Children & Stranger Danger: How Cautious or Cavalier Should Parents Be?

Whenever the subject of stranger danger is brought up many people are quick to point out that children are often the victims of people they know and trust, rather than of strangers. While it is true that children can be victims of people they know, the fact is there are sick, twisted, strangers who attempt to get hold of (and sometimes keep) child victims.

This is an ugly and difficult truth, and sometimes parents may lean toward finding reassurance in the idea that their children don't have insane parents, and they don't their children to be alone with the baseball coach. When we face - head on - the reality that twisted, deranged, lunatics are "out there" in shocking numbers we are then faced with trying to figure out how to protect children without scaring them and while allowing them the kind of freedom children need to grow. When we face the reality of deranged strangers online and in the streets or at the park we face the challenge of finding a balance between being aware and smart yet not being paranoid, and that's not an easy balance for any parent to find. The challenge of watching children in public, letting go of their hands when they're a certain age, and allowing them to play in their own backyards while still vowing that no "animal" will ever get his thrills molesting, torturing, or murdering OUR child is a difficult one. The reality that there are times when we just must let our children out of our site and hoping the odds are with them and us, while never having a guarantee, is a cold, hard, reality to face.

Another reality is that no matter how much we talk to our children about not talking to strangers, they just aren't always emotionally mature enough to resist their tendency to trust someone who seems nice or who is "needs their help". We'd like to believe that talking with our children about strangers is enough to immunize them, but if we've seen any of the programs or television that show how children forget the rules (or if we've had an experience with our own carefully-instructed children "forgetting") we know that talk doesn't do as much as we'd like to think it does.

So, what do parents do about stranger danger? Parents must find that reasonable line between being paranoid and being too cavalier about this reality. Parents need to be secure in their insistence that safety rules be followed. They shouldn't be afraid of "looking paranoid" to other people. Parents shouldn't let pre-schoolers out of site outside the home, and parents of school age children can take some simple precautions like making sure one of the neighborhood mothers is watching the school bus stop. Paying attention to what school-aged children are doing on the Internet is wise, as is not allowing children to go off alone with people like teachers or baseball coaches.

Older children should remain close by parents in public places. Not allowing children to walk alone for any distance is wise. (There's a difference between walking alone for any distance and scooting across the street to a friend's house.)

While our streets don't have mobs and mobs of lunatics waiting outside to grab all the children, the numbers of sex offenders and child murderers is high enough not to ignore. While the chances of any one child's being taken are not great, if that one child out of a hundred thousand is yours there is no going back and being a little more careful.

Taking sensible safety precautions when children are young enough to be of interest to sicko-freaks isn't a matter of living afraid. Taking the precautions to keep a child safe and teaching a child how to keep himself safe allow parents and children to realize that most of the time our safety is within our control - and that's empowering. Taking safety precautions doesn't have to mean creating the impression for the child that everybody is evil and nobody can be trusted. It is entirely possible to take safety steps and let children know, "Most people are fine and can be trusted, but because there are a few who are bad we need to take some safety steps."

Facing the reality of stranger danger, finding that fine line between safety precautions and no precautions, figuring out a way to let children grow up without growing up fearful, and bothering to take those extra precautions all take a little extra work and thinking. Predators, though, usually go for the easy prey; and taking steps to keep young children with us, and eliminating the times older children would be easy prey, makes children less likely to be the victims of predators.

It may be tempting to believe that the biggest risk to children is posed by deranged and evil relatives and that the risk of stranger danger is almost non-existent. The reality, though, is that there are two different types of risk to children. One is being victimized by people they know. The other is being victimized by strangers. They are two different types of crimes, and the criminals are driven by different types of sickness. Stranger danger is very real. Children who are fortunate enough to have normal parents who would never hurt them are not immune. Ask any parent who has had their child abducted and/or murdered by a stranger.