Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder, Louv, Richard [best free novels txt] 📗

weren’t strangers, but family members or someone the family knew. Second, the actual annual figure of stranger abductions was two hundred to three hundred, and it still is.

By 2005, the rates of violent crimes against young people had fallen to well below 1975 levels, according to the 2007 Duke University Child and Well-Being Index. In 2006, New York state’s Division of Criminal Justice Services report on missing children described a microcosm of the issue: “Abduction cases accounted for approximately one percent of the total reports, and abductions committed by family members comprised the most frequent form of abduction.” One stranger abduction is too many, but in New York state, only three children were abducted by strangers in 2006. The authors of the New York report cautioned that this may be an undercount, because of how cases are reported. Even so, the recorded number is far lower than most people believe. An argument can be made that this is because children have spent more of their lives indoors. There may be some truth to that. But many other variables are at work, among them the demographic reduction in the proportion of young males, the rise of community policing, and so forth. The greatest risk to children is elsewhere. The authors of the Duke Well-Being Index state, “The most disturbing finding” of their report is not violence or abductions, but “that children’s health has sunk to its lowest point in the 30-year history of the Index, driven largely by an alarming rise in the number of children who are obese and a smaller decline in child mortality rates than achieved in recent years.”

Today, Finklehor calls the stranger-snatcher epidemic “an optical illusion” caused by the generalized social anxiety, new coordination between law enforcement and the missing-children groups, and media excitability. Make that media market-driven excitability. In a five-year study of local newscasts aired in Los Angeles in the 1990s, Frank Gilliam, a professor of political science at UCLA and associate director of the Center for the Study of American Politics and Public Policy, found that local TV news is creating a powerful “crime script” in the public’s mind—a distorted shorthand that we carry around in our heads. “The nightly news, much more visceral and powerful than print media, actually promotes racism and violence,” he says. “Viewers now automatically link race with crime.”

Isn’t TV simply telling us unpleasant, though accurate, news? “No,” says Gilliam. “Violent crime coverage, connected to race, has disproportionately come to dominate local news.” In Los Angeles, coverage of violence overwhelmingly outstrips the incidents of violent crime—by a factor of as much as 30 to 1 in the case of murder. Some TV newsrooms work hard to provide balance and context to crime coverage. But Gilliam insists that “body-bag” news coverage, by conditioning us to “crude stereotypes of members of racial minority groups,” is shaping public policy and spreading inaccurate fear.

Such fear may actually make our children less safe. In 1995, a “shyness inventory” revealed that 48 percent of people surveyed described themselves as shy, up from 40 percent in the mid-1970s. “People see social interactions as more dangerous than they are,” says Lynn Henderson, a clinical psychologist and visiting scholar at Stanford. She worries that, as more parents keep their children inside the house or under rigid control, youngsters will be deprived of chances to become self-confident and discerning, to interact with neighbors, or to learn how to build real community—which is one defense against sociopaths.

Excessive fear can transform a person and modify behavior permanently; it can change the very structure of the brain. The same can happen to a whole culture. What will it be like for children to grow up in socially and environmentally controlled environments—condominiums and planned developments and covenant-controlled housing developments surrounded with walls, gates, and surveillance systems, where covenants prevent families from planting gardens? One wonders how the children growing up in this culture of control will define freedom when they are adults.

Parents may now buy a cheerfully colored, three-ounce bracelet called the global positioning system (GPS) personal locator, and lock it on their child’s wrist. If the water-resistant bracelet is cut or forcefully removed, its continuous signal activates an alarm and notifies the manufacturer’s emergency operators. At least at first glance, resistance to global personal tracking seems not only futile but also selfish—because we love our children and want to protect them. But guaranteed safety, or the illusion of it, can only be bought at a dangerous price. Imagine future generations of children who have been raised to accept the inevitability of being electronically tracked every day, every second, in every room of their lives, in the un-brave new world. Such technology may work in the short run, but it may also create a false sense of security and serve as a poor substitute for the proven antidotes to crime: an active community, more human eyes on the streets, and self-confident children.

When Nature Becomes the Bogeyman

Stranger-danger isn’t the only reason families draw the boundaries of children’s lives tighter. Children and adults are even beginning to see nature as our natural enemy—a bogeyman, a stand-in for other, less identifiable reasons for fear.

Has our relationship with the outdoors reversed, or more accurately, regressed? Earlier generations of Americans were not sanguine about their chances of survival in the great outdoors. As development encroaches on their territories, wild animals do sometimes attack humans—and remind us why many of our forebears perceived nature as a threat.

Parks, once viewed as refuges from urban ills, are becoming suspect—at least in the media. A few years ago, a motel handyman confessed to the FBI that he killed three Yosemite sightseers just outside the national park, and later decapitated a naturalist in the park. Other recent stories may have jarred Americans’ confidence in the outdoors. In Washington’s Olympic National Park in 1998, there were eighty-two car break-ins, forty-seven cases of vandalism, sixty-four incidents involving drug and alcohol abuse, one sexual assault, and one aggravated assault with a weapon. The park’s rangers now