The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [44]
On Geraldo Rivera’s show a few weeks after the Ramsey murder Walsh reproached the mayor of Boulder for presuming to suggest to residents of his city that they have little to fear. Branding the mayor’s plea for calm “a Chamber of Commerce type of move,” Walsh said, “I don’t agree with that philosophy that says, ‘we don’t have a problem here in beautiful little Boulder, Colorado.’ They have a big problem.” The view accorded well with Geraldo’s own position. In another program in 1997 devoted to child abductions Rivera effused to the camera, “This isn’t a commentary, this is reality: they will come for your kid over the Internet; they will come in a truck; they will come in a pickup in the dark of night; they will come in the Hollywood Mall in Florida. There are sickos out there. You have to keep your children this close to you [he gestures with his fingers]—this close to you.”32
Even in media accounts where more complete and realistic information is provided about stranger danger, the overall impression often reinforces parental anxieties. For example, although the author of an article in USA Today in 1994 took pains midway through the piece to deemphasize stranger abductions, by that point readers had already been given another impression. The headline read, “MISSING CHILDREN : A Fearful Epidemic,” and the story opened with tales of kids who had disappeared and been murdered. Tragedies like theirs “have awakened Americans to the vulnerability of children everywhere,” the article stated. And the piece was illustrated (as stories about missing kids often are) with snapshots of adorable boys and girls who are identified by name and the dates on which they were abducted or discovered dead.33
Book publishers also help perpetuate undeserved anxieties about child nabbing, and not just by bringing out memoirs by grieving parents. A paperback from HarperCollins titled On the Safe Side at first appears to be a collection of general safety tips for youngsters. Yet most of the 245 pages are devoted to providing parents with ploys they can teach their children to use in scaring off potential molesters and abductors, as well as surveillance methods parents themselves can use to check up on baby-sitters and day care providers.34
The publication of another book, Child Lures, resulted in a mini-explosion of media fear mongering about child snatching when the author, Kenneth Wooden, helped producers at TV newsmagazines and talk shows set up mock abductions. CBS’s “48 Hours” placed hidden cameras in a toy store and had parents watch behind one-way mirrors as a middle-aged man lured their children out of the store with comeons about needing help finding his dog. “It’s scary. It can bring tears to your eyes,” said one of the moms, as her eleven-year-old son walked out of the store with the stranger. “My worst fears were confirmed,” confessed the store owner.
CBS didn’t cite any real-life examples of kidnappings at toy stores, mind you, such occurrences being, if not nonexistent, certainly rare. Still, author Wooden promised that there are perverts for whom “the challenge is getting a kid out of a Sunday school, getting a kid out of your home, getting a kid out of a toy store.” Neither CBS nor other shows that featured Wooden during this period in the mid-1990s took note of the fact that in the 1970s and 1980s he had been a leading advocate for questionable scares about “devil worshipers” and serial murderers abducting children. Appearing on programs like ABC’s “20/20” and before congressional hearings, Wooden claimed that children were being brutally raped and murdered, their bodies left to rot in trash trucks and garbage dumps.35
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