Protecting Children from Kidnappers
As parents and their children have become more conscious about “stranger danger,” they have incor- porated preventive steps into their daily routines in a myriad of ways. Youngsters are instructed by police officers, teachers, and parents “what to do if …” as well as through comic book characters, board games, songs, and books. Potential targets and their guar- dians are educated to spot child lures—deceitful tricks abductors use to entice them into situations where they can be exploited. Child lures involve ways of meeting the intended prey, of gaining their trust—perhaps by playing games—and of evading parental supervision. The training that children receive in recognizing and rejecting child lures far exceeds the old warning of “Don’t accept candy from strangers.” They are taught to distinguish between good touches and bad touches and to be wary of certain situations and behaviors as well as specific kinds of people. The aim is to build self- confidence rather than to instill unreasonable fears.
The widespread use of social networking sites and youth-oriented websites provides sexual pre- dators with many additional opportunities to lure and then groom their intended prey. They can chat, exchange increasingly explicit photos, and subsequently make plans to meet in person. Par- ents find it difficult to effectively monitor the communications of naïve or rebellious youngsters (Walker, 2009).
Some risk reduction strategies involve plan- ning, products, and services. At the height of the social panic that gripped many families during the
mid-1980s, the maximalist viewpoint was so wide- spread that many new products flooded the market and department stores set up child safety displays. High-tech outlets sell homing devices that trigger alarms when children stray or are taken beyond a certain range. Dentists offer to bond microchips containing identifying information to children’s teeth. Graphic designers can be hired to create images that project what a missing child might look like at different ages. Shopping centers attract crowds by offering fingerprinting for infants and toddlers. Playgrounds, schoolyards, and large stores are designed to limit access and close down escape routes. Tens of thousands of stores have set up Code Adam responses (named after a child who was abducted from a store and murdered; see the first real-life example above) that lock down all doors and notify customers and employees that a child has just been reported missing on the pre- mises. The shadow cast by the ominous stranger has eclipsed the mushroom-shaped cloud that haunted the imaginations of previous generations (Wooden, 1984; “Teaching Children,” 1999; and Verhovek, 2001).
Understandably, child safety campaigns have provoked a backlash. Skeptics dismiss as “urban legends” most of the accounts that circulate via the Internet and in emails about children of inat- tentive parents who are hustled out of stores and malls and other public places by kidnappers who quickly alter the youngsters’ appearances by chang- ing their clothes or slipping wigs on them. These cautionary tales that urge parents to be vigilant at all times, to never let their guard down, and to not let youngsters out of their sight, even for a moment, reflect widespread fears about predatory strangers that apparently well up in people who reside in increasingly impersonal and anonymous urban and suburban settings and who regret the loss of close- knit communities (“What a way…,” 2008).
Some minimalist skeptics worry about the potential social and psychological costs of certain of these victimization prevention measures. They wonder whether an anxious, suspicious, and depen- dent generation will be cheated out of a carefree childhood and grow up obsessed by security
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considerations and burdened prematurely by adult’s fears. Other critics are concerned about the ques- tionable performance of expensive products and services. They take a dim view of commercial out- fits that charge for information, devices, and forms of assistance that can be obtained for free from non- profit child-find organizations or police depart- ments. Other minimalists are suspicious of the motives of the many corporations that have made tax-deductible contributions to child-search pro- jects; amid the hoopla over staged events, they get free publicity and cultivate good public relations. Victimologists can carry out research to determine whether certain widely touted child safety measures really work as intended, fail to be effective, or, worse yet, have unanticipated negative social and emotional side effects (see Karlen et al., 1985; Andrews, 1986; Adler, 1994; Brody, 2003; Hoffman, 2009; and Rochman, 2011).