"Will somebody please think of the children?"
We've all heard this line at one time or another, and we heard it again this past week with the highly publicized abduction and murder of 11-year-old Carlie Brucia in Sarasota, Fla. It was also the rallying cry behind a sudden burst of irrationality in a Phoenix neighborhood last month as parents decried having to live in the same neighborhood as prior sex offenders.
The trap we fall into when reading the hyped-up press coverage of an aberrant case like that of poor Carlie Brucia or, on an even grander scale, Elizabeth Smart, is believing that children are at a greater risk to harm than they are. This is what brings about the behavior exhibited by certain Phoenix residents in the vicinity of Seventh Street and Rose Lane.
In other words, these rare but well-covered cases bring out the Helen Lovejoy in all of us.
Though it may seem otherwise, child abductions are not on the rise. Victims' groups throw out numbers of abductions in the hundreds of thousands per year, but there is more to these figures than meets the eye.
The FBI does receive approximately 450,000 missing child reports each year, many of which end up being runaways. Of those 450,000, anywhere from 163,200 to 354,100 are cases of children abducted by family members. Only about 3,200 to 4,600 cases are non-family abductions, and a little over half of those are the ones everybody fears most, stranger abductions. Where the abducted child faces a serious risk of harm or death, the number plummets to below 300 cases annually.
Sometimes fear gets the better of us. Think back over all of the truly horrible stories you've heard about child victims. As isolated incidents, they may have seemed shocking, but not cause to lock the kids indoors and develop a gross mistrust of the entire world. Take that in conjunction with media barrage, and it's easy to see that this idea is a social construction.
The only thing worse than fearing a pseudo-problem that society created for itself is acting on it, and we always do. The desire to protect children from the threat of the hour often gives way to an endless barrage of "tough on crime" and "moral corruption" rhetoric that ultimately does more harm than good.
Whereas in recent years the concern has been over abductions and sexual assaults, it used to be drugs and gangs (interestingly, public sentiment in the 1980s included neither drugs nor violence as serious problems until President Reagan told them it was), and that gave us a whole host of terrible legislation including mandatory minimum and truth in sentencing laws that have done little but fill our prisons with nonviolent drug offenders.
To a lesser degree, fear for children's moral corruption has also brought about efforts to censor television and video games that the morality police find objectionable. After the hoopla surrounding the porn industry and the implementation of rating systems for practically everything, isn't it sad we live in a world where Janet Jackson flashing a crowd full of football fans is a bad thing?
Not to make light of the few genuine tragedies that befall American children, but it might behoove many in this country to take a step back and, the next time someone asks you to think of the children, don't.
Scott Phillips is a justice studies senior. Reach him at scott.phillips@asu.edu.
