8 ms·

My relatives keep mentioning the possibility of my son being stolen, which seems absurd to me. I was very curious what the real odds of your child being stolen

My relatives keep mentioning the possibility of my son being stolen, which seems absurd to me. I was very curious what the real odds of your child being stolen by a stranger in the US are. EDIT: The post motivated me to do some quick Googling... one article I found said there are roughly 40 children abducted by strangers or slight acquaintances in the US annually which would make your child "700 times more likely to get into Harvard than to be the victim of such an abduction".

delinka 14y ago
Keep in mind the general state of fear in the US. If a danger even exists, it's cause for concern. Unless it involves an automobile. --d, US Citizen
- lostlogin 14y ago
  There are few others besides the car that American citizens seem (italics would be ideal here) blinkered to. It seems obvious to an outsider - who is possibly indoctrinated the polar opposite way. however the topics are all so inflammatory that even HN can get uncivil.
  - youngerdryas 14y ago
    You can italicize a word by adding an asterisk directly before and after the word without spaces.
    - lostlogin 14y ago
      Thanks.
  - yakiv 14y ago
    (I'm an American.) I'd be interested to hear what dangers Americans seem to be oblivious of.
    - lostlogin 14y ago
      Touchy ground! The two I had in mind were the lack of effective gun control and the problems associated with a lack of socialised healthcare. I would characterize these as both being partly due to an us/them 2 party government system, which encourages exclusion. I should add that New Zealand isn't free of gun issues, healthcare system problems or political parties playing BS games, its just they seem to pale compared to US paper headlines. I should note that prevailing views here on HN, are vastly different to those I notice in US papers and TV.
    - dalke 14y ago
      No matter the topic, some Americans will be worried about it. Still, the list might include: Many western countries have a state television service, funded by a TV fee or a special billing system. The goal is to have a news source which is (nominally) independent of the government and which is not beholden to advertisers. The US was once worried about this, but the FCC eliminated the Fairness Doctrine in 1987. Most of the citizens of the other western countries are agog at the US for insisting on privatized medical care. (As lostlogin also pointed out.) My experience in visiting Europe is that nationality and ethnicity are much more closely tied. A second generation Arab in France or Turk in Germany may still be considered a foreigner. Apparently we are more oblivious to the need to regard the grandchildren of immigrants as still untrustworthy. (At the very least, xenophobia in Europe feels different than in the US.) GMO restrictions are much, much higher in Europe than the US. Apparently Europeans believe in this concept of "freedom of choice to the farmers and consumers", and insist that GMO foods be labeled as such, while the US does not require that labeling. Privacy laws are higher in Europe, in part because of strong memories of how "World War II-era fascist governments and post-War Communist regimes" used that information. Someone from Bhutan might say that the US and most other countries are too interested in their country's Gross Domestic Product and not in Gross Domestic Happiness.
      - fennecfoxen 14y ago
        The main problem with the Fairness Doctrine is it's a limitation on freedom of speech. This is something that Americans can be quite sensitive to, more than Europeans, if we'd like to talk about people having blinkers on. :) The Fairness Doctrine was designed in 1949 to "provide adequate coverage of public issues", and when challenged in court it was judged constitutional specifically because the radio and television airwaves were limited. With expanding sources of media, including cable television and the Internet, the availability of broadcast airwaves no longer presents a substantial limitation on Americans being able to access any given point of view. Modern attempts to revive the fairness doctrine are led more or less exclusively by partisans who favor the Democratic Party and preferred the content of political speech under the old system. (For example, Bill Clinton stated that he supported it "because essentially there's always been a lot of big money to support the right wing talk shows.") Many of these partisans would like to apply the doctrine to cable television and other non-public-airwave broadcast media. However, court rulings made it quite explicit that if they ever found that the doctrine was limiting political speech, it would be found unconstitutional, so it is likely all of these attempts will fail even if legislated or regulated. Neutrality and "fairness" is, of course, impossible to judge objectively. Just ask any Wikipedia administrators dealing with edit wars. ;) Government regulation of "fairness" and government domination of the media have the potential to present significant limitations on political freedom - look at various South American dictators' and their forays into controlling the media and bullying opposing points of view. It is the fox guarding the henhouse. Of course, sometimes you may have relatively benevolent foxes (I hear the BBC's okay!) or you may just have suicidal hens who fawn over the latest bit of personality-cult politician voluntarily (no further comment on this topic, this post is enough of a digression).
- AutoCorrect 14y ago
  If a gun exists, it's only for killing. <== another irrational (on some people) fear
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - lotsofcows 14y ago
    Yeah, they make really good hammers. And I once saw someone open a beer with one. They have sooooo many uses other than killing things.
- scotty79 14y ago
  I think it has something to do with wide spread circumcision. Once in you life you've felt like a god and then one of your subordinates came and cut off part of your penis. You can never feel safe after such event.
avar 14y ago
Here are some statistics about it: http://www.ncmec.org/en_US/documents/InfantAbductionStats.pdf http://www.ncmec.org/en_US/documents/InfantAbductionStats.pd... The kid is probably more likely to be struck by lightning while you're walking around in the park on an overcast day than being abducted by strangers. But parents of newborns are rarely sensible about their risk assessment, and obsess over amazingly unlikely scenarios while forgetting about the plausible and common ones.
- taylorlb 14y ago
  I've really enjoyed talking to my family and strangers about their irrational fears that exist around children. It's incredibly fascinating to me. That said, I have been totally terrified to board an airplane for the last 3 years (use to fly once a month) so I don't have much of a leg to stand on.
- rayiner 14y ago
  Risk analysis isn't just about probability. It's about the cost of prevention relative to the probability of a bad outcome multiplied by the cost of a bad outcome. Parents worry about children because the cost of losing a child is ruinously high to a parent. Meanwhile, little preventative measures like not leaving them outside are cheaper than putting them in little baby Faraday cages on cloudy days. Hence why parents worry about child abduction and not lightning strikes.
  - bjornsing 14y ago
    Baby Faraday cages, that's the best thing since sliced bread! :)
  - lostlogin 14y ago
    Not that long ago some friends were mid argument when we turned up. She was saying that, hypothetically, if she ended up in a river with her baby she would hold it up, save it, and drown if it required that to save it. Her husband was saying save yourself first, you're no good dead and if you drown, the baby drowns too. And they wouldn't shut up. I hadn't seen anything like it before, but now we have a child, and strange crap happens.
speeder 14y ago
Depends on the country and how much the population is mixed. Yes, it may sound evil or anti-immigrant, but it does not matter where, if the location has people of uniform ethnic identity, they tend to treat everyone around them as distant cousins (and there are biological reasons for that) and some negative actions people don't feel like doing it. In places with lots of random ethinic identities mixed, leaving your baby outside is BAAAAAAD idea.
- PavlovsCat 14y ago
  Nordic countries are just as diverse as the US.
  - speeder 14y ago
    I do not mean specifically the US. And Sweden is NOT diverse as US, Sweden has as the "biggest minority" the Finnish (that are not that different from Swedes), any other population is very small except on some specific cities. US has a great population of people from several backgrounds. Also the same is in my country (Brazil). Here, I see people being much more lax with their security when everyone near them are of the same ethnic background, be it white, black, native american, whatever. It is just that everyone is born to not trust strangers, foreigners, etc... And "race" is a very quick way to assess that. Not that I think we should go hating each other or anything like that, but it is how it works, and it is very visible, the more mixed a place is, the less people trust each other, with some specific exceptions (ie: places that are truly cosmopolitan like Universities or some workplace cities).
    - vinkelhake 14y ago
      The Finnish minority is followed closely by immigrants from former Yugoslavia (166k vs 155k). Sweden has accepted a large number of refugees from Iraq & Iran, together they outnumber the Fins. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Sweden http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Sweden
    - guylhem 14y ago
      As shocking as it may sound, I noticed the same thing in the caribbean where population is very mixed. It's not about racism - it's more as if a shared group identity encouraged cooperative behaviour. Even weirder - there seems to be a trigger effect : until the non visible minority reaches 5% the cooperative behaviour keeps working. Funny thing - it seems to works even if you account your own ethnicity - i.e. when you are in the <5% you will get more cooperation by people with a different ethnicity than you !! Cross the 5% mark and it won't work as well - apparently even with people of the same ethnicity as you. Weird. Some may call that parochialism. I find that interesting. I've been quite puzzled by this (it contradicts all the mainstream thoughts about diversity) and I would love to know more about such issues (scientific research - can anyone with a sociology background give more details about that?)
antiterra 14y ago
That kind of statistical hand waving is irritating. First, it's 40 abductions where parents are characterized as being paranoid about their child being kidnapped. The statistic says nothing about how leaving your kid on a sidewalk might affect the chances of abduction. Your chances of getting hit by lightning aren't as slim if you're a golfer. Also, 700x more likely to get into Harvard as an applicant or just a US born child? Does that include post-graduate Harvard institutions? How is 'getting into Harvard' a useful benchmark for acceptable risk?
- rz2k 14y ago
  Clearly leaving a child unattended is going to have an effect, and so are many other factors going to have an effect on admission to Harvard. Furthermore, the hand waving statistics are off by an order of magnitude as far as I can tell. 40 * 700 = 28,000, but the cohort of births in a given year result in a student body closer to 2,800 than 28,000.
  - antiterra 14y ago
    It probably came from comparing accept percentage of Harvard (6% now but 7% a couple years ago) with a kidnap chance calculated for the whole of children born in the US. Of course applicants are already a selected subset and not representative of all candidates born in the same year. It's a pretty useless comparison. e.g. 40 kidnaps per year for 10 years = 400. 400 * 700 'times more likely' = 280,000. Divide that by 4mil children born in a year to get 7%.

delinka 14y ago

Keep in mind the general state of fear in the US. If a danger even exists, it's cause for concern. Unless it involves an automobile. --d, US Citizen

lostlogin 14y ago
There are few others besides the car that American citizens seem (italics would be ideal here) blinkered to. It seems obvious to an outsider - who is possibly indoctrinated the polar opposite way. however the topics are all so inflammatory that even HN can get uncivil.
- youngerdryas 14y ago
  You can italicize a word by adding an asterisk directly before and after the word without spaces.
  - lostlogin 14y ago
    Thanks.
- yakiv 14y ago
  (I'm an American.) I'd be interested to hear what dangers Americans seem to be oblivious of.
  - lostlogin 14y ago
    Touchy ground! The two I had in mind were the lack of effective gun control and the problems associated with a lack of socialised healthcare. I would characterize these as both being partly due to an us/them 2 party government system, which encourages exclusion. I should add that New Zealand isn't free of gun issues, healthcare system problems or political parties playing BS games, its just they seem to pale compared to US paper headlines. I should note that prevailing views here on HN, are vastly different to those I notice in US papers and TV.
  - dalke 14y ago
    No matter the topic, some Americans will be worried about it. Still, the list might include: Many western countries have a state television service, funded by a TV fee or a special billing system. The goal is to have a news source which is (nominally) independent of the government and which is not beholden to advertisers. The US was once worried about this, but the FCC eliminated the Fairness Doctrine in 1987. Most of the citizens of the other western countries are agog at the US for insisting on privatized medical care. (As lostlogin also pointed out.) My experience in visiting Europe is that nationality and ethnicity are much more closely tied. A second generation Arab in France or Turk in Germany may still be considered a foreigner. Apparently we are more oblivious to the need to regard the grandchildren of immigrants as still untrustworthy. (At the very least, xenophobia in Europe feels different than in the US.) GMO restrictions are much, much higher in Europe than the US. Apparently Europeans believe in this concept of "freedom of choice to the farmers and consumers", and insist that GMO foods be labeled as such, while the US does not require that labeling. Privacy laws are higher in Europe, in part because of strong memories of how "World War II-era fascist governments and post-War Communist regimes" used that information. Someone from Bhutan might say that the US and most other countries are too interested in their country's Gross Domestic Product and not in Gross Domestic Happiness.
    - fennecfoxen 14y ago
      The main problem with the Fairness Doctrine is it's a limitation on freedom of speech. This is something that Americans can be quite sensitive to, more than Europeans, if we'd like to talk about people having blinkers on. :) The Fairness Doctrine was designed in 1949 to "provide adequate coverage of public issues", and when challenged in court it was judged constitutional specifically because the radio and television airwaves were limited. With expanding sources of media, including cable television and the Internet, the availability of broadcast airwaves no longer presents a substantial limitation on Americans being able to access any given point of view. Modern attempts to revive the fairness doctrine are led more or less exclusively by partisans who favor the Democratic Party and preferred the content of political speech under the old system. (For example, Bill Clinton stated that he supported it "because essentially there's always been a lot of big money to support the right wing talk shows.") Many of these partisans would like to apply the doctrine to cable television and other non-public-airwave broadcast media. However, court rulings made it quite explicit that if they ever found that the doctrine was limiting political speech, it would be found unconstitutional, so it is likely all of these attempts will fail even if legislated or regulated. Neutrality and "fairness" is, of course, impossible to judge objectively. Just ask any Wikipedia administrators dealing with edit wars. ;) Government regulation of "fairness" and government domination of the media have the potential to present significant limitations on political freedom - look at various South American dictators' and their forays into controlling the media and bullying opposing points of view. It is the fox guarding the henhouse. Of course, sometimes you may have relatively benevolent foxes (I hear the BBC's okay!) or you may just have suicidal hens who fawn over the latest bit of personality-cult politician voluntarily (no further comment on this topic, this post is enough of a digression).
AutoCorrect 14y ago
If a gun exists, it's only for killing. <== another irrational (on some people) fear
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- lotsofcows 14y ago
  Yeah, they make really good hammers. And I once saw someone open a beer with one. They have sooooo many uses other than killing things.
scotty79 14y ago
I think it has something to do with wide spread circumcision. Once in you life you've felt like a god and then one of your subordinates came and cut off part of your penis. You can never feel safe after such event.

avar 14y ago

Here are some statistics about it: http://www.ncmec.org/en_US/documents/InfantAbductionStats.pdf http://www.ncmec.org/en_US/documents/InfantAbductionStats.pd... The kid is probably more likely to be struck by lightning while you're walking around in the park on an overcast day than being abducted by strangers. But parents of newborns are rarely sensible about their risk assessment, and obsess over amazingly unlikely scenarios while forgetting about the plausible and common ones.

taylorlb 14y ago
I've really enjoyed talking to my family and strangers about their irrational fears that exist around children. It's incredibly fascinating to me. That said, I have been totally terrified to board an airplane for the last 3 years (use to fly once a month) so I don't have much of a leg to stand on.
rayiner 14y ago
Risk analysis isn't just about probability. It's about the cost of prevention relative to the probability of a bad outcome multiplied by the cost of a bad outcome. Parents worry about children because the cost of losing a child is ruinously high to a parent. Meanwhile, little preventative measures like not leaving them outside are cheaper than putting them in little baby Faraday cages on cloudy days. Hence why parents worry about child abduction and not lightning strikes.
- bjornsing 14y ago
  Baby Faraday cages, that's the best thing since sliced bread! :)
- lostlogin 14y ago
  Not that long ago some friends were mid argument when we turned up. She was saying that, hypothetically, if she ended up in a river with her baby she would hold it up, save it, and drown if it required that to save it. Her husband was saying save yourself first, you're no good dead and if you drown, the baby drowns too. And they wouldn't shut up. I hadn't seen anything like it before, but now we have a child, and strange crap happens.

speeder 14y ago

Depends on the country and how much the population is mixed. Yes, it may sound evil or anti-immigrant, but it does not matter where, if the location has people of uniform ethnic identity, they tend to treat everyone around them as distant cousins (and there are biological reasons for that) and some negative actions people don't feel like doing it. In places with lots of random ethinic identities mixed, leaving your baby outside is BAAAAAAD idea.

PavlovsCat 14y ago
Nordic countries are just as diverse as the US.
- speeder 14y ago
  I do not mean specifically the US. And Sweden is NOT diverse as US, Sweden has as the "biggest minority" the Finnish (that are not that different from Swedes), any other population is very small except on some specific cities. US has a great population of people from several backgrounds. Also the same is in my country (Brazil). Here, I see people being much more lax with their security when everyone near them are of the same ethnic background, be it white, black, native american, whatever. It is just that everyone is born to not trust strangers, foreigners, etc... And "race" is a very quick way to assess that. Not that I think we should go hating each other or anything like that, but it is how it works, and it is very visible, the more mixed a place is, the less people trust each other, with some specific exceptions (ie: places that are truly cosmopolitan like Universities or some workplace cities).
  - vinkelhake 14y ago
    The Finnish minority is followed closely by immigrants from former Yugoslavia (166k vs 155k). Sweden has accepted a large number of refugees from Iraq & Iran, together they outnumber the Fins. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Sweden http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Sweden
  - guylhem 14y ago
    As shocking as it may sound, I noticed the same thing in the caribbean where population is very mixed. It's not about racism - it's more as if a shared group identity encouraged cooperative behaviour. Even weirder - there seems to be a trigger effect : until the non visible minority reaches 5% the cooperative behaviour keeps working. Funny thing - it seems to works even if you account your own ethnicity - i.e. when you are in the <5% you will get more cooperation by people with a different ethnicity than you !! Cross the 5% mark and it won't work as well - apparently even with people of the same ethnicity as you. Weird. Some may call that parochialism. I find that interesting. I've been quite puzzled by this (it contradicts all the mainstream thoughts about diversity) and I would love to know more about such issues (scientific research - can anyone with a sociology background give more details about that?)

antiterra 14y ago

That kind of statistical hand waving is irritating. First, it's 40 abductions where parents are characterized as being paranoid about their child being kidnapped. The statistic says nothing about how leaving your kid on a sidewalk might affect the chances of abduction. Your chances of getting hit by lightning aren't as slim if you're a golfer. Also, 700x more likely to get into Harvard as an applicant or just a US born child? Does that include post-graduate Harvard institutions? How is 'getting into Harvard' a useful benchmark for acceptable risk?

rz2k 14y ago
Clearly leaving a child unattended is going to have an effect, and so are many other factors going to have an effect on admission to Harvard. Furthermore, the hand waving statistics are off by an order of magnitude as far as I can tell. 40 * 700 = 28,000, but the cohort of births in a given year result in a student body closer to 2,800 than 28,000.
- antiterra 14y ago
  It probably came from comparing accept percentage of Harvard (6% now but 7% a couple years ago) with a kidnap chance calculated for the whole of children born in the US. Of course applicants are already a selected subset and not representative of all candidates born in the same year. It's a pretty useless comparison. e.g. 40 kidnaps per year for 10 years = 400. 400 * 700 'times more likely' = 280,000. Divide that by 4mil children born in a year to get 7%.