The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [119]
The nationwide AMBER Alert system, named for a child murdered in Texas in 1996, costs the federal government $5 million annually and the states many times that amount, and produces frequent notices in the media about kidnapped children. But “the system does not typically work as designed (i.e., to save children who are in life-threatening danger) and might be generally incidental to the safe return of most of the hundreds of children for whom the alert system is said to have been ‘successful,’” a team of criminologists at the University of Nevada concluded from their extensive study of AMBER Alerts over a three-year period beginning in 2003.20
Even were that system and others like it to become more successful than the research suggests thus far, crucial questions would remain. As criminologist James Alan Fox of Northeastern University noted in an op-ed in the New York Times, “More important than the risk of ineffectiveness is the danger of misuse. What should the criteria be for determining reliable information? Who might get hurt in the process of hurriedly chasing down inaccurate leads and wrong suspects? What might happen, for example, if an incorrect license plate of a suspected abductor is displayed on electronic highway signs? Might some poor motorist be pulled over by authorities or, worse, chased down by a group of vigilantes? These concerns are especially salient in the climate of fear and hysteria that surrounds what many have accurately called a parent’s worst nightmare.”21
For children, too, fear and hysteria about stranger danger are harmful. While they should certainly be taught commonsense rules about interacting with strangers, too many warnings can lead to the “mean-world syndrome” I mentioned at the beginning of this book. Children raised to view every adult with distrust might have little desire to become engaged in civic life when they are adults.
Missing children coverage is also bad for citizens who would like to get some actual news with their news. The hours and column-inches wasted on these stories could be put to better use. Focusing on bizarre and uncommon cases distracts us from the common dangers millions of children face every day like malnourishment, poverty, lack of health insurance, and crowded and crumbling public schools. In a UNICEF study in 2007 that looked at factors like poverty, health, safety, and education, children in the United States were found to be at much greater danger than anywhere else in the developed world.22
More Risky Business: Teens Gone Wild
The other major fright about America’s youth—teen pregnancy—broadened in scope in the mid-’00s. No longer focused primarily on low-income girls of color, the scare got expanded to include young women from other ethnic and income groups, and to non-pregnant girls, even girls who had yet to have intercourse. In 2005, Katie Couric reported “horror stories of kids growing up way too fast, having oral sex at ridiculously young ages.” To find out “what’s really going on,” she gathered a group of teenage girls from across the nation for an NBC news special, “The 411: Teens and Sex.”23
“I was in a journalism classroom and we could hear through the bathroom vent and so every time anybody was having sex, we like run in there and say, ‘Caught,’” said Natalia.
“Supposedly during gym class a bunch of guys were in the bathroom for a long time and they were in a line and the girl was in the bathroom,” said Kameron.
“I’m 16 ... I don’t think oral sex should be expected in a relationship, but unfortunately, I think it is,” said Kierstin.
To their credit, Couric and her colleagues recognized that a roomful of gossiping teenage girls does not an epidemic make, and in conjunction with People magazine, NBC News commissioned a national survey of 1,000 teens between the ages of thirteen and