On Monday, a federal appeals court made a ruling that threatened to open an old wound for New Yorkers. The court overturned the 2017 conviction of Pedro Hernandez, a bodega clerk who had confessed to abducting and murdering 6-year-old Etan Patz in 1979. Patz’s case had been a media sensation at the time of his disappearance, helping to crystallize public disgust with the perceived chaos and lawlessness of life in New York in the 1970s. The legal proceedings against Hernandez, brought after family members came forward to say that Hernandez had confessed to the crime, stretched on for years thanks to a hung jury and complex procedural questions. The appeals court ruled that improper jury instructions had unfairly influenced the verdict and that Hernandez must be retried or else freed. The Manhattan district attorney’s office has announced that they will review the case.

Patz was a key face in the late 20^th-century surge of interest in missing children. His disappearance and others like it contributed to a siege mentality among many Americans, particularly parents. Patz became one of the first “milk carton kids,” missing children whose faces were printed on milk cartons in the hopes that someone might recognize them and alert the authorities; Ronald Reagan’s 1983 announcement of the creation of National Missing Children’s Day was timed to coincide with the date of Patz’s disappearance. Over the course of the next several decades, the idea that American children were at constant risk of being snatched off the street by shadowy predators became an obsession. Politicians championed expansive new police powers, nonprofit organizations dedicated to saving missing children mushroomed, and parents gradually began to adopt a stance of outlandish fear of random crimes against their children. As a child of the 1980s, in the summers my brothers and I would leave the house in the mornings and go run around the nearby fields and woods for hours, unsupervised, returning home only for lunch or when my father bellowed our names as the sun went down. By the 2000s, America’s vision of responsible childrearing was that of the helicopter parent, fretfully hovering overhead, never letting their kids out of their sight.

In the last several decades of the 20^th century, at least, there was some justification for such anxious parenting and media hype, as we were living in a period of genuinely elevated crime rates—although even then, random kidnappings were quite rare. What’s disturbing to me is the way that “stranger danger” fears have grown as the 21^st century has trundled on, despite the fact that we’ve been living through an unprecedented reduction in the violent crime rate. And this constant state of low-level panic risks disrupting the most essential rites of passage of American youth, without any factual justification.

Consider, for example, Halloween. It might seem strange to be thinking about the quintessential fall holiday in the heat of summer, and yet that’s precisely what I’ve been doing lately—pondering the classic slice of Americana that is trick or treating. This might make a little more sense if you understand that I am the father of a four-month-old baby, one who’s stubbornly sticking to his “absolutely will not sleep in a crib or bassinet” policy, requiring me to stay awake with him all night, every night before I hand him off to his mother in the morning. I therefore have both new reason to think about the rituals of childhood and nothing but time to ponder them. He’ll still be blissfully unaware of the world when we dress him up in a pumpkin costume this October 31^st, but the following year he’ll be a little toddling menace, and then there’s the year after that, and the year after that… and I find myself both excited to see what he’ll come up with as far as Halloween costumes go, and concerned that the classic American ritual of trick or treating might not be waiting for him in the future.

You may have heard of “Trunk or Treat,” an impossibly depressing 21st-century practice in which fretful parents take their children to some sad parking lot to exchange candy in a grim facsimile of actual Halloween festivities. This is necessary because, as we all know, the modern world is a terribly dangerous place for American children, full of maniacs looking to pull them into windowless vans. Perhaps parents of an earlier, more innocent age could have sent their kids out into the dark of night in search of free candy, but the world has grown too harsh, too dark, too violent for such things now. Better to awkwardly mill around in a parking lot for a couple hours before heading home, never having exposed our kids to the crazies out there. Of course, this robs the night of its spirit of wandering adventure, the opportunity to take in the moonlit landscape in search of sugary treasure that has proven to be such fertile ground for storytelling and culture-building. But what are those vague and idealistic virtues worth, really, compared to the obligation to save our children from the evil strangers who lurk in the dark?

Of course, you and I know the actual reality: the notion that the average child is meaningfully threatened by violent crime is fundamentally, quantitatively, objectively, scientifically untrue. The broader notion that American life has gotten more dangerous or more violent is also untrue, even during recent fluctuations such as the brief pandemic-era murder spike; violent or criminal threats against children, in particular, are extremely remote. The fear of anti-child violence has never had any empirical basis, and more importantly, this fear speaks to a deepening divide between public perception of the dangers of our society and their reality—a divide that risks pulling us ever deeper into our little bubbles, driven there by our least rational selves.

The most obvious and important point, when it comes to Trunk or Treat, is that the idea of Halloween as a festival of violence against children is simply a myth. Take the hoary old urban legend of children being killed by adulterated candy, handed out by psychopaths. There has never been an authenticated claim of needles or poison hidden in Halloween candy, never, which is sensible given a) it’s very difficult to hide anything in mini-sized candies, b) it would in fact be fairly simple for police to identify which house was handing out booby-trapped sweets, and most importantly, c) there’s zero rational motivation for someone to do such a thing. In fact, the only documented cases of any children being harmed or poisoned by adulterated Halloween candy are cases where the parents were the culprits, which is part of a broader reality about crime against children: the public conception of such crime is a matter of “stranger danger,” but in reality if a child is the victim of a crime, it’s overwhelmingly likely to be committed by someone they know, usually a family member, very often the parents. This speaks to the dominance of feelings in this domain, feelings over statistics, over common sense, over reality. Bad feelings. Scared feelings.

Halloween stranger danger fears are just part of a far larger contemporary obsession with violent crimes committed against children—fears that seem to grow more and more exaggerated precisely as the actual danger of such crimes declines further and further over time.

Take kidnapping. The raw numbers for kidnapping might look concerningly high to American parents. But in fact kidnapping is overwhelmingly a crime committed by family members, typically in some sort of custody dispute; the paradigmatic case of kidnapping in the 21st century is not some creep luring a kid away at the mall but rather one parent taking a child and fleeing somewhere without having the formal custody rights to do so. Federal data show that only about 100-115 stereotypical stranger abductions occur annually in the United States, a rate of roughly 1 in 1.2 million children. These cases make up less than 0.3% of missing child reports. Of course any is too many, but there are 73 million minors in the United States! A stranger absconding with your child is just an incredibly remote risk, and like most crimes the incidence of kidnapping is class-and-race stratified, meaning that middle-class-and-above white parents likely face even less of a risk that has a very low basal rate to begin with. And yet the emotional valence is often exactly the opposite; it’s typically financially stable white parents who most drive the stranger danger narrative.

Why So Many Elites Feel Like Losers

Freddie deBoer

·

March 6, 2023

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Violent crime overall, including crimes against children, has dropped drastically since its peak in the 1990s. National statistics show a 50% decline or more in violent crime in major cities over the past three decades. And while we will have to wait and see what the second half of 2025 holds for us, early indications are that this has been a remarkable year when it comes to falling crime rates. Trends regarding crimes against children require more granular, harder-to-acquire information, and thus we’re forced to rely on older data, but the direction of travel has been clear for some time. Specific to children, longitudinal data shows that assaults with weapons, child maltreatment, and sexual victimization have all decreased significantly through the 2000s and 2010s. Likewise, the evidence shows that physical child abuse fell by some 55% between 1992 and 2011; sexual abuse declined by 64% over the same period; and stranger abductions fell by about 50% between 1997 and 2012, again from an already-rare baseline.

Meanwhile, our responses to these crimes are growing more effective. More robust systems for finding and rescuing abducted children, such as cellphones, Amber Alerts, ubiquitous cameras, and mandatory reporting mean that missing child cases are resolved far more quickly and safely. In the early 1990s only about 60% of stranger abduction victims were recovered alive; now that figure is upward of 92%. And various forms of ancillary data almost all point to a secular trend: children are experiencing far less violence from all sources, including and perhaps especially from people they do not know. Even the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children has in recent years made the strategic decision to move away from “stranger danger” messaging. Which makes sense, given that American children have never been safer.

And yet, Trunk or Treat. And yet, polling which consistently shows that parents live in fear of their children becoming the victims of violent crime. And yet, the continued salience of random crime in our elections for public office. No matter how much the reality changes, the fear never seems to go away.

Part of what’s so aggravating about this is that many of the challenges our children do face—food insecurity, housing insecurity, exposure to lead and other environmental contaminants, inadequate access to healthcare or dental care—are all profoundly solvable problems that are actual problems. We have considerable statistical evidence of the breadth and depth of these problems for our children, and adequate public investment could solve them.

But on Planet True Crime, that stuff doesn’t pass the virality threshold. Parents cling to fear of violent crime not because the data supports it, but because anxiety has become its own form of moral performance, a way to signal vigilance, virtue, and parental devotion. The truth is that many don’t want to be convinced their kids are safe. Safety is boring. Fear gives shape to their identity.

I say all of this as someone who is far more amenable to talking frankly about crime and policing than many leftists. I’ve long felt that the progressive tendency to be dismissive of crime fears is bad politics; the public cares about crime, so we must demonstrate to them that we do, too, if we’re to win elections and take control of the institutions of law and order. The specter of Twitter lefties mocking concern about violent crime during the very real Covid-era homicide surge makes me wince just to think about it, especially given the presidential election that followed.

But I want us to have a rational level of concern for policing. I want us to care about the right things in the right ways. And just about the last place we should be investing our energy or attention or resources is the extraordinarily remote risks of strangers snatching kids off the street.

In an era defined by instant, unlimited access to information, the persistence of “stranger danger” fears is a revealing irony. We live in a time when government crime statistics, peer-reviewed sociological studies, and detailed historical comparisons are all available to anyone with a smartphone. And yet the myth that American children are more at risk than ever, especially from random predatory strangers, remains inescapable. It’s not a lack of access to the truth that drives public perception; on the contrary, the problem is too much access, and a deep mistrust of the institutions that provide that truth. This is one of the most important lessons of the internet era: constant access to massive amounts of information does not lead to an informed populace. Instead, such access often seems to simply give people more ways to deceive themselves.

In a media ecosystem that constantly amplifies outrage and exceptional horror stories, rare tragedies take on the shape of common patterns. People consume true crime, algorithmically fed horror stories, and warnings wrapped in TikToks and Facebook posts—an ambient hum of anxiety that statistics, no matter how clearly presented, cannot quiet. And parents, understandably, don’t want to be wrong about something so high-stakes.

But in privileging these fears over what the numbers show, we train ourselves to ignore reality in favor of myth, choosing the comfort of vigilance over the challenge of trust. The information age hasn’t abolished folklore, just digitized it. And I would hate to think that my son will grow up in a world that’s even more obsessed with safety thanks to a communal refusal to pay attention to reality—a world where he never gets to experience the grand American tradition of running around outside with his friends on Halloween night, searching for candy, carefree.

Freddie deBoer is a writer and academic and the author of How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement.

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