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Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

I think the "Stranger Danger" panic that accelerated in the 80's is probably more responsible for people thinking that a 4-year old is incapable of running errands. It's not so much the lack of mental capacity as it is decades of cultural inculcation that you should not dare to let any child under the age of ___ wander the streets alone, or they will be immediately abducted, assaulted, and decapitated by dark forces.

America has never really recovered from Adam Walsh's murder, IMO.

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Well, and now the Internet - it doesn't help when Nextdoor is full of "suspicious person alerts" aka "there was a solicitor and I didn't like it", and a non-stop barrage of crime related stories.

I live in a city whose broader region is almost 10000 square miles, and the crime feeds report all crime in this area as occurring in "Houston", even though this region is larger than some US states. I feel like this contributes to panic because people feel like the crime is in their backyard. My local news station targets me on Facebook with stories because I'm in this MSA, but the story they hit me with could be a shooting that's easily a 1.5 hour drive from me.

Heck, here in Texas, my phone has buzzed from what they are calling "Blue Alerts" now, which is a riff off of Amber Alerts, where I've gotten notified that an officer was shot at, literally over 4 hours away from me, almost 300 miles away. It's not surprising that our society is inundated with panic.

Nextdoor is very revealing. I had no idea how racist my neighbors were until I read the Nextdoor post about a suspicious cherrypicker truck driver in the neighborhood, who suspiciously claimed to work for the power company.

Nextdoor post in my neighborhood complained about a "suspicious car" that "scouts the area" around 11pm at night. Whipped enough people into a frenzy to where someone decided to block the car and confront the driver one night. They wound up being a neighbor who gets off late every night, driving straight to their house. The driver made a post chastising the community for targeting them, but it got removed because it was too "political".

It's funny because you'd think this watchfulness + technology like Nextdoor would let kids be more independent, e.g. if anybody tried to snatch your kid they'd be reported by half a dozen busybodies watching through their windows.

This assumes that most users of Nextdoor or have video cameras dotting their house are interested in protecting kids. Nextdoor is a cesspool of racism, and everyone I know who has "security" cameras is afraid of people stealing their stuff. Despite crime in our area being at an all time low and property theft very uncommon.

I suspect more has been spent on anti-theft for houses than total thefts.

Places where theft really IS common don’t put up cameras (they’d get stolen), they put up bars.

I think it has much less to do with any particular murder, and is actually related to the rise of cable news that needed to find some way to fill an entire day, every day of the week, with national news. There just isn't that much national news, not the sort that keeps people tuning in. So instead they started taking local news stories that had some sensational elements and presenting them as national news stories. Stories about serial killers, kids getting hurt, etc.

I think their point is that Adam Walsh's murder kickstarted the fear mongering on the news you're talking about.

It might be the columbine to school shooters. Everything else is derived from it.

I’ve seen three names so far in response to “when it started” and they’re all different.

We know for a fact that pedophiles, kidnappers, and murders exist. I think we just always thought we could sniff them out by knowing our community. That was probably a false sense of security all along. Now we mostly live in communities too plentiful to know everyone so our fear is unchecked.

I grew up in a small community, and while a few people were usually thought of as not to be trusted, they didn't turn out to be the dangerous ones. So I agree that there is a false sense of security in small communities. At the same time, I'm sure that overall, like shark attacks, we very much overestimate the danger.

Read about the BTK serial killer. Dude was a "pillar" of his community. Look at all the priests the Catholic Church continually protects when they commit abuse. Besides, most abuse (like most murders) is committed by someone the victim knew.

I mean - I grew up in the 90's and had this level of freedom.

"stranger danger" isn't just a delusion of over-protective parents...my own daughter has told me numerous times over the years of being followed and approached by males she did not know (a car following her slowly, a middle-aged man "asking her out" repeatedly in a park, etc)

we didn't respond to these instances by locking her up, but I'm not going to dismiss parents who are protective

I don't doubt for a moment that your daughter encountered creeps in public spaces. I'm just not sure that the solution that was impressed upon my generation (I was born at the tail-end of the 80s) really helped. The default behavior shifted from "View some people with suspicion" to "View everyone you are likely to encounter as a potential serial rapist-pedophile-murderer." And don't think just avoiding contact is enough, because you could just be walking down an empty street by yourself when Mr. Serial Killer pulls up beside you in his car, jumps out, pulls you into the vehicle, and we won't hear from you again until your severed head is found in a well.

Could it happen? Sure. Is it likely to happen? Probably not. Is it worth keeping your children unable to leave the house without an escort until they're 18?

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