Why don't kids walk home from school these days?

[hal]

decay wrote:
lots of us posted reasons why in response to your questions.

how do you KNOW there are "no more child-related crimes than there were 30 years ago"?

This was a hot topic 10 years ago or so and of course, I can't find anything to back me up right now. But this is close: The book, Moral Panic by Philip Jenkins is available to read online at google if you like. Interesting stuff...

Despite the press hysteria, it is still the case that child sex murders are very rare. Of children under the age of 12 years old in the US, an average of 900 are murdered every year. Some 400 are murdered by a parent and are under one year old, and 54 kids (6 percent) will be killed by a stranger-- in only 3 percent of these crimes (27 cases) did 'a sex offense either [occur] simultaneously with or preceded the murder of the child'. Only five victims a year involved the murder of a child by a stranger in a sexual assault.

One such murder was that of seven year old Megan Kanka, who was raped and strangled in July 1994. Within a month her home state, New Jersey, introduced 'Megan's Law', which compelled sex offenders to register for a ten year period and if convicted a second time to serve mandatory life imprisonment. Two years later and some 35 states had introduced this legislation. It has achieved nothing in dealing with child sex abuse, only feeding the misconception of 'stranger danger'. This has resulted in the witch hunting of sex offenders and creating a climate of fear and loathing.

Such witch hunting also occurred earlier this century. In 1915 media coverage was 'intense' after the murders of two children in New York City. Mobs took to the streets 'looking for suspicious characters'. The New York Times campaigned for 'the state to provide adequate places of custody for the feeble minded where they may have the treatment by skilled physicians.' The introduction of such laws for 'sexual deviants' led to between 700 and 800 people being examined by the early 1930s. Again, in 1937, New York City became the scene of mob rule after sex murders of children (with one sheriff recommending that child attackers should be shot on the spot instead of arrested).

Yet who are sex offenders? In the 1990s in New Jersey a 12 year old boy admitted sexually fondling his 8 year old brother in the bath. He received three years' probation and was then required to register on a sex offenders' list for the next 15 years!