"At the height of the first missing-children panic, a decade ago, some missing-children organizations were claiming that four thousand children a year were being killed by strangers in the course of abduction. Wrong, said David Finklehor, co-director of the Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire, who conducted the National Incidents Study of Missing Children with the Justice Department in 1990, considered the most comprehensive and accurate report on this subject. Most of the abductors weren’t strangers, but family members or someone the family knew. Second, the actual annual figure of stranger abduction was two hundred to three hundred and it still is.
"Today Finkelhor calls the stranger-snatcher epidemic "an optical illusion" caused by the generalized social anxiety, new coordination between law enforcement and the missing-children groups, and media excitability. . . . Excessive fear can transform a person and modify behavior permanently; it can change the very structure of the brain. The same can happen to a whole culture. What will it be like for children to grow up in socially and environmentally controlled environments — condominiums and planned developments and covenant-controlled housing developments surrounded with walls, gates, and surveillance systems where covenants prevent families from planting gardens? One wonders how the children growing up in this culture of control will define freedom when they are adults.
"Parents may now buy a cheerfully colored, three-ounce bracelet called the global positioning system (GPS) personal locator, and lock it on their child's wrist. If the water-resistant bracelet is cut or forcefully removed, its continuous signal activates an alarm and notifies the manufacturer's emergency operators. At least at first glance, resistance to global personal tracking seems not only futile but also selfish — because we love our children and want to protect them. But guaranteed safety, or the illusion of it, can only be bought at a dangerous price. Imagine future generations of children who have been raised to accept the inevitability of being electronically tracked every day, every second, in every room of their lives, in the un-brave new world. Such technology may work in the short run, but it may also create a false sense of security and serve as a poor substitute for the proven antidotes to crime: an active community, more human eyes on the streets, and self-confident children."
