking the bus stop site, but Etan never arrived. The tragedy was and remains impossible to comprehend. His first time walking to the bus…

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Halloween and Stranger Danger

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[bostonreview.net – 10/31/19] Do you believe in the boogeyman? This is the pivotal question of the Halloween movie franchise. The tension around naming the movies’ antagonist foregrounds the problem of seeing him: “it” or “him,” “thing” or “human,” “The Shape” or “Michael Myers”? Even if you have never seen the original 1978 movie, you know the plot. On Halloween 1963, six-year-old Michael Myers kills his older sister after she has sex with her boyfriend. Cut to 1978, and Myers, after being locked in an asylum for fifteen years, escapes back…

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Dear Abby Says Never Take Your Eyes Off Your Kids Till They Are Old Enough To “Fight Off a Predator”

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[letgrow.org] From last week’s Dear Abby comes this pointless fear-mongering: DEAR ABBY: My husband and I disagree about how to handle taking our children shopping with us. I believe that, especially while our children are small (they are 3 and 5), the adult with them should keep them in sight at all times, or at least the majority of the time. If a child moves out of eyesight, the adult should find them within a minute. Are there guidelines on what is appropriate by age or developmental stage on this…

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