The other night Chris and I took a walk in one of the open space preserves near our house. It made me think of all the time I spent as a child wandering around by myself in Shell Ridge Open Space, looking for dinosaur bones. (I found a lot of cow bones, anyway.)

I asked Chris whether nowadays he'd feel safe letting his 9- or 10-year old daughter roam around the open space by herself, and he didn't think he would. Nor would I, which makes me very sad--that was a very good part of my childhood.

I always wonder whether or not child abductions have actually increased. People seem to think kidnappings are on the rise, but are they really? Maybe we're just much more aware of them. I dug around a bit for statistics, but I haven't seen anything definitive. One site mentions that only 24% of kidnappings are "stranger kidnapping", as opposed to being kidnapped by family members (for example in a disputed custody) or acquaintances.

Another site says that there are about 100 incidents in the United States each year in which a child is kidnapped and murdered. That's out of about 800,000 reported "missing children" per year--many of those are runaway children or family abductions.

The same website says that the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children does not ascribe to the "stranger-danger" philosophy--that of trying to teach your child who "strangers" are and to run away. Instead, they say: "It is much more beneficial to children to help them build the confidence and self-esteem they need to stay as safe as possible in any potentially dangerous situation they encounter rather than teaching them to be "on the look out" for a particular type of person."

Statisically speaking, the chances of a child being abducted in the open space behind our house seems to be astronomically small. But it doesn't matter--it's the mindset we live with today. The mindset that says I'd be crazy to let my young child--especially a girl--wander around a place like that, even in the daytime. And that makes me incredibly sad.