What changed?

I read this article (Family in strife after kids left alone in park) this morning and I've been thinking about it all day. Here's a summary of the article: After making them prove they are capable of doing so, a father lets his children play alone in the park. Someone freaks out and calls CYF who decide to investigate.

What really got me thinking was a quote in the article from Peter Gerrie of Barnados:

We all pine for all the old days when it was totally safe to let your kids play at the park alone, but those days have gone.

I hear this all the time. I get the impression that in the 60's and 70's when my parents were growing up it was perfectly safe to for children to play unsupervised, and now there are pedophiles hiding in every bush. The sentiment that our communities are not as safe as they used to be is incredibly prevalent. So prevalent perhaps that no one questions it. I'll take the bait.

What changed? Is our society falling to pieces? Not really. Are there more pedofiles now than when my parents grew up? Maybe, it's difficult to research. I honestly don't know what's going on. Enlighten me.

Are our communities more dangerous or is that just something parents tell themselves to justify being overprotective?

Jun 29, 2009

Adam said...

Nowadays with new detective and police technologies we can conclusively prove these kind of things more. Most people think it is one of the worst crimes about, so we notice it more (ie, it is more salient) than other crimes. When people notice it more, it gets into the media more, we hear more about it, and more people believe it, irrelevant of whether or not its true.

Betina said...

It's media. We hear more about it (and we lap it up cos we just love our gossip) and the more we hear about children going missing or being abused the more parents fear it happening to their own children. It's sad really. It probably only happens to a very few children out of the population but we hear about nearly every case so it seems like a much larger number. Also we've learnt to listen to our children instead of making them sit in total silence and show perfect manners so more cases are reported than before anyway.

Oct 13, 2009

Ryan said...

I assume the above comments are true, but I also think there is another underlying problem in that the more parents protect their children like this, the more likely it is that the un-supervised children will be attacked. Even if the number of pedophiles etc. has not changed over the years, the ratio of pedophiles to un-supervised children has definitely changed, therefore those children are far more at risk than in the past.

So basically, part of the reason for the increased risk is caused by the parents who are trying to protect their children.

How much of a difference this makes I don't know. I imagine it would be hard to quantify.

PS: Interesting to see how your comments work with the Twitter login and AJAX'd comments area.

Michael Dowse

What changed?

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