The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [46]
Ideon’s CEO said he got the idea for the new business after the 1993 kidnapping and murder of twelve-year-old Polly Klaas in Petaluma, California. Once again reporters were claiming that the public ought to be, as Newsweek put it, “more aware of how vulnerable children are.” The media blaze ignited by the Klaas murder continued for years, refueled periodically by Marc Klaas, the girl’s father, and by drawn-out legal proceedings against Polly’s accused killer, Richard Allen Davis. The Ideon service raised fears of its own, however, for some missing-children crusaders. “What perfect information for a pedophile to have access to. They’ll know your mom and dad’s name—the perfect way to trick your child,” Kim Swartz, who runs a foundation in honor of her seven-year-old daughter, Amber, missing since 1988, commented to a reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle about Ideon’s information. “I think everybody ought to be very cautious about this group,” Swartz advised. “Who knows if they’re going to be around in a year?”41
As it turned out, they were not. After spending close to $21 million in the first half of 1995 on marketing and operational costs Ideon had too few subscribers to justify further investment. It closed the business and refunded money to parents. In explaining what went wrong, company officials pointed to gaps in their market research. Fears about child abduction and police preparedness did not translate into parents’ willingness to forward substantial amounts of money and personal information to a company they had never heard of.
It would not be surprising were a similar service to appear sometime in the future. Officers at Ideon have considered experimenting with a more modest operation that would operate through their credit card registration service. And at the time the company decided to bail out it had spent an estimated $17 million defending itself against a suit from another firm, LifeFax, whose owner claimed he originated the idea and planned to market his own child-registration and recovery service.42
Making Scary Kids
The misbelief that every child is in imminent risk of becoming a victim has as its corollary a still darker delusion: Any kid might become a victimizer. Beneath such headlines as “Life Means Nothing,” “Wild in the Streets,” and “‘Superpredators’ Arrive,” the nation’s news media have relayed tale upon blood-soaked tale of twelve- and fourteen-year-olds pumping bullets into toddlers, retirees, parents, and one another. Armed with quotes from experts who assert, often in so many words, “everyone’s kids are at risk,” journalists stress that violent kids live not just in the South Bronx or South Central L.A. but in safe-seeming suburbs and small towns.43
The news media seldom pay heed to the fact that in eight out of ten counties in the United States entire years go by without a single juvenile homicide. As has been discussed, journalists and politicians were able to take a string of schoolyard shootings in 1997 and 1998 and present them as proof that kids in small towns were becoming maniacal; when it comes to the suburbs, incidents need not even come in clumps. Pasadena, California, is a suburb of 125,000 located at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains, about a dozen freeway miles from South Central Los Angeles. Best known as home to the annual Tournament of Roses parade and football game, it garnered national media attention for another reason not long ago. The inciting event occurred on Halloween night in 1993. In what reporters accurately described as “a quiet neighborhood of neatly tended bungalows,” three