When fear of strangers is fatal

Stoking parental fear about predators inspires vengeance

This summer in India, two dozen innocent people died at the hands of mobs convinced that they were meting out justice to kidnappers. One was a software engineer beaten to death after giving chocolates to children outside a school. One was a 65-year-old woman who got lost on a trip to a temple with her family and stopped to ask for directions. All five travellers were stripped naked and beaten with fists, sticks and iron rods. One was hospitalised in a coma. A woman named Rukmani died in the street.

This is what it happens when stranger-danger runs rampant. It turns out that fear of strangers is far more dangerous than strangers themselves.

The panic began in April when a video that appears to show a child being scooped off the street by two men on a motorcycle went viral. The video was originally created in Pakistan as a public service announcement to teach parents to watch their children more closely. The end of the clip showed the child returned by the “kidnappers” who held up a sign: “It takes but a moment to snatch a child off the streets of Karachi.”

But that wasn’t what millions of Indians saw on WhatsApp. In the doctored Indian version, that ending was cut off, so the child never reappears.

Child kidnapping is a terrible problem in both countries. The Pakistan video claims 3,000 kids go missing every year there, but some sources put the number as high as 35,000. In India in 2015, there were estimates of close to 42,000 reports of kidnapping - a horrifying number, even if it translates into just .01 per cent of Indian children.

So why not remind parents of this menace and their responsibility to protect their young?

Because humans are already hard-wired to be intensely protective of their children. Showing a video of an innocent child snatched by a fiend doesn’t inspire prudence, it inspires vengeance. Share it and you ignite panic and rage, often against those who seem different. Many of the people killed in India had simply wandered into unfamiliar areas or didn’t speak the local language.

When rumours of predators mix with new technology the results tend to be combustible. We can see that as early as 1475. That’s the year that Simon, a boy in Trent, Italy, was found dead. Rumour rapidly spread that the local Jews had killed him to use his blood to make matzo for Passover. The Jews of Trent — and they were very much The Other at the time — were tortured into confessing this blood libel. Eight were executed.

The story was so sickening and shocking that it stuck. The blood libel persists to this day.

But it had help from the start. Simon of Trent went viral thanks to a boost from the brand new social media of his day: The printing press. “There were poems, posters, pictures,” says historian Emily Rose, the author of “The Murder of William of Norwich: The Origins of the Blood Libel in Medieval Europe.” “There were treatises printed in multiple languages.”

Afterward, other towns started claiming blood libels, leading to more violence against Jews but also a twisted prestige. Exaggerating child danger is terrible for tolerance, but great for garnering attention. “You’re not just some provincial schlub,” says Ms Rose, “you’re at the centre of a story of deep religious importance.”
 

The clip that got so many people killed in India was probably inspired by other massively popular videos on YouTube that purport to show how easy it is to steal a child. One with 13 million views ends by claiming “Over 700 children are abducted a day.”

This is utter nonsense. In 2011, the most recent year the US Department of Justice has hard numbers for, 105 American children were taken in a “stereotypical kidnapping” — that is, the kind of stranger abduction you’d see on “Law & Order.” Not per day. Per year.

But when scary rumours are repeated over and over — or watched again and again — they change the way we see the world. So now it’s the rare day on Facebook when I don’t come across a post like this: “My name is Amanda and I’m a Longview, Texas resident. I’m convinced that our two-year-old daughter was the victim of a potential sex-trafficking scam yesterday. I got in the checkout line at a local store early afternoon. I took my daughter out of the cart and the couple ahead struck up the typical conversation about how ‘cute your daughter is.’”

Strangers — East Indians, she says — admiring her child. That’s it. That’s all it took for this mother to believe they were child-snatchers.

In all these social media stories, including Amanda’s, no child is actually kidnapped. None of the strangers do anything more than glance or chat. Panic does the rest.
 

David Finkelhor, head of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, tells me he knows of no child under the age of 10 in the United States that has ever been snatched from a parent in public and trafficked for sex. And yet these posts get shared tens of thousands of times, usually with comments like, “So glad you’re safe!” or, “Mamas, keep your babies close!”

And we do. We have completely changed childhood with our fears. Today, only about 13 per cent of American kids still walk to school. A big part of this decline is because of fear of predators. Parents who do let their children walk or play outside risk getting arrested or investigated when onlookers assume the children are likely to be kidnapped and call 911 to report “endangered” kids. This happened just this month in my hometown, Wilmette, Ill., where a mother was investigated for letting her 8-year-old daughter walk the dog around the block.

Illustration by Binay Sinha

Fear is a virus. Once infected, we hallucinate, seeing threats everywhere. And it’s very hard to stop the spread.

Since the violence this summer in India, WhatsApp has taken out ads begging people to be sceptical of scandalous stories, and limiting message-forwarding to five chats to try to quell the hysteria. I’d like to beg Americans to stop sharing the “My kid was almost kidnapped” posts, too.

Because these days even some people who long to be Good Samaritans fear their kindness could be misinterpreted. In 2002 in England, a man saw a lost girl who was about two years old toddling by the side of the road. “I kept thinking should I go back?” Clive Peachey later told the press. “One of the reasons I did not go back is because I thought someone would see me and think I was trying to abduct her.”

The girl later drowned in a pond.

Stop spreading stranger-danger rumours and start giving people the benefit of the doubt. Innocent lives depend on it.

The writer is the president of Let Grow, a nonpartisan group promoting childhood independence and resilience

©2018 The New York Times News Service