The Culture of Fear (14 page)

Groups such as the National Safe Kids Campaign, whose objective is to educate parents about the true leading causes of death and disability among children, find they cannot compete in this media environment. How do you interest TV producers in stories about preventable accidents? Thousands of young lives could be saved each year, and hundreds of thousands of emergency room visits averted, if parents and elected officials paid more attention to simple safety measures in homes and public spaces. Yet when Safe Kids Campaign conducts its own
surveys of parents’ concerns the results confirm what other researchers find: kidnapping remains at the top of the list.
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Responsibility for perpetuating the confusion rests not only with journalists, celebrity advocates, and politicians but also with marketers who have devised a whole range of strategies for profiting from missing children. Among the more creative companies is Advo Inc., which mails out an estimated 57 million postcards each week to American households. Each card features on one side the smiling face, birth date, eye color, hair color, and other vital information for a missing child, and on the reverse side an advertisement for a local business. The question “Have you seen me?” printed above the child’s picture has multiple meanings: it asks if we’ve seen the child and, at time same time, if we’ve seen the advertisement and the product or service it advertises. As Marilyn Ivy, an anthropologist at the University of Washington, notes in an essay about this marketing device, “That a child is missing—not at home—also brings up fears that perhaps we as residents at home are missing something, too.”
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To produce results any advertisement must do two things: It has to grab the audience’s attention, and it has to persuade the audience that they have a problem whose solution is the item being advertised. Advo’s mailers cleverly and quickly accomplish both tasks. The photo of the missing child immediately elicits feelings of guilt, fear, and fascination, which compel a person to look at the card rather than toss it into the wastebasket along with the rest of the day’s junk mail. And the mailer creates a problem-solution situation for the reader at a subconscious level. “Since we probably can’t find the missing child,” Ivy observes, “the packet of ads is there to tell us what else we might be missing and where to find it: Domino’s Pizza, Sterling Optical, Tireman, Hydroflo, Twining’s Upholstery and Carpet Cleaning, Jiffy Lube.”
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Other entrepreneurs of the 1990s have marketed products that respond more directly to fears about missing kids. Ident-A-Kid, a Florida firm, sold more than 3 million child-identification cards a year at $5 each through a nationwide network of salespeople who visit schools. Saf-T-Child, a Texas company, marketed a more elaborate package for $25 that included two ID cards and an instructional cassette for parents
about how to prevent child nabbing. Then there’s the Blockbuster Video chain, which lures movie-renting parents into its stores by offering free videotaping of children—the tapes to be used by police should the kids ever go missing.
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By far the most ambitious and well-financed effort to capitalize on parents’ fears of losing their children came from the Ideon Group, whose stock trades on the New York Stock Exchange. The nation’s leading provider of registration services for credit cards, Ideon marketed an analogous service for children. In full-page advertisements that ran in major newspapers and newsmagazines throughout the country in 1995 the company professed: “If Your Child Were Missing You’d Think About It Every Minute. Same With Us.” For $50 a year Ideon’s “Family Protection Network” service would register a child’s picture and other identifying information in a national data bank. For $250 a year the company would provide investigative services as well. “We have a network of over 1,000 highly qualified, licensed, independent agents, including former agents from the FBI, CIA, and Departments of Treasury and Justice,” the ads proclaimed.
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Through market research Ideon learned that parents were worried about the amount of help the police and FBI can provide if a child vanishes. For only $250 a year, the ads suggested, parents could lessen that worry. Or as Georgia Hilgeman, mother of a formerly missing daughter and founder of Vanished Children’s Alliance and a supporter of Ideon’s new service put it when I interviewed her in 1995, “We have insurance on our homes and our cars, why not to insure our children’s safety?”

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?”
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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.
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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.
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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 teenage boys were gunned down while trick-or-treating. The shooters, gang members from a neighborhood nearby, apparently had set out after some of their rivals and mistakenly hit the trick-or-treaters.
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This awful but isolated incident got retold in the media repeatedly over the coming months as evidence of the unbridled spread of youthful violence into previously safe areas. The coverage culminated in a
New
York Times
story a full year after the event. Headlined “Mistaken Killing of Three Teen-Agers Erodes a California City’s Confidence,” the piece was hard to take seriously if you knew much about what actually had transpired in Pasadena over the twelve months following the shootings. There had been no epidemic of violence by the city’s youth and no mass exodus of homeowners or merchants, many of whom depend heavily on the tourist trade. On the contrary, Pasadena’s “Old Town” section was booming with new restaurants and clothing boutiques, and violent crime in Pasadena actually dropped by 20 percent in 1994. On Halloween night that year community groups sponsored an outdoor carnival on the steps of City Hall that went off without incident.
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Stories commemorating the anniversary of violent events further add to what has become an extraordinary volume of coverage about kids and crime. When a professor of communications at the University of California at Santa Barbara monitored the media for a month in the early 1990s he discovered that stories about health and economic issues together accounted for a measly 4 percent of newspapers’ and television newscasts’ coverage of children. By contrast, 40 percent of all news
reports about children in the nation’s leading newspapers concerned crime and violence. The figure for evening newscasts on ABC, CBS, and NBC was 48 percent.
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Local newscasts are worse still. In a paper published in 1997 in the
American,journal of Public Health
researchers from the University of California at Berkeley reported the results of an analysis they conducted of all news stories broadcast on local television stations in California over a twelve-day period. Fifty-five percent of stories about young people concerned violence committed by or against them.
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Reports about violence by youths customarily contain two elements that together guarantee the audience will sit up and shudder: vivid depictions of the young criminals and their crimes, and numbers showing dramatic increases on some dimension or other. A
New York Times
story typical of the genre began with a kid and a crime: “It was a wave of the hand from a 10-year-old boy with a Botticelli face and Dennis the Menace bangs that brought Elizabeth Alvarez to her death on a humid afternoon last August.” Then the story related the kid and the crime to a statistical trend: “As overall violent crimes leveled off, those committed by people under 18 rose 47 percent.”
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If instead of percentages reporters concentrated either on the actual numbers of such crimes committed by kids in these age groups or on historical comparisons, they wouldn’t have much of a story. “The number of homicides committed by children age 12 and under grew by 125%,”
USA Today
let its readers know, at a time when fewer than forty kids under the age of thirteen were convicted of murder each year. In the mid-1990s homicide by children under thirteen occurred less often than in 1965. A report from the Justice Department stated unambiguously, “Today’s serious and violent juvenile offenders are not significantly younger than those of 10 or 15 years ago.”
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Particularly rare are kid criminals whose behaviors, given the rest of their lives, are very surprising. You have to dig deep into the media accounts, though, to glimpse that reality. It was the angelic face of Jacob Gonzales, in a large photograph just beneath the masthead at the top of the front page of the
New York Times
in 1994, that most readers undoubtedly remembered for weeks to come. Headlined “2 Boys, a Debt,
a Gun, a Victim: The Face of Violence,” the story tells how Jacob helped his buddy, a fourteen-year-old drug dealer, murder a pregnant mother of three who refused to hand over $80. “jacob’s take was $20. He bought a chili dog and some Batman toys,” says the article, second in a four-part series on kids who kill. The installment about young Jacob occupies close to two pages of the
Times.
Fully one-quarter of a page is taken up with a second photo in which Jacob, photographed in his cell at the children’s home where he was being held, is the epitome of an average American boy. Clad in a University of Michigan sweat-shirt, he has a sweet smile on his face and a cute little hand puppet in one hand. Beside him is a collection of football trading cards.
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Only a patient reader learns how far from normal was Jacob’s larger reality. Well into the article, the reporter lets us know that Jacob lived in a crack house and that his father, who used to beat his mother, was murdered when Jacob was four or five, about the same time that Jacob witnessed one of his seven siblings get shot in the face. Jacob’s mother, raped when she was in seventh grade, had once sold her children’s clothes for drug money, according to court documents. When she testified in court on Jacob’s behalf, she was drunk.

Perhaps if journalists talked more with children, as Margaret Tinsley of the
Daily Telegraph
in London did, they would come to see the folly in purveying an impression that every kid is at risk of becoming a killer. When Tinsley spoke with her ten-year-old son about the widely publicized story of two boys his age who abducted a toddler from a shopping mall and brutally murdered him, the child was totally baffled. “What’s the point? Why would they want to?” Tinsley’s son asked her. When Tinsley drew a parallel to bullies at his school, he balked. “That’s different. They’re your own age. Hurting a baby is just stupid. Like pushing over an old lady,” the boy avowed.
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