THE handwritten sign appeared on our school noticeboard, a warning from a well-meaning parent. Someone, it said, had tried to abduct a child from our local Sainsbury’s.
In the days that followed there was much discussion of the subject at the school gates. Even those who had not seen the notice had heard the tale. The warning had come originally, apparently, from a headmistress of another local school. Luckily, all exits had been shut when the child was reported missing, and so he had been rescued in the nick of time. But somehow the evildoers had escaped. Parents shook their heads at the sorry state of our modern world, and reminded each other of the need for constant vigilance.
A frightening fable for our times, indeed. But it was just that — a fable. In other words, completely untrue. When I checked with Sainsbury’s and the police, both assured me that no such incident had taken place.
It was, in fact, an urban legend that has been circulating in various forms across the globe for decades. The respected American mythdebunking site, www.snopes.com, carries several versions of the tale. Usually, it includes the added motif of the abductors altering the appearance or clothing of the child in order to fool CCTV surveillance.
A couple of years ago, when we made a family trip to Disneyland Paris, two separate friends had warned me of just such a kidnap risk, which they assured me had happened there recently. I, of course, took the story as gospel and panicked when I lost sight of one of the children in the video arcade.
In fact, no child has ever been abducted from a Disney theme park anywhere in the world. As for supermarket kidnaps, the best known UK incident is a fictional one: the little girl who disappears from her father’s side at the beginning of Ian McEwan’s Whitbread-winning novel The Child in Time.
The loss of a child in such circumstances is dreadful to contemplate. However, the likelihood of a minor being abducted and murdered by a stranger in the UK is so small as to be statistically negligible. There are around 13 million children in this country, and the number killed by strangers has remained fairly static, at around five to seven a year, for the past few decades. And yet surveys show that abduction is parents’ biggest fear — well above the dangers that really do kill large numbers of children, such as home fires and accidents, cars and a child’s own relatives.
“You can tell parents until you are blue in the face that their fears are unjustified, but it doesn’t work,” says Michele Elliott, of the children’s charity Kidscape. Elliott, who gives lectures on the subject of the new generation of over-protected “cotton-wool kids”, would like to see a return to a common-sense approach: “Teach children to be aware of danger and how to react sensibly to keep themselves safe, then make them jam sandwiches, put them on their bikes and send them off out to play.”
But in the current climate, that is not likely to happen. Most parents find themselves locked in a pattern of competitive vigilance. It would take a brave parent to let a child cycle off on an adventure or even walk to school on their own, not necessarily because of the danger facing the child, but because of the wave of disapproval they would face from fellow parents.
I remember the barely concealed gasps of shock I got at a mothers’ lunch when I admitted that since he was about six or seven, I’ve let my son go unaccompanied to male public lavatories while I take his sisters to the ladies. Another mother said proudly that when her son got old enough to be embarrassed about using women’s loos, she simply marched into the gents with him.
Children’s freedom and levels of physical activity have plummeted dramatically in just one generation. In 1971, eight out of ten eight-year-olds were allowed to walk to school alone. Now it is fewer than one in ten. According to Gillian Thomas, author of the recently published Demos report Other People’s Children, the restrictions we place on them in the name of safety have led to a “serious reduction in quality of life for children”.
Many people blame media hysteria surrounding individual horror stories — Sophie Hook, James Bulger, Sarah Payne, Milly Dowler, Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells. Parents have interpreted these not as extraordinary cases but as the norm — a child snatcher could be just around the corner.
Public policy response tends to reinforce the spiral of paranoia, focusing endlessly on making places that are already safe — schools, nurseries and so on — even safer by locking gates, vetting staff and monitoring CCTV screens. Thomas believes that “often the less likely something is to happen, the more obsessed with it we become”.
Of course, parents have always been afraid for their children, and abduction myths have probably always been with us. Fairies of folklore took babies and left changelings in their place. The Pied Piper lured children away out of spite when he wasn’t paid. Medieval Europeans justified their anti-Semitism by spreading tales that Jews celebrated Easter by kidnapping and crucifying Christian children. Gypsies were the child-stealers of Victorian times. Indians, meanwhile, thought their English colonial overlords abducted children to use as sacrifices to their various engineering projects.
But what is alarming about modern abduction myths is how many intelligent adults accept them as fact. The Sainsbury’s story raises many obvious questions. Since when do British supermarkets “immediately close the exits” when you report a lost child? As we all know, a call on the public address system is the usual procedure. And if the child had been saved, why weren’t the perpetrators caught as well? Why wasn’t the story in the local papers?
It seems that parents want these horror stories to be true. When I told the worried mothers at the school gates the Sainsbury’s tale wasn’t true, some became insistent and even annoyed. They had been eagerly capping abduction tales with the relish of teenagers scaring each other with grisly yarns round the camp-fire, and facts got in the way of their fun.
The Demos report recommended that children’s charities publish an annual risk survey and media survey, comparing media coverage of danger to the statistical reality. Parents could be persuaded to let their children back into public spaces by the establishment of “home zones” that are perceived to be protected in some way.
Thomas’s next project will be a survey of children themselves — what they think of their loss of freedom and what dangers most frighten them. Then perhaps we will find out if, as Elliott fears, we have succeeded in “raising a generation that thinks the whole world is out to get them”.
