So first of all there are two forms this post could take. I think I could connect to a previous post on salvation and original sin, and argue that an unhealthy fear of strangers is an inevitable side effect of the unhealthy belief that humans are born evil. Further more, when an unhealthy fear of strangers grows up, it becomes conspiracy theorism, which is ultimately predicated in part on Fear Of Them, because fear that people we actually know are conspiring against us is another thing entirely and doesn't take the form of Marathon bombing trutherism or anti-refugee racism.
But I think I will argue that only by pointing out the existence of the argument, and move on to other points.
Like everybody in my generation, and the generation before me, and the generation after me, and basically like American kids for at least as long as there have been suburbs and PSAs, I grew up aware of the specter of STRANGER DANGER.
It's invoked in narrower and more specific moral panics like the fear that someone is going to hide a razor blade in your Snickers bar on Halloween, or entice your kids into Satanism by playing Dungeons and Dragons with them.
But independently of this, kids are taught to beware strangers, and adults are taught to fear strangers on children's behalf. It percolates into the legal system, it affects the conversation on guns, it's everywhere.
Here are some of the problems with the Stranger Danger horseshit.
I'm not going to tell you that there has never been a case of a stranger being a threat to a child. Part of the difficulty in arguing against paranoia is that people have no sense of scale or frequency. If something has happened ever anywhere at all, they're comfortable arguing that it's a valid concern if that's the argument they were already inclined to make. People don't generally base their opinions on facts, but on feelings, and in this case they've already internalized the gut feeling that children are under threat from strangers, and anything that seems to confirm this will resonate with them, while anything that contradicts this will bounce off them.
But strangers represent a very small threat.
For instance, the idea that young girls are in danger of being in bathrooms with grown men, some of whom could be Danger Strangers, has been invoked as a reason to support discriminatory bathroom laws like the one passed in Mississippi.
There are a score of problems with that but let's just focus on the Stranger Danger issues here.
There are two possible, and obviously related, scenarios that are being conjured up by this Danger Stranger here: either the bathroom stranger is going to molest the girl, or he's going to kidnap her, all because he's been given access to women's bathrooms in the name of trans rights.
As I've mentioned before, I was abused as a kid myself. In the course of reading books about dealing with it, and forums for survivors, and being a little involved with groups like RAINN, I've learned a few things that should be common knowledge but for some reason aren't. Or perhaps we keep learning them and then forget them again because the facts aren't as compelling a narrative as STRANGER DANGER.
By now, everyone probably knows that most cases of rape with adult victims involve a rapist the victim knows.
This is also true with child victims.
In cases of child molestation, in the largest number of cases the abuser is a family member.
"Ah," the paranoiac says, "but since I know I'm not an abuser, I can still be worried about strangers, since they may be the lesser threat overall, but they're still the larger threat to my own kids, having ruled myself out."
No.
The second-biggest group of abusers is people known to the victim -- family friends, teachers, babysitters, coaches, doctors, the people you have already vetted and delegated control to.
Strangers account for somewhere between 8% and 14% of abusers, depending on the study. Given the difficulty of conducting large-scale studies of child abuse, that spread isn't very surprising. (The percentage of strangers involved in kidnapping is lower still.)
Consider also that abuse by someone known to the child is less likely to be reported than abuse by a stranger, which means the ratio probably favors known abusers even more if we could factor in unreported abuse.
But more importantly, consider why child abuse goes unreported.
When you're a child, you're less likely to report abuse by someone you know (family or otherwise) for a number of overlapping reasons:
1: Because you know them, they remain in your life. As an adult, you can consider this and realize that not reporting the abuse means the possibility of the abuse being repeated -- and that in many cases, we're talking about not reporting continuing, ongoing abuse that the child isn't sure will ever end. But you don't know that reporting the abuse will put a stop to that, and if it doesn't, you have to deal with the consequences of
a) making them angry
b) making everyone else upset
c) the stress of articulating what's been happening
2: Further, an abuser who is part of your life is an abuser who has some kind of power in your life. From a child's perspective, any adult in their life has some kind of power and some kind of authority. If you tell your parents one thing and the abuser tells them another, what if they believe the abuser because the abuser is a fellow adult?
The abuser knows they have that power and can make threats. If it's a parent, they may threaten that you'll end the marriage by telling. If it's not a family member, they may threaten to hurt your parents, especially if you're a very young child.
That power can also come from the emotional attachment the child has to the abuser -- being an abuser doesn't necessarily sever the other relationship the abuser has. If this is a family member, that's of course especially true, but it's also true with favorite teachers, etc.
3: Shame.
There is no way to report that someone has molested you without reporting that you have been molested.
There is no way to box off the abuser and say This Person = [ABUSER] without saying I = [ABUSED].
This is a very hard thing to do.
We live in a culture that continues to fetishize purity and virginity to unhealthy degrees -- especially in women, needless to say, but that doesn't mean boys don't internalize the ideas that "sex is dirty," that virginity and purity are fragile and irrevocably lost, that having sex when you aren't supposed to have sex lessens your value both physically and spiritually.
And that's only one source of the shame.
Here's where we come to the part that is the most key to the the subject of this post.
We lean on Stranger Danger fear so hard, even though chances are your kid won't even know another kid who's had any trouble with a stranger, whereas they will know several who have been abused by family or acquaintances. We lean on it so hard that strangers become the only sensible source of abuse.
So really ...
4: If I know my abuser, I guess I wasn't abused.
I don't think any kid actually thinks about it in these terms. I don't think that's the way kid thought works. But below the surface, that sentence sums up a lot of what's going on.
If abusers are strangers, and my babysitter abused me, then how can it have been abuse?
If it wasn't a stranger, I guess I was a participant, not a victim.
If it wasn't a stranger, I guess it was just some weird game we were playing.
If it wasn't a stranger, I guess boys will be boys.
If it wasn't a stranger, I guess I kind of owe him one, he does get me great Christmas presents every year.
If it wasn't a stranger, I'm the first one this has ever happened to.
If it wasn't a stranger, this must be my fault, not theirs.
If it wasn't a stranger, no one will believe me anyway.
If it wasn't abuse, I guess I deserved it.
When I post about child abuse every year, it's to fight the stigma. Stranger Danger strengthens the stigma.
When you try so hard to teach kids to avoid scenarios of abuse and what to do if they happen, and then hand them the wrong script, all you do is make things worse. You've told them that a thing happens in the world, and you've told them how it happens. You're the voice of reason and authority, the one who explains why you have to eat vegetables and not just pudding snacks, the one who explains how many days it is until summer vacation. Kids know you're wrong sometimes, but you're still the closest thing to dependable that they have. You were right about the thing that happens, but the script you gave them doesn't fit what happened. None of the cues are in the right places and none of the dialogue works.
All this can do is make them panic instead of prepared.
And all of this, all of this is just about the effect that it has on kids who actually are abused -- which, thankfully, is still a minority of kids.
On top of that, you're teaching all the other kids fear for the sake of fear, fear that will do them no good, and will make a lot of them anxious about nothing -- and turn them into parents who do the same to their own kids.
