Crime and Perception
"Pedophiles watch our children from the shadows,” warned U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. "They lie in wait, studying, planning "to ensnare and violate the innocent.”
The attorney general’s audience that day in February 2007 was trainees at the Project Safe Childhood Training Program, hosted by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. They had a mission, Gonzales told them. “It is our responsibility, in law enforcement and as adults, to find the predators first. To bring them to justice before they catch their prey: our kids. . . . At this training program, you will learn how best to pursue them, to interrupt their sadistic hunt. Together, we can make these hunters feel like they are the hunted. Because we all pray for, and work for, a day when children in this country are safe from the leering eyes, the insidious stalking, and the unthinkable cruelty that pedophiles inflict upon them.”
There is probably no figure more reviled in modern Western culture than the man—he’s always a man—who hunts, sexually abuses, and even kills children. In the tabloid press, he’s a “monster,” a “pervert,” or a “sicko.” A headline in the Lancashire Evening Post blares, “Sex Beast Caged.” The British tabloid Daily Star warns, “Pervs Now Rife in Our Schools.” The revulsion is so profound and universal that even quality American newspapers, which are normally scrupulous about avoiding prejudicial language, have taken to calling sex offenders “predators.” Politicians have reflected the shift by making promises to crack down on lurking pedophiles a staple of election campaigns.
He is worse than the drug dealer, the murderer, even the terrorist. He is the embodiment of evil, the stuff of nightmares. “It is every parent’s fear, having your child taken,” intoned Anderson Cooper, the popular host of CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, using the standard journalistic formulation to introduce a special hour-long edition of his show in January 2007. “No child, of course, is immune.”
The focus of Cooper’s show was the story of Ben Ownby and Shawn Hornbeck, two Missouri boys. When Hornbeck was eleven, he was abducted while riding his bicycle. Four years later, Ownby, thirteen, was snatched at his school bus stop. Acting on a tip, police found Ownby shortly after he was taken. They were also startled to discover a now fifteen-year-old Shawn Hornbeck. Both boys had been kidnapped by Michael Devlin, a seemingly ordinary man who is “a chilling reminder that the coworker and neighbor you think you know so well may be a monster,” Cooper said.
CNN is not tabloid TV, and this show—entitled “Taken: Children Lost and Found”—was relatively restrained in its presentation of what is an inherently terrifying issue. There were interviews with Hornbeck’s parents, Devlin’s former employer, and a psychiatrist who discussed why a kidnapped child may not run at the first opportunity. There was also a look at how forensic artists “age” photos of young children. But mostly, there were agonizing stories of lost children and shattered parents. “Four o’clock, the bus came and we heard it. And she just never came up the driveway,” said one mother who lost her daughter twenty years ago. “We were at home,” recalled another. “He decided he wanted to go out and ride his bicycle. I guess it was about two thirty, somewhere around there. . . . And I stood at the door and watched him get on his bike and ride down the street. And that was the last I saw of my son.”
“These are the kind of stories that keep parents awake at night worrying, ” Cooper observed. “Coming up, teaching your child to fight back if they come face to face with a kidnapper. Tips from an expert that could save a child’s life.”
The tips from “family safety expert Bob Stuber” included telling children that if someone is following them in a car, they should run in the opposite direction to buy time as he turns the car around. Stuber also suggested teaching children that if someone tries to snatch them off a bicycle—“a common scenario”—they should hang on to the bike in order to “make yourself too big and too bulky to be put into a car.”
“For a lot of parents, it’s a nightmare thinking about their child being thrown into the trunk of a car,” Cooper said. “If a kid is in the trunk of a car, is there anything they can do then?”
“You know, there’s not a lot you can do in the trunk of a car,” Stuber replied. “You can kick and scream. Nobody is going to hear you, nobody’s going to see you. But here’s something that will work. Disconnect the brake or taillight wires. Now, you can teach a three-year-old, four-year-old how to do this. You pull them real tight, the wires at the rear of the trunk. It takes the brake or taillights out. Now, the police may pull that—in fact, there’s a 50 percent chance that the cops will pull that car over, not because you’re in the trunk but because it has no brake or taillights. Then they’re going to be able to hear you and come rescue you.”
Cooper thanks his guest and closes out the interview with the observation that “we all hope your children never have to use these tips, but better [to] be prepared than not.”
And with that, one hour of parental terror ends. Not a word about probability has been spoken.
Of course Cooper was right when he said at the start of the show that “no child is immune.” But saying that something could happen is close to meaningless. What matters is how likely something is to happen. On that score, Gut will definitely have a strong opinion: Having just seen a string of horrifying examples, Gut will use the Example Rule to conclude that the chances of this crime happening are high. What’s more, these crimes are so hideous that anyone watching the show will feel intense sorrow and revulsion—which will also lead Gut to conclude, using the Good-Bad Rule, that the likelihood of this sort of attack is high. It’s also possible—perhaps even likely—that the emotions will be so intense that they will drive out any thought of probability: This is so horrible! I have to protect my kids! As for Head, it has no reason to step in and adjust Gut’s conclusion because it has been given no information that would allow it to rationally assess the risk.
Or rather, almost no information. As these sorts of television shows often do, a few statistics appeared on-screen briefly as the show faded to commercial breaks. Cooper didn’t read them aloud and they were very easy to miss. Viewers who did happen to see them, however, read this, once: “Of an estimated 115 ‘stereotypical kidnappings’ of children per year . . .” 40 percent are killed, 60 percent are recovered, 4 percent are not found.
Why these numbers add up to more than 100 percent wasn’t explained. Neither is the strange term “stereotypical kidnapping.” Even if this had been cleared up, however, it would have made little difference to what the audience got out of the show. These numbers are far too incomplete to get a real sense of the probabilities involved. And whatever the statistics presented, they were up against a litany of graphic, horrifying stories about children stolen and murdered. Toss a handful of statistical fragments into that emotional storm and they’ll be blown away like so much dust.
So what are the real numbers? In the 1980s, when one of the first waves of what has become a recurring panic over child abductions swept across the United States, there were no accurate data. Officials, activists, and reporters repeatedly said 50,000 or 75,000 children were stolen from their parents’ arms each year, but no one knew where those figures came from. Like the 50,000 pedophiles said to be prowling the Internet today, they seem to have been someone’s guess that was believed and repeated as fact until its origins were lost. Finally, with fears for the safety of children rising, Congress asked a federal agency to do proper research and produce reports on the number of missing kids. The first such report—known by the acronym NISMART (National Incidence Studies of Missing, Abducted, Runaway, and Thrownaway Children)—covered cases in 1988. The second looked at 1999.