• Catherine_Steward [she/her]
    ·
    2 years ago

    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

    • garbage [none/use name,he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      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.

      • infuziSporg [e/em/eir]
        ·
        2 years ago

        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?

        • Anemasta [any]
          ·
          2 years ago

          Yeah. Those sound like Q-Anon style numbers from the "underground tunnels full of children" era.

          • infuziSporg [e/em/eir]
            ·
            2 years ago

            https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/2022/03/15/americans-misestimate-small-subgroups-population

            • Anemasta [any]
              ·
              2 years ago

              I love that graph. I guess people's first instinct is to assume that every minority makes up for roughly the third of population.

                • DinosaurThussy [they/them]
                  ·
                  2 years ago

                  This, but kind of unironically. The rate among autistic people is as high as 20% in some studies. On average, it probably hovers around 10%. Once the NT’s can stop being so embarrassed about nonconformity they’ll come around

          • infuziSporg [e/em/eir]
            ·
            2 years ago

            If it were 800,000, then 1 in every 5 children would have been abducted at one time.

            That figure doesn't pass the common sense test.

          • Opposition [none/use name]
            ·
            2 years ago

            hanging with kids you don’t know makes you look like a fucking creeper.

            That's so sad. Children and adults should be able to be friends.

              • Opposition [none/use name]
                ·
                2 years ago

                Doesn't matter. Our entire society is just as hostile as you towards child-adult relationships. Even actual parents have had the police called on them because they were with their (adopted) kids that didn't look like they could be related.

                Other countries aren't like that. It's really relaxed because those countries didn't have decades of milk carton propaganda scaring the shit out of them about "stranger danger".

                • ClimateChangeAnxiety [he/him, they/them]
                  ·
                  2 years ago

                  Yeah. Fuck Japan, but this just makes me think of that tv show about Japanese kids going around doing little errands like going down to the store, and all the adults around are very nice and willing to help them. In the US people would be terrified to go near a 4 year old with their parents not present, and the cops would probably be called.

      • Catherine_Steward [she/her]
        ·
        2 years ago

        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

      • Chapo0114 [comrade/them, he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        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

        • TankieTanuki [he/him]
          ·
          edit-2
          2 years ago

          The vast majority [of reported disappearances], typically more than 95 percent, ran away.

          Makes a lot of sense.

    • GreenTeaRedFlag [any]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Ah yes, the child should feel perfectly calm wandering around the race track unsupervised.

      • Catherine_Steward [she/her]
        ·
        2 years ago

        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

        1. 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

        2. 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

        3. 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

        • GreenTeaRedFlag [any]
          ·
          2 years ago

          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.

          • Catherine_Steward [she/her]
            ·
            2 years ago

            i dont see how any of this has anything to do with anything i've ever said in my life. i have never commented on the fears of children under such circumstances

            • GreenTeaRedFlag [any]
              ·
              2 years ago

              You responded to @garbage talking about their feelings of vulnerability at a race track as an unmatched child that they shouldn't have been scared of being taken, which I responded to point out a child wandering the tracks would feel uncomfortable no matter what. You then responded going on about how hard kidnapping a kid is. My overall point was that his feelings of being vulnerable to capture, whether fully grounded in reality or not, were just as expression of the fear a child would feel in that environment. Your response of "um, actually, dragging a kid to races and leaving them alone won't lead to them being kidnapped" is an absurd response. Sure maybe he wouldn't be kidnapped, but what if he ate something he found and got sick, or broke something, or wandered into an area he shouldn't have? Anything could have happened to him in an environment he should not have been in alone.

              • Catherine_Steward [she/her]
                ·
                2 years ago

                talking about their feelings of vulnerability at a race track as an unmatched child

                no, he talked about his feelings as an adult in hindsight about how an unwatched child could have been vulnerable to abductions. he did not at any point mention any feelings as a child, you invented that part.

      • TankieTanuki [he/him]
        ·
        edit-2
        2 years ago

        Unironically yes. I don't see how it's any different than walking down a busy city street.