Fear

The case that started the hysteria over child abductions has now been solved, 33 years later. The Etan Patz case began the media saturation of child abductions, and, along with that theme recurring almost nightly on prime-time television, led to a distortion of reality. Despite our fears, only 115 children are kidnapped by strangers each year. The majority are returned home within a day; only 50 are murdered or are never found. To put that in perspective, you have a greater chance of being struck by lightning than your child has of being the victim in a "stereotypical" (really, atypical) kidnapping. We don't walk around with lightning rods on our heads (at least most of us do not,) but we lock our kids away, imprisoning them at home, keeping them under constant supervision, stunting their emotional and social development, all in fear of a minimal risk.

Leonore Skanazy (Free Range Kids), Etan: The End « FreeRangeKids:

Readers – As I'm sure almost all of you have heard, there has been an arrest, 33 years too late, of a man who confesses to murdering Etan Patz.

In the wake of 6-year-old Etan’s 1979 disappearance came the era we are living in to this day, the “Don’t let your child out of your sight, he could be snatched like that little boy” era. It’s an outlook reinforced daily by the media (“Up next: Children at risk!”) and the marketplace (“Buy this! Your children are at risk!”). It has been embraced by schools (“No walking allowed! Your children are at risk!”), and day care centers (“We have cameras everywhere. Your children are at risk!”), and by the law (“No letting your kids wait in the car. Your children are at risk!”). In short, the fact that we can see Etan even with our eyes closed has allowed the fascism of fear to flourish.

Knowing how he died provides cold comfort. I’m also not sure there’s any way to make a murder “meaningful.” But it does make me want to take action. For the sake of the next 33 years’ of children, I want to help our culture regain  its perspective. We remember this tragedy more than a generation later precisely because things like this do not, thank God, happen all the time. We cannot raise our children as if they do. And we can’t organize our lives around avoiding random, rare, heartbreaking events. Lisa Belkin makes this point movingly in her Huffington Post piece today.

Let me repeat the words another writer sent here a few weeks back: Fear does not prevent death. It prevents life.

Let’s not prevent it in Etan’s name anymore.