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By Root 588 0

and Time provided a quote from a U.S. senator confirming as much. “We face a unique, disturbing and urgent circumstance, because it is children who are the computer experts in our nation’s families,” Republican Dan Coats of Indiana remarked, tapping into a perennial parental paranoia about adult obsolescence—a paranoia that fear mongers continued to mine in subsequent years when thousands of pornselling sites appeared on the Internet, many of them offering free samples. By then, however, parents had a bounty of smut-blocking software available for their home computers, as well as Internet services that vetted out questionable content. Yet claiming that parents could not protect their kids from web filth, politicians and pundits pushed through the Communications Decency Act in 1996. The Supreme Court overturned the act the next year on the same grounds that courts had rejected other censorial legislation: it could have had the effect, as Justice Felix Frankfurter once put it, of “reducing the adult population to reading only what is fit for children.”22

Missing Children

The cyberporn episode demonstrates, on the one hand, that a deficient study—even one that experts easily identify as bunk—can precipitate a panic that continues well after the study is discredited. The episode also points up another way in which the culture of fear grows and persists: while giving birth to new scares, fear mongers resuscitate old ones.

Inundated with criticism following its cyberporn cover, Time came as close as it could to recanting. In a full-page article three weeks after the cyberporn edition the magazine took note of some of the flaws in Rimm’s research and acknowledged that Rimm has “his own credibility problems.” In light of those admissions, and the undeniable seductiveness of Rimm’s offer to Time (great sex in the safe environment of a respected university, enhanced by the latest in technology), I am not sure that I blame the editors for having succumbed. I do fault them, however, for a sleazy connection they made between cyberporn and another overstated menace: in the context of reporting that as many as a dozen children had been lured on-line by child molesters, the magazine informed us that “more than 800,000 children are reported missing every year in the U.S.”23

By including this statistic, which has nothing to do with cyberporn, Time helped to perpetuate one of America’s most enduring but fallacious panics. In national surveys conducted in recent years three out of four parents say they fear that their child will be kidnapped by a stranger. They harbor this anxiety, no doubt, because they keep hearing frightening statistics and stories about perverts snatching children off the street. What the public doesn’t hear often or clearly enough is that the majority of missing children are runaways fleeing from physically or emotionally abusive parents. Most of the remaining number of missing children are “throw aways” rejected by their parents, or kids abducted by estranged parents. According to criminal justice experts, a total of 200 to 300 children a year are abducted by nonfamily members and kept for long periods of time or murdered. Another 4,600 of America’s 64 million children (.001 percent) are seized by nonfamily members and later returned.24

Without question every such incident is a horrible tragedy, but once again, kids are not equally at risk. Child molesters, both inside and outside families, tend to target vulnerable children: youngsters with disabilities and poor communications skills, troubled kids whose reports adults distrust, and children whose parents are absent or inattentive.25

Most of these facts and figures have been known since 1985, when Diana Griego and Louis Kilzer published a series of Pulitzer Prize—winning articles in the Denver Post and revealed that then-current estimates of missing children were largely fantasies of politicians who had seized on what one congressional aide called “the perfect apple pie issue.” Congressman Paul Simon, in one of several governmental hearings on the problem,