Re:The Enduring Myth of Stranger Danger
by danaris on Thursday February 18, 2021 @08:42AM
(#26179671)
I believe the major US panic about "stranger danger" arose in the 1980s and early 1990s—in particular, there were a couple of high-profile cases of children going missing in the early '90s that were sensationalized far beyond what made any sense. As a child growing up in the '80s, I was allowed to poke around the neighborhood unsupervised, but by the time I was a teenager, I was already hearing about children being strictly watched at all times as "the norm".
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Re:The Enduring Myth of Stranger Danger
by Jtsummers on Thursday February 18, 2021 @10:16AM
(#26180735)
There were a few cases of multiple children missing in major cities (like the Atlanta child murders, 28 dead in two years), and also the proliferation of cable news. The former was a valid, regional, concern but people let it blow up into a more national fear.
Cable news, in turn, started emphasizing singular disappearances/killings (not serial cases), which further exacerbated this fear. When you have 24 hours of coverage on CNN and 10 of them are about "Missing Girl in California", your perception of how common this is gets distorted. It's a singular case, but seeing it all the time causes people to perceive it as a frequent thing instead of the relatively rare thing it is in most of the country.