A general response to comments on an earlier entry

[pegkerr]

This entry, I fear, is going to be rather impolite. Sorry. You have been warned.

I have attempted to draft replies to several comments left on the post I made earlier today about the false alarm of a child abduction in my neighborhood. Uncharacteristically, I realized that I just couldn't because I was getting much too angry. I thought about this most of the evening, wondering at my own reaction. The comments I was reacting to so strongly were made by people I really respect, including parents with more years of experience than me.

Look. As I told cakmpls I am perfectly well aware that stranger abduction is rare. But I am not willing to accept the judgment that my neighbors and I were "needlessly" upset, as if we don't have the intelligence and judgment to assess and accurately evaluate real-life risks. I truly believe that I was reasonably and responsibly upset. What some of you don't seem to be quite grasping is that this was personal for me. I do not make it a habit to watch television news just to scare myself with stories about awful things happening to children. In fact, I do not watch television news at all. I learned about this because a neighbor called me personally to tell me about something that was happening in my own neighborhood, at a park very close to my home that my girls go to all the time. Would I have preferred that she not call me, as if it was something I didn't need to know? Hell no. I was not merely reacting to a media-created amorphous threat Somewhere Out There. I was reacting to a call from a neighbor. This was MY park. This kid was the exact age of MY child. This kid went to MY neighborhood school. This kid was actually acquainted with MY neighbor. And from the information I was given (which turned out to be an error), an Amber Alert had been issued, meaning that an abduction was believed to have occurred.

Ladies and gentlemen, I want no more well-meaning comments directed at me explaining (as if I'm dense, as if I didn't know) that the risk of stranger abduction and harm is so low that I needn't worry about it. What I finally realized tonight was that the reason that these comments (which I understand were well-intended and meant to be reassuring) upset me so much is because both Rob and I have had childhood friends who were raped and murdered. By strangers, goddammit. The one I knew was the little sister of one of my best friends growing up. She was grown up when it happened to her--someone raped her and threw her over a cliff to die hundreds of feet below. But for Rob, it was a little girl, the first little girl he ever had a crush on. She was, I don't remember, ten or twelve or so when it happened. Her body was dumped along a lonely stretch of road like garbage. Neither murderer was ever caught.

From Rob's and my own personal experience, this threat is not just theoretical, not just a concern of scaredy-cat cowards or those easily cowed and manipulated by the media. To both of us, remembering Andrea and Ginny, it is searingly real. So forgive me if I reject well-meaning pats on the head. Forgive me if I seem rather defensive and emotional about this.

I think I have a right to be.

I'm making this a general post, because I don't want to be rude to anyone personally.

Comments

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure I'm not part of the original problem, since I don't believe I commented on that entry. I apologize in advance if you find me becoming part of the problem with this post. While I recognize the risk of annoying you, it's very much not my intention.

I find your emotional reaction to the credible report of an abduction in your neighborhood completely unsurprising, unexceptionable, normal, and appropriate. I'd like to think I'd have a very similar emotional reaction if something like that hit so close to me. Your and Rob's previous close connections to actual stranger abductions and murders makes it even more understandable.

What you don't seem to be grasping, to borrow your phrase, is that even the most reasonable and justifiable emotional reactions are not always your best guides to what to actually do. I'm not criticizing your actual handling of your actual children -- not my place, not my expertise, just not a good idea in any way. However, there's also a theoretical discussion going on around this issue, which has touched on whether society in general (including pundits, experts, and politicians as well as parents) and parents in particular are actually doing the best things for the children. For that discussion, I hope you'll agree that your emotional reaction to events that have hit near you isn't the only acceptable type of argument. I'm pushed to write this rather risky message because your post above sounds to me like you're rejecting the validity of statistics fairly broadly as a way for society and individuals to make decisions about such events, and I think that would be a mistake. Quite possibly I'm misreading the breadth of your statements!

I absolutely do not want to argue with you about your decisions for your children; I'm only interested in engaging on the broader/theoretical policy issue.

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

I think I understand your point, and I have no problem with it. How do we safely and responsibly manage risks about terrible things happening to children, and our own fears? One way I do, obviously, is that the girls and I are taking karate. I'll talk about this some more when I do the karate identity post.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

How do we safely and responsibly manage risks about terrible things happening to children, and our own fears?

Yep, that's exactly the key point. The precautionary principle can only take one so far, because (I hope we all agree) eventually raising a child totally wrapped in cotton-wool batting, never having any independence, and never being out of sight of at least 5 certified competent adults (deliberately pushing to an extreme I hope we can all agree would be bad) starts to be damaging in and of itself. It's quite clear to me that one must take many risks, and allow a child many risks, in the process of growing to adulthood. One learns to cope with bigger risks, it seems to me, largely by practicing with smaller ones, and any child, as they move towards adulthood, will have to cope with many risks.

I certainly agree that taking karate is a useful step. It teaches both skills and attitudes that are useful and relevant.

There are situations (and I'm not suggesting specific recent events constitute one; or that they don't) where managing our fears about our children is the best thing, even the only thing, to do. That is, where we must largely ignore them (at least as to letting them control our actions) after careful consideration.

[jimhines.livejournal.com]

"There are situations ... where managing our fears about our children is the best thing, even the only thing, to do. That is, where we must largely ignore them (at least as to letting them control our actions) after careful consideration."

Disclaimer: I did a lot of work with rape issues and survivors, and that colors my reaction to your statement.

I agree we can't let fear paralyze us or dictate our actions. However, at least in the research on sexual assault, the majority of survivors talk about feeling afraid or uncomfortable or simply wrong about a situation, but choosing to ignore those feelings. They had learned that it's not okay to be afraid, and so they ignored a valid warning to get away from a dangerous situation.

I don't think you're saying we should flat-out suppress feelings of fear and ignore the risks that are out there. But personally, I'd rather teach people to listen to that fear. Don't let it control you, but do respect it.

Heck, I feel a twinge of fear every time my little girl leaves the house to play with her friends. (We moved here about 7 months ago, and she's young enough that this is the first time she's really left the house to go play.) I don't demand she stay cooped up in our house under constant supervision, but I don't think ignoring the fear is the right solution. I mean, I know of one registered sex offender living about three houses down, and I also know there's a good chance there are other potential predators, if not on our street, then within a block or so.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

I think there's a big, and important, difference between (1) "feeling afraid or uncomfortable or simply wrong about a situation" when it's a specific, particular situation that one is in (what I think you're talking about) and (2) feeling afraid or uncomfortable or wrong in some general, everyday situation because someone, somewhere, sometime, came to grief in such a situation. The former is using all our senses, even ones we aren't aware of, to give us useful information; the latter is letting groundless emotions rule our lives.

Ignoring fear in the specific immediate situation is often a bad idea (although people in dangerous occupations have to learn to do it, and people who are taking a risk to help others may consciously or instictively do it). Managing fear when there's nothing we can do about the feared thing or when anything we could do has a greater risk of a negative outcome is usually a good thing. (Have you seen the movie The Village? I find it very on-point to this discussion, but don't want to be a spoiler. I have an entry in my own LJ in which I discuss this behind a cut.)

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

One difference is that sexual assault is common. It's not rare like abduction.

B

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

I'll happily distinguish general fears from specific fears. I agree with you that if you have a feeling about a particular situation, person, or whatever, a feeling that it/they are not quite right, that you're not comfortable with it/them, that it's smart to take note of that fear.

[jimhines.livejournal.com]

How do we safely and responsibly manage risks about terrible things happening to children?

I think one piece is simply to recognize what you already know. Nothing we do can ever guarantee they'll be safe. So we grit our teeth and try to give them every damn tool we can think of to help them learn to protect themselves. We try to minimize that risk as much as humanly possible.

I believe there's a huge difference between teaching kids the tools to be safe and sheltering a child so they never see the outdoors until they're 18. Isolating children doesn't protect them; it protects the parents from having to face the reality that the world isn't 100% safe, and probably never will be.

[dejaspirit.livejournal.com]

How do we safely and responsibly manage risks about terrible things happening to children, and our own fears?

I think we can manage risk without making our children fear life (or all strangers for that matter). There are terrible people out there, but I like to believe there are far more good ones. All we can do as parents is exactly what you're doing - let your children know there are risks to certain behaviors and arming them the best we can with defense skills. But It's hard (for me at least) to balance that with letting them live life. The life we give them isn't our own. It's theirs. And even at their age, it's really up to them to make the choices. It's frightening, but I recall wandering around the neighborhood with friends at around 8 or 9 and living life, and making bad (and good) choices. Sometimes I listened to my parents and sometimes I didn't. All we can do is hope our children make the right choices and are lucky enough to avoid these dangers.

*sigh*

I avoid the news as well.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

"How do we safely and responsibly manage risks about terrible things happening to children, and our own fears?"

I don't even know the answer to this question.

What I've been preaching is to get beyond fear and to rationality. To me, that's the best way. Fear is a good emotion, but like all emotions it has a place in the pantheon.

But this kind of thinking doesn't seem to work broadly in our society. We have a completely idiotic counter-terrorism policy because we're reacting out of fear, and personal experience, instead of from rationality.

B

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Since I'm one who mentioned statistics, as well as media coverage, I'm sure that I was part of the original problem. As I said before, I mentioned the statistics only because I was jarred by your comment about the mother being tempted to just about kill him. And I understand that you got your information from a local person, not from TV. I did not write my earlier posts very well, I realize now, because there's at least one "you" that was meant to be generic and reads as if it means "you, Peg." I stuck too much of my own opinion about media coverage into comments to you, rather than (as I eventually did) putting them in my own LJ. I apologize for doing those things.

But what dd_b writes here says (better) some of what I was trying to get at. I especially appreciate this phrasing: "even the most reasonable and justifiable emotional reactions are not always your best guide to what to actually do."

I'm not consistent in my emotional reactions to events from my childhood. When I was 9, one of my good friends, her younger sister, and a younger boy were all killed when the pickup truck they were riding in the bed of turned over after an accident. I get a sick feeling every time I see people riding in the bed of a pickup, and I would never let my kids do it. On the other hand, when I was about 12 my best friend's 16-year-old brother was killed in a scuba-diving accident. Seeing people scuba-diving doesn't affect me at all, and I'm quite sure that if any of my kids had wanted to learn scuba-diving at that age I would have agreed.

I don't know why I have the different emotional reactions to the two, and I realize that my attitudes toward my children's doing them may come from my emotions rather than my thinking. If I found out that the statistics on both activities contradicted my choices, I probably would change my viewpoint on my kids' doing them, though my emotional reactions would stay the same. But that's just me.

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

Thanks.

That's a really interesting insight, that you have different reactions to the risk of riding in a pickup truck vs. the risk of scuba diving. My hunch is that the reason you might feel differently is that people's perception of how great a risk is depends on whether they think they are in control or not. A passenger in the pickup truck has less control (someone else is driving; someone else may hit them and they can't stop it) but someone who is scuba diving can check the oxygen level, decide how deep to dive, decide when to come back up, etc.

As I said, one of the ways I'm controlling my fear is by having me and the girls take karate.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

You may be into something with the control explanation; even if something fairly minor goes wrong in the truck--getting lightly rear-ended, for example--the bed-riders can't do much of anything to prevent disaster to themselves; in scuba-diving, most minor things that go wrong can be compensated for or corrected, or the diver can surface. Diving is something that you can train for, to minimize danger; there is nothing a bed-rider can do to minimize their danger.

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

Yeah, and it also explains why most people are so much more afraid of flying than driving, although statistically, Flying is much safer. When behind the wheel, people have the impression (and alas, sometimes the illusion) that they are in control. Whereas when they get on a plane, all they can do is hope that the pilot isn't drunk and the plane doesn't crash--they can't do anything about it themselves, even if something goes wrong.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

I've heard that about the control issue in plane vs. car, but for me, the difference is more in the chances of survival if I am in an accident. A lot higher percentage of people walk away from, or at least recover from, car accidents than from plane accidents.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

"You may be into something with the control explanation..."

In my lastest book I wrote about six common ways in which the perception of risk is different from the reality of risk. That was one of them.

B

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

I suspect that the different levels of concern people have over danger from strangers and danger from family, friends, and acquaintances also has to do with control. We can observe our family, friends, and acquaintances, and we think that we can accurately read them and assess them; strangers give us no opportunity to do so.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

Of course. People tend to underestimate risks in areas where they are in control, and overestimate them in areas where they are not in control. It's why people are afraid to fly but not to drive, or are afraid of abduction -- or assault, or rape -- by strangers but not by relatives.

B