Stranger kidnappings are basically unheard of. It's never been a safer time for kids in terms of crime like that.

Your child is more at risk of being abducted by the State than some random stranger.

That's why they don't go outside. You can teach them to run from the panel vans; teaching them to run from the police (who were called by some Karen) is much more difficult.

▲

goda90 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They're heard of because it's so rare that media loves to broadcast them far and wide for the views. Like it's good to get people watching out for the kidnapped child as quickly as possible, but the media sensation causes paranoia in unaffected viewers.

▲

xboxnolifes 3 days ago | parent [-]

A lot of the ones that do get broadcasted still end up being a relative too, but you wouldn't know unless you look into it after it get resolved and stops being talked about.

	▲	pibaker 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		A lot of them are not even kidnapping in the colloquial sense. We hear "kidnapping" and think about being tied up in the trunk of a car but many of the actual kidnapping cases are more like "Bobby went to his divorced daddy's place for the weekend and hasn't been back on Monday." It's about the parents' custody and not about the kids' safety.

▲

giancarlostoro 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They're more common among relatives than total strangers.

About a year or so ago I saw on Nextdoor a neighbor posted about that some girl who always walked home from school whom he waves to when he sees her. One day she was walking slower than normal, and she ran to him scared, they didn't actually know each other, on the Ring footage you can see that a car that was following her drove off. Who knows if all these cameras are helping to prevent so many incidents, but the world is still as evil as ever. Just because its rare doesn't mean that you as a parent want to win the misfortune lottery.

	▲	pibaker 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Just because its rare doesn't mean that you as a parent want to win the misfortune lottery. If you want total safety from misfortune why have kids at all? Pregnancy and birth is one of the most dangerous things people choose to do voluntarily. 1 in 200 newborns die in the US. You could avoid that by not having kids! Flippant I know. But at the end of the day to live is to take risks. Extreme risk avoidance will come back to bite you on a later day in the form of declining birth rates, increasing neuroticism and support for building a police state.

▲

null_shift 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Genuinely curious…is it rare because there are less kidnappers, or because parents are more vigilant and there is less opportunity for them to commit the crime?

	▲	mrguyorama 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It's rare because almost all kidnappings and other harmful things done to children are done by people who aren't strangers: Aunts and uncles, parents, coaches, family friends, community leaders, religious leaders, day care employees, etc They never seem to even acknowledge that, let alone care about fixing it. This was known from the statistics even before these people insisted every school teach children about "Stranger danger" because these specific people are utterly incapable of overriding primal fear, fed by "news" they insist on watching, with factual reality.
	▲	pvaldes 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Most probably kidnappers and pedophiles found a better way. Kidnapping small children has been institutionalized. And before to say that I'm crazy or trolling, we need to remind that some estimates claim that until 300,000 small immigrant children could had vanished in the last decades after being taken by the USA government. Even if the real value is a tenth of that, we would be still talking about a very concerning and astonishing cipher And we need to remind that ICE has happily employed some very seedy people lately. Journalists disclosed some workers with a criminal past that includes sexual assaults to minors and that wouldn't be allowed to work with minors in any other circumstance. The sad truth is that lots of recent recordings prove that criminals are now allowed to shop for children in the streets and parks and take them somewhere with them, as long as this children aren't white. And some of this children are not seen again. Nobody in the government can explain were they went.