Think of the children

One of the most frustrating things about the helicopter-parenting phenomenon is that hardly anyone seems to support it on principle. I don’t think I’ve met anyone, parent or not, who disagrees that today’s kids have overly structured lives. And to the extent this new lifestyle evolved to manage risk, everyone seems to recognize it did so incoherently.

In no rational sense was it “risky” for 10-year-old me to travel alone to school, from an affluent part of Toronto to an even more affluent part. It is certainly less risky now: the murder rate for children is considerably lower today than in the 1980s; the rates of accidental injury and death have plummeted.

And I think the media are getting better, too, at keeping risk in perspective. If you’re 28 per cent more likely to die of X if you do Y, but your existing chances of dying of X are one in a bajillion, then you ought to be informed of that.

Wednesday’s Toronto Star failed spectacularly in this regard. “Child abduction data paint chilling portrait,” it reported on the front page. “Study sheds light on violence against our most vulnerable.”

In red, there were some helpful stats: “3 hours” — the time within which most “child victims were sexually abused and then killed”; “84 per cent” — the number of victims who were girls; “11.6 years old” — their average age; and “45 per cent” — the number abducted on a Friday or Saturday.

The study, by the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, concerns abduction and murder by strangers, which is the No. 1 risk North American society has mismanaged for four decades. It is a tiny subsidiary risk of an already tiny one: by my count roughly 99.999992 per cent of Canadian children are not murdered.

Yet the Star provided no data whatsoever on how stranger abductions fit into any bigger picture. Between 2000 and 2012, the biggest cause by far of death among children under 15 was accidents (29 per cent). Next came cancer (16 per cent); genetic conditions (nine per cent); suicide (four per cent); heart disease (3.4 per cent); and then homicide (3.1 per cent).

Over 41 years, the study identifies 155 victims under age 17 of a “stranger or acquaintance” murder. That’s an average of 3.8 victims a year. Over that time, the population of Canadian children has remained steady at around 6.5 million. Anyone can do that math, surely.

Moreover, the number would have been even smaller than 3.8 had the study used a different definition of “acquaintance,” such as the one found in any dictionary. The study excluded all cases where the person responsible was a family member living under the same roof as the child, and where the victim and assailant were in a romantic relationship — but it did not exclude, say, friends of the family or schoolmates, whom no one would describe as “strangers.”

A 2003 study by the RCMP’s missing children division looked at 80 reported cases of “stranger abductions,” defined as “anyone other than the subject’s parent or guardian.” It found just two of the perpetrators met a definition of stranger that you would find in the dictionary.

To summarize, then: somewhere fewer than 3.8 children a year are murdered by actual strangers, which is an insignificant subset of child murders, which is an insignificant cause of child death, which is itself rare event. And by studying this, the CCCP and the Star propose we can gain “valuable insight”?

Like what? What can we possibly do with the knowledge that kids are most likely to be abducted on a summer Friday or Saturday, in the afternoon or evening, while “in transit” from A to B, when they are very nearly guaranteed not to be abducted on any day, at any time, doing any thing?

It would make far more sense to turn a suspicious eye on everyone we know and love — and that would make no sense at all.