No Stranger Danger Please

A recent Facebook post by a family member expressing alarm at the number of registered sexual offenders in and near her zip code has prompted me to revisit a skeptical claim made by many people, not the least of which are Penn & Teller.

They did an episode of Bullshit, their hilarious series on Showtime, debunking the notion of “stranger danger”. Not wanting to be one who takes everything a popular skeptic says on faith, I did a little bit of my own research and along with some back of the napkin calculations (that I couldn’t have possibly done without WolframAlpha), I’ve come to the same conclusions.

Please do not assume that I am advocating against taking basic precautions to keep your children safe, I am simply stating that worrying yourself sick over something that is extremely unlikely to happen to you or your children isn’t healthy. We have enough to worry about with the daily stresses of living.

I also think we pass far too many laws trying to keep our children safe from every conceivable harm that may come to them, to the point that our civil liberties may suffer. To wit the recent scandal of “sexting” and the politicians that want to brand kids who do it as sex offenders. 

http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/04/07/sexting.busts/index.html 

This is one afternoon’s worth of research here, so it is by no means a scientific study. I wish I had the luxury to spend the weeks or months it would take to get real hard facts and figures, but I’m pretty sure it’s not going to be off by anything like an order of magnitude, and if anything the numbers I present lean in favor of the “Stranger Danger” hypothesis.

From 1998 to 2002 there were 14.8m violent offenses committed by “strangers” in the US. (<— divide by 4 to get yearly stats = 3.7 million, I’m doing this because most other sources for mortality rates are based on yearly rates)

Only 3% involved sexual assault or rape and .1% were homicide.
3.7m x .03 = 111,000 Sexual Assaults / Rapes
3.7m x .001 = 3700 homicides

Of ALL VICTIMS of violent crimes, 18% were under the age of 18. I can’t know what percentage of violent crimes against children under 18 were committed by strangers because my sources did not say. I’m extrapolating here, but it’s safe to say it’s probably either a similar number or slanted in favor of violent crimes by strangers being perpetrated against adults.

18% of 111,000 = 19,980 sexual assaults / rapes of children under 18 by strangers
18% of 3700 = 666 (not on purpose I swear) homicides of children under 18 by strangers.

In 2002, there were about 73 million kids under the age of 18 in the united states (According to the 2000 census).

19,980 is .027% of 73m. The odds of any child under 18 being sexually assaulted by a stranger are about 1 in 3653. Keep in mind that these numbers, due to my source, necessarily include young people who are sexually assaulted but refuse to name the perp, or lie about it. I was unable to find any reliable numbers that do not include this so this number is skewed to a very large degree. An educated guess says you are probably looking at more like 1 in 10,000. Even at the inflated number of 1 in 3653, there is a still a 99.973% likelyhood that your child will NOT experience sexual assault or rape at the hands of a stranger.

666 is .0009% of 73 million. The odds of your child being killed by a stranger are 1 in 109,610. Your child can be 99.999% sure that they will NOT be killed by a stranger. 

Compare these odds to the other leading causes of DEATH in children age 1-18 in 2002. That’s worth restating, I’m not talking about leading causes of trauma here but DEATH: 

unintentional Injury - 9578 or 1 in 7700 

misc illnesses rounding out the top 20 - 5553 or 1 in 13146

suicide - 1331 or 1 in 54846

Your child is almost twice as likely to commit suicide then die at the hands of a stranger, 8 times more likely to die from one of the top 20 illnesses, and 14 times more likely to die from accident or injury.

Other freak things that can kill and the odds of them happening (all ages, 2002):

Motor Vehicle Accident - 1 in 6,371
Unintentional Poisoning - 1 in 15,978
Falling - 1 in 17,240

Sources

http://webapp.cdc.gov/cgi-bin/broker.exe
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/fvs.pdf
http://www.disastercenter.com/cdc/Age%20of%20Deaths%20113%20Causes%202005.html
http://censtats.census.gov/data/US/01000.pdf