“Stranger danger” teaches children to avoid strangers due to potential harm, but has been criticized for creating fear and not always working. Advocates suggest teaching children about dangerous scenarios and empowerment strategies instead.
Stranger danger is the general concept taught to many children that strangers are inherently dangerous and should not be approached or talked to due to their potential harm. This has been a common method used with the good intention of protecting the children. The phrase “Don’t talk to strangers” and the numerous instructions given to children to always avoid strangers have come under great criticism from a number of advocates working to protect children.
Some of the key concepts of stranger danger are often repeated to children. Some of these include telling the children:
Don’t talk to strangers who approach you in public
Don’t believe strangers who offer rides or ask for help looking for things like “lost puppies.”
Don’t get into a car with a stranger who reports a parent’s illness.
The list goes on and on, and the main point is that children should perceive anyone not known as potentially harmful.
The problem is that studies of this issue show that it doesn’t always work, and many children create a visual image of a stranger as somehow ugly or scary. Even though they are taught differently, numerous studies have shown that many children completely ignore unrelated danger impulses if a stranger seems friendly enough. Alternatively, a child in a dangerous situation may not ask people for help because they are so fearful of all people they don’t know. This was the case in 2005, when a lost eleven-year-old boy escaped rescuers for four days because he was afraid to talk to strangers.
It has been suggested by many critics of the outsider danger that this teaching be abandoned in favor of imparting other messages to children. One such message would be implied that strangers could be a great source of help if a child is lost or in an emergency setting. It is also argued by organizations such as the US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, that most children may ignore danger from strangers anyway because that is not how parents operate. Parents talk to strangers all the time: in grocery stores, in line at the movies, at school, and so on. So children do not see the alien danger regularly practiced by their parents or guardians.
Many believe that some form of middle ground is needed that helps children understand and avoid situations that could bring them harm. This would include learning about scenarios that are presumably dangerous. However, many, including organizations attempting to prevent child sexual abuse, have abandoned the teaching of only one unknown danger. This is especially important as children are often abused by people they know. Therefore, empowerment strategies that give children a sense of self and a sense that they have the right to fight or speak out may be more effective in protecting children.
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