This effort put me in the company of anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, political scientists, archeologists, urban designers, activists, philosophers, and theologians, plus hundreds of random strangers I talked to wherever I went.įor more than 6,000 years, humans have lived in cities – a form of social organisation characterised by a superabundance of strangers. While I am not advocating for strangers to approach children, or vice versa, I do believe, as adults, we should think again about the benefits of safely speaking to strangers.įor several years, I researched why we don't talk to strangers and what happens when we do for my book, The Power of Strangers: The Benefits of Connecting in a Suspicious World. "How many social or economic opportunities do we miss by simply being afraid of strangers?" Stolle wondered. This is problematic – trust being key to the functioning of many societies. The political scientist Dietlind Stolle, from McGill University in Canada, argued that decades of this messaging may have damaged a whole generation's ability to trust other people. Some social scientists believe teaching kids that literally everyone in the world they hadn't met is dangerous may have been actively harmful. Why people object to laws that save lives.How the views of a few can determine a country’s fate.The myths and reality of modern friendship.Stranger rhymed with danger, and the pair became inextricably linked.Ĭould this way of thinking, however, have affected our interactions in later life for many of us? Have we missed out on something valuable? Abductions by non-family members – which include those where a child is taken by someone unknown to them – account for just 1% of the missing children cases reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in the US.īut, it felt real, and therefore it was real. Then, as now, the majority of sexual and violent crimes against children ( and adults, for that matter) are committed by people known to the victim: relatives, neighbours and family friends. While there is no doubt that some people do have traumatic experiences with strangers, "stranger danger" lacked any real statistical basis. Police officers, teachers, parents, religious leaders, politicians, media personalities, and child welfare organisations set aside their differences and worked together to spread the message – that interacting with a stranger could be putting them at risk. Parental concern and humanity's natural wariness towards strangers were supercharged by sensationalist media coverage and plummeting levels of social trust, which bloomed into a full-on moral panic. "Stranger Danger" was all the rage in those days. Like many people who grew up in America in the 1980s, I was raised to fear strangers.
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