The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,270

Since 1979, when six-year-old Etan Patz disappeared on his way to a school bus stop in lower Manhattan, kidnapped children have riveted the nation’s attention, thanks to three interest groups that are dedicated to sowing panic among the nation’s parents. The grief-stricken parents of murdered children understandably want something good to come out of their tragedies, and several have devoted their lives to raising awareness of child abductions. (One of them, John Walsh, campaigned to have photographs of missing children featured on milk cartons, and hosted a lurid television program, America’s Most Wanted, which specialized in horrific kidnap-murders.) Politicians, police chiefs, and corporate publicists can smell a no-lose campaign from a mile away—who could be against protecting children from perverts?—and have held ostentatious ceremonies to announce protective measures named after missing children (Code Adam, Amber Alerts, Megan’s Law, the National Missing Children Day). The media too can recognize a ratings pump when they see one, and have stoked the fear with round-the-clock vigils, documentaries in constant rotation (“It is every parent’s nightmare . . .”), and a Law and Order spinoff dedicated to nothing but sex crimes.

Childhood has never been the same. American parents will not let their children out of their sight. Children are chauffeured, chaperoned, and tethered with cell phones, which, far from reducing parents’ anxiety, only sends them into a tizzy if a child doesn’t answer on the first ring. Making friends in the playground has given way to mother-arranged playdates, a phrase that didn’t exist before the 1980s.208 Forty years ago two-thirds of children walked or biked to school; today 10 percent do. A generation ago 70 percent of children played outside; today the rate is down to 30 percent.209 In 2008 the nine-year-old son of the journalist Lenore Skenazy begged her to let him go home by himself on the New York subway. She agreed, and he made it home without incident. When she wrote about the vignette in a New York Sun column, she found herself at the center of a media frenzy in which she was dubbed “America’s Worst Mom.” (Sample headline: “Mom Lets 9-Year-Old Take Subway Home Alone: Columnist Stirs Controversy with Experiment in Childhood Independence.”) In response she started a movement—Free-Range Children—and proposed National Take Our Children to the Park and Leave Them There Day, intended to get children to learn to play by themselves without constant adult supervision.210

Skenazy is not, in fact, America’s worst mom. She simply did what no politician, policeman, parent, or producer ever did: she looked up the facts. The overwhelming majority of milk-carton children were not lured into vans by sex perverts, child traffickers, or ransom artists, but were teenagers who ran away from home, or children taken by a divorced parent who was embittered by an unfavorable custody ruling. The annual number of abductions by strangers has ranged from 200 to 300 in the 1990s to about 100 today, around half of whom are murdered. With 50 million children in the United States, that works out to an annual homicide rate of one in a million (0.001 per hundred thousand, to use our usual metric). That’s about a twentieth of the risk of drowning and a fortieth of the risk of a fatal car accident. The writer Warwick Cairns calculated that if you wanted your child to be kidnapped and held overnight by a stranger, you’d have to leave the child outside and unattended for 750,000 years.211

One might reply that the safety of a child is so precious that even if these precautions saved a few lives a year, they would be worth the anxiety and expense. But the reasoning is spurious. People inescapably trade off safety for other good things in life, as when they set aside money for their children’s college education rather than installing a sprinkler system in their homes, or drive with their children to a vacation destination rather than letting them play video games in the safety of their bedrooms all summer. The campaign for perfect safety from abductions ignores costs like constricting childhood experience, increasing childhood obesity, instilling chronic anxiety in working women, and scaring young adults away from having children.

And even if minimizing risk were the only good in life, the innumerate safety advisories would not accomplish it. Many measures, like the milk-carton wanted posters, are examples of what criminologists call crime-control theater: they advertise that something is being done without actually doing anything.212 When 300 million people change their lives to reduce a risk to 50 people,