The Culture of Fear (13 page)

Rimm’s exclusivity agreement with
Time
ensured that true experts on computer networks could neither see nor comment on his study until the magazine hit the stands. As soon as these folks did get their hands on his paper, however, they pulverized it. Donna Hoffman and Thomas Novak, professors at Vanderbilt University, pointed out that by his own admission in his paper, of the 917,410 files Rimm says he found, only 3 percent actually contained potentially pornographic images. The images were not readily available to children in any event, because they were on bulletin boards that required membership fees. Of 11,576 World Wide Web sites Rimm examined—cyberplaces children
might
actually visit—only nine (.08 percent) contained material that Rimm considered R- or X-rated.
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Another of Rimm’s statistics included in the
Time
article had an impact beyond the pages of the magazine. “On those Usenet newsgroups where digitized images are stored, 83.5% of the pictures were pornographic,”
Time
reported. Within days that figure got repeated throughout the media and by members of Congress who were pushing a piece of legislation to censor the content of the Internet. Conservative groups such as Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition and Gary Bauer’s Family Research also had a field day. The 83.5 percent figure became a main-stay in their solicitation mailings and speeches.
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When critics got a look at Rimm’s paper, however, they discovered that the 83.5 percent referred to the proportion of porn postings at just seventeen Usenet news groups. At the time of Rimm’s study there were thousands of Usenet groups in existence. Only a tiny percentage of these contained any dirty pictures, and you needed special software to view them.
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What Rimm’s study suggested, if anything, was that adult, middle-class, computer-literate men no longer had to frequent seedy store-fronts to view smut. But a cover story on that topic wouldn’t boost circulation, so
Time
opted instead for the kids-at-risk hook. “The great fear of parents and teachers” is that “this stuff” will fall into the hands of children “who are not emotionally prepared to make sense of what they see,” the article asserted. To back up the claim, they quoted a mother in Skokie, Illinois, who refused her sons’ request for Internet access. “They could get bombarded with X-rated porn,” the mom exclaimed, and
Time
provided a quote from a U.S. senator confirming as much. “We face a unique, disturbing and urgent circumstance, because it is children who are the computer experts in our nation’s families,” Republican Dan Coats of Indiana remarked, tapping into a perennial parental paranoia about adult obsolescence—a paranoia that fear mongers continued to mine in subsequent years when thousands of pornselling sites appeared on the Internet, many of them offering free samples. By then, however, parents had a bounty of smut-blocking software available for their home computers, as well as Internet services that vetted out questionable content. Yet claiming that parents could not protect their kids from web filth, politicians and pundits pushed through the Communications Decency Act in 1996. The Supreme Court overturned the act the next year on the same grounds that courts had rejected other censorial legislation: it could have had the effect, as Justice Felix Frankfurter once put it, of “reducing the adult population to reading only what is fit for children.”
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The cyberporn episode demonstrates, on the one hand, that a deficient study—even one that experts easily identify as bunk—can precipitate a
panic that continues well after the study is discredited. The episode also points up another way in which the culture of fear grows and persists: while giving birth to new scares, fear mongers resuscitate old ones.

Inundated with criticism following its cyberporn cover,
Time
came as close as it could to recanting. In a full-page article three weeks after the cyberporn edition the magazine took note of some of the flaws in Rimm’s research and acknowledged that Rimm has “his own credibility problems.” In light of those admissions, and the undeniable seductiveness of Rimm’s offer to
Time
(great sex in the safe environment of a respected university, enhanced by the latest in technology), I am not sure that I blame the editors for having succumbed. I do fault them, however, for a sleazy connection they made between cyberporn and another overstated menace: in the context of reporting that as many as a dozen children had been lured on-line by child molesters, the magazine informed us that “more than 800,000 children are reported missing every year in the U.S.”
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By including this statistic, which has nothing to do with cyberporn,
Time
helped to perpetuate one of America’s most enduring but fallacious panics. In national surveys conducted in recent years three out of four parents say they fear that their child will be kidnapped by a stranger. They harbor this anxiety, no doubt, because they keep hearing frightening statistics and stories about perverts snatching children off the street. What the public doesn’t hear often or clearly enough is that the majority of missing children are runaways fleeing from physically or emotionally abusive parents. Most of the remaining number of missing children are “throw aways” rejected by their parents, or kids abducted by estranged parents. According to criminal justice experts, a total of 200 to 300 children a year are abducted by nonfamily members and kept for long periods of time or murdered. Another 4,600 of America’s 64 million children (.001 percent) are seized by nonfamily members and later returned.
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Without question every such incident is a horrible tragedy, but once again, kids are not equally at risk. Child molesters, both inside and outside families, tend to target vulnerable children: youngsters with disabilities and poor communications skills, troubled kids whose reports adults distrust, and children whose parents are absent or inattentive.
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Most of these facts and figures have been known since 1985, when Diana Griego and Louis Kilzer published a series of Pulitzer Prize—winning articles in the
Denver Post
and revealed that then-current estimates of missing children were largely fantasies of politicians who had seized on what one congressional aide called “the perfect apple pie issue.” Congressman Paul Simon, in one of several governmental hearings on the problem, had put forward 50,000 as a “conservative estimate.” Other public figures had thrown out numbers as high as 400,000. John Walsh, father of Adam Walsh, whose abduction and murder in 1981 at a shopping mall in Hollywood, Florida, got the country focused on missing children in the first place, proclaimed the country “littered with mutilated, decapitated, raped, strangled children.”
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Following the
Denver Post’s
revelations, for several magnificent months the media actually set about to correct the record and calm people down. CBS News ran a story in which they showed an excerpt from a commercial for one of the many products being marketed to worried parents at the time—a warning buzzer that attached to a child’s clothes—and quoted an expert suggesting that people not waste their money. “Exact figures are in dispute, but child abduction by strangers appears relatively rare,” CBS correspondent Steve Young noted at the end of his report.
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The
Washington Post,
in a page-one article in late 1985 entitled “Abduction Publicity Could Scare Children,” told of an elementary school counselor in Silver Spring, Maryland, who spent much of her time consoling children who worried that someone would follow them home. “They’re scared, and I feel like they’re not having fun anymore,” the
Post
quoted her. On milk cartons, television programs, billboards, posters, and at mass fingerprinting sessions in shopping malls, the article went on to catalogue, kids were being bombarded with the message that “today’s world is a dangerous place.” The article said that famous pediatricians such as Benjamin Spock and T. Berry Brazelton regard this onslaught as unhealthy for children. “I don’t think it’s really appropriate to make them afraid of everybody,” Brazelton was quoted.
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The trend toward corrective reporting was short-lived, however, and easily offset by aggressive campaigns from advocacy groups such as the
Adam Walsh Center, Vanished Children’s Alliance, and others whose spokespersons are parents of abducted children. Soon after Missing Children’s Day in 1995, NBC’s “Today Show” ran a segment with John Walsh, whose more recent claim to fame is as host for nearly a decade of “America’s Most Wanted,” a popular “reality” television show whose stock in trade is stories about psychopathic killers who ambush innocent, unsuspecting women and children. The police have “new information about the case,” Katie Couric reported in voice-over at the top of the segment, while a snapshot of little Adam filled the screen. When she introduced Walsh, however, he did not actually discuss any new information, and the interview quickly deteriorated into fanciful speculation. “I truly believe that if Adam’s murderer isn’t found in this life,” Walsh said, “he will get justice in the next life.” The segment ended with Walsh wondering whether “Adam’s murderer has gone on to kill other children or might try to hurt our family again.”
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Walsh is an exemplar of a particularly influential category of person in the culture of fear: the grieving parent-cum-celebrity. Politicians respond to these people by passing legislation memorializing their dead child. Dale Russakoff, a reporter at the
Washington Post,
documented that in just an eighteen-month period ending in mid-1998 more than fifty laws had been passed by state legislatures with names like Jenna’s Law (New York), Amber’s Law (Texas), and Stephanie’s Law (Kansas). Commenting on the trend, Stephen Schulhofer, a law professor at the University of Chicago, suggested to Russakoff, “Policy issues are reduced to poster children and you have an up-and-down emotional vote as if you’re choosing between the killer and a particular child.”
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In the media too policy issues around child abduction get framed by parents-cum-celebrities. During the time period that Schulhofer studied, for instance, John Walsh was almost omnipresent in television and print coverage about child abductions and murders. Following the murder of six-year-old JonBenet Ramsey in Boulder, Colorado, on Christmas night 1996 and the publication of Walsh’s memoir,
Tears of Rage,
in 1997, the media couldn’t get enough of Walsh. And his advice to parents could not have been more chilling. “Don’t let your guard down for a minute,” the
Buffalo News
quoted him. “It can happen anywhere.
These creeps are all over the place. They’re mobile. They’re so violent and remorseless, they think nothing of killing someone for twenty-five dollars or a car stereo.”
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On Geraldo Rivera’s show a few weeks after the Ramsey murder Walsh reproached the mayor of Boulder for presuming to suggest to residents of his city that they have little to fear. Branding the mayor’s plea for calm “a Chamber of Commerce type of move,” Walsh said, “I don’t agree with that philosophy that says, ‘we don’t have a problem here in beautiful little Boulder, Colorado.’ They have a big problem.” The view accorded well with Geraldo’s own position. In another program in 1997 devoted to child abductions Rivera effused to the camera, “This isn’t a commentary, this is reality: they will come for your kid over the Internet; they will come in a truck; they will come in a pickup in the dark of night; they will come in the Hollywood Mall in Florida. There are sickos out there. You have to keep your children this close to you [he gestures with his fingers]—this close to you.”
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Even in media accounts where more complete and realistic information is provided about stranger danger, the overall impression often reinforces parental anxieties. For example, although the author of an article in
USA Today
in 1994 took pains midway through the piece to deemphasize stranger abductions, by that point readers had already been given another impression. The headline read, “MISSING CHILDREN : A Fearful Epidemic,” and the story opened with tales of kids who had disappeared and been murdered. Tragedies like theirs “have awakened Americans to the vulnerability of children everywhere,” the article stated. And the piece was illustrated (as stories about missing kids often are) with snapshots of adorable boys and girls who are identified by name and the dates on which they were abducted or discovered dead.
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Book publishers also help perpetuate undeserved anxieties about child nabbing, and not just by bringing out memoirs by grieving parents. A paperback from HarperCollins titled
On the Safe Side
at first appears to be a collection of general safety tips for youngsters. Yet most of the 245 pages are devoted to providing parents with ploys they can teach their children to use in scaring off potential molesters and abductors,
as well as surveillance methods parents themselves can use to check up on baby-sitters and day care providers.
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The publication of another book,
Child Lures,
resulted in a mini-explosion of media fear mongering about child snatching when the author, Kenneth Wooden, helped producers at TV newsmagazines and talk shows set up mock abductions. CBS’s “48 Hours” placed hidden cameras in a toy store and had parents watch behind one-way mirrors as a middle-aged man lured their children out of the store with comeons about needing help finding his dog. “It’s scary. It can bring tears to your eyes,” said one of the moms, as her eleven-year-old son walked out of the store with the stranger. “My worst fears were confirmed,” confessed the store owner.

CBS didn’t cite any real-life examples of kidnappings at toy stores, mind you, such occurrences being, if not nonexistent, certainly rare. Still, author Wooden promised that there are perverts for whom “the challenge is getting a kid out of a Sunday school, getting a kid out of your home, getting a kid out of a toy store.” Neither CBS nor other shows that featured Wooden during this period in the mid-1990s took note of the fact that in the 1970s and 1980s he had been a leading advocate for questionable scares about “devil worshipers” and serial murderers abducting children. Appearing on programs like ABC’s “20/20” and before congressional hearings, Wooden claimed that children were being brutally raped and murdered, their bodies left to rot in trash trucks and garbage dumps.
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