TBD on Ning
Fear, are you consumed by it?
What if you wanted your child to be kidnapped by a stranger and held overnight? How long would you have to leave him or her outside and unattended for that to actually happen? When journalist and author Lenore Skenazy asked people to take a guess, the answers showed a country increasingly, and irrationally, consumed by fear.
“I’m not saying there is no danger in the world, but we live in really safe times, and statistically they are as safe as they were in 1970,” she says. Noting that crime rates climbed in the 70s and 80s before falling in the 1990s, she points out that “if you were outside as a kid anytime in the 70s and 80s, your kids are safer – not just safe, but safer - than you were.” The chance of any child being abducted and killed by a stranger is roughly one in 1.5 million (the odds vary slightly depending on the number of abductions per year relative to the number of children).
And yet, whenever she points this out she is constantly reminded “but what if that one is yours?” It’s as if people cannot imagine being part of the 1,499,999,” she says. “They only see the one – they only see the one on the milk carton, they see one on TV, and they see the one sitting in front of themselves with the cutesy eyes, and they don’t want it to be them.”
It was odd; instead of real numbers rescuing parents from the false sense risk, they actually worked against rational thinking. No matter how big the denominator, people still focused on the number one – which, naturally, stood for their child.
Perhaps the problem needed to be approached from a different angle, she thought. What if you actually wanted your child to be kidnapped by a stranger and held overnight? How long would you have to leave him outside, and unattended for that to be likely to happen? When she asked people to take a guess, the most she ever heard was three months. Some people ventured a day, an hour, and even - implausibly - ten minutes.
Skenazy turned to Warwick Cairns, the British author of “About the Size of It: The Common Sense Approach to Measuring Things” and “How to Live Dangerously” (“a prolonged, statistically-based plea to stop living in our beige world of risk-minimalization,” as the Times of London put it).
Cairns, who did graduate work in English literature at Yale with legendary critic Harold Bloom and, among a series of diverting segues to becoming a champion of numerical thinking, dug wells on a Sioux reservation in South Dakota, had calculated these very odds for British children. It would be easy to run the numbers for American kids.
The answer to Skenazy’s question was… 750,000 years. By reframing the way the risk was framed, she took the focus away from one, and placed it on what the chance was in real time – and 750,000 years is a far more arresting and reassuring number than one in 1.5 million.
http://stats.org/stories/2009/land_free_home_scared_sept2_09.html
“I’m not saying there is no danger in the world, but we live in really safe times, and statistically they are as safe as they were in 1970,” she says. Noting that crime rates climbed in the 70s and 80s before falling in the 1990s, she points out that “if you were outside as a kid anytime in the 70s and 80s, your kids are safer – not just safe, but safer - than you were.” The chance of any child being abducted and killed by a stranger is roughly one in 1.5 million (the odds vary slightly depending on the number of abductions per year relative to the number of children).
And yet, whenever she points this out she is constantly reminded “but what if that one is yours?” It’s as if people cannot imagine being part of the 1,499,999,” she says. “They only see the one – they only see the one on the milk carton, they see one on TV, and they see the one sitting in front of themselves with the cutesy eyes, and they don’t want it to be them.”
It was odd; instead of real numbers rescuing parents from the false sense risk, they actually worked against rational thinking. No matter how big the denominator, people still focused on the number one – which, naturally, stood for their child.
Perhaps the problem needed to be approached from a different angle, she thought. What if you actually wanted your child to be kidnapped by a stranger and held overnight? How long would you have to leave him outside, and unattended for that to be likely to happen? When she asked people to take a guess, the most she ever heard was three months. Some people ventured a day, an hour, and even - implausibly - ten minutes.
Skenazy turned to Warwick Cairns, the British author of “About the Size of It: The Common Sense Approach to Measuring Things” and “How to Live Dangerously” (“a prolonged, statistically-based plea to stop living in our beige world of risk-minimalization,” as the Times of London put it).
Cairns, who did graduate work in English literature at Yale with legendary critic Harold Bloom and, among a series of diverting segues to becoming a champion of numerical thinking, dug wells on a Sioux reservation in South Dakota, had calculated these very odds for British children. It would be easy to run the numbers for American kids.
The answer to Skenazy’s question was… 750,000 years. By reframing the way the risk was framed, she took the focus away from one, and placed it on what the chance was in real time – and 750,000 years is a far more arresting and reassuring number than one in 1.5 million.
http://stats.org/stories/2009/land_free_home_scared_sept2_09.html
Views: 23
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Whiny Old Bastard on
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I don't know Pru, it certainly seems like the world is a more dangerous place today, than when I was a child, but when I ran across this web site a few weeks ago, her statistics seemed to refute my feelings.
She does throw out some rather astounding, (to me) numbers, and I can find no one who disputes her findings.
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I really think that it has everything to do with the internet, 24 hour news channels, the way, and speed, in which we receive news. I mean 30 or forty years ago, if a child went missing on the other side of the country you might not have even heard about it. Now everyone knows about it within minutes. That makes it seem like it happens more often now.
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Permalink Reply by darroll on
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There are allot of children that go missing each year.
The teeny boppers just run off, but what about the young ones?
I heard young children are being sold into slavery overseas…
sick
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Darroll, are you saying that people are kidnapping American children and selling them into slavery in other countries?
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Yes,
even though I have no proof or any knowledge.
Just word of mouth.
I wish that someone would come foreward and let us know.
This is a world problem, not just the US.
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Permalink Reply by Westerly_2 on
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I've heard their motto: "If it bleeds, it leads," and all we see color videos of some sick dude's tent prison in the back yard ALL THE TIME, or some daddy's dungeon on a 24-hour news cycle. When I was a kid we were warned to not get into the car with/accept candy from a stranger, and though not explicit, we had it figured out. News was days old, in small print and used euphemisms like: "she was interfered with" or assaulted.Occassionally the word "nude" would cause us to hold our breath.
It is my theory, there is nothing new under the sun, and such things were as frequent then, but under-reported.
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I'm not sure that I really want to know but, what the hell does this mean? "If it bleeds, it leads,"
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Orianb - Oh, gosh, it's a newsperson's code: if it's violent, or shocking, if there's hurt or death, it automatically becomes the lead story, because it is thought to be news which will sell.
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Oh, ok, I get it.
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Permalink Reply by CWO3ROBBIE on
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My nose leads. But it usually runs, not bleed. Well sometimes, if goes where it shouldn't.
Oh, Sorry! thought this was the place to post ramdom thoughts.
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