Let’s not get hysterical about the threat strangers pose to children

NOBODY could blame the people of Soham for wanting to batten down the hatches and shut themselves away from a world which suddenly seems a darker, crueller place in which apparently nobody can be trusted.

Nobody could blame those who stormed out of a community meeting with police last week after being refused in their demands for access to information on local sex offenders, or the resident who argued "there should be parents' justice not the court's justice. Prison isn't good enough for the people who did this".

But it is precisely at times of extreme tragedy and heightened emotion that the rest of us need to keep our heads, not become further immersed in the corrosive climate of "stranger danger" or swayed by demands for panic measures and ill-conceived new laws.

The obsessive, round-the-clock media coverage that followed the disappearance of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman was grotesque in its voyeurism. Assisting the police by helping to issue appeals, putting necessary information into the public domain or luring suspects into incriminating themselves before the cameras is fair enough.

But the ordeal confronting the parents of the two 10-year-olds, and indeed the rest of the population of Soham, can hardly have been made any easier by the incessant demands upon them to parade their emotions and their suffering before the intense gaze of the world's media.

The offers of huge cash rewards by newspapers like the Daily Express may or may not have been cynical in their motivation, but in practical terms they were worse than useless. As well as wasting police time and resources in responding to vast quantities of useless information and chasing up false leads, the people of Soham had to endure the sight of day trippers, enticed by the prospect of financial reward, landing on their doorsteps in search of clues others had missed.

The sensationalism and hysteria whipped up around this tragic case is likely to have further destructive consequences that extend far beyond the tiny community of Soham.

On Sunday, the News of the World relaunched its "naming and shaming" of paedophiles campaign, publishing the names and photographs of almost 40 offenders. When this campaign was first launched two years ago, wrongly identified men and known paedophiles came under attack from mobs in Manchester and Plymouth.

On the Paulsgrove estate in Plymouth, crowds of vigilantes smashed windows, torched cars and forced five families wrongly identified as harbouring sex offenders out of their homes.

A suspected paedophile in nearby Southampton shot himself dead and a hospital paediatrician in south Wales had to flee when vigilantes confused her job title with the word "paedophile".

The News of the World is campaigning for the adoption of "Sarah's Law" whereby parents could gain access to information on registered sex offenders in their area. One can only imagine the possible consequences had such a law already been operable in Cambridgeshire last week.

The climate of fear, suspicion and mistrust that characterises modern society will only be intensified by this case. As columnist Joan Smith pointed out in the London Times, the obsessive media focus upon a single tragedy like the murders of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman "paralyses us and stirs up atavistic and mostly unfounded fears about the kind of society we inhabit".

Like other deeply shocking, but mercifully rare, events such as the murders of Jamie Bulger or Damilola Taylor, it makes little sense to draw any sweeping conclusions about modern society from the deaths of Jessica and Holly.

British Home Office statistics show that between five and seven children a year are killed by someone they don't know, a figure that has remained constant over 30 years, even though the population has grown.

In Ireland, child abductions and killings by strangers are an even rarer occurrence. That is why individual cases like the disappearance of young Phillip Cairns back in 1986 still stand out so vividly in our minds. The chances of your child dying at the hands of a stranger are extremely remote.

Yet several times over the past few weeks I have heard people say things along the lines of "you cannot let children out of your sight these days" to which everybody nods, unquestioningly in agreement. It is taken for granted that children today are at risk as never before from potential killers, abductors and predatory paedophiles.

Studies reveal that children today already enjoy far less freedom than previous generations. They are forbidden from enjoying any potentially risky activities, denied the freedom of unsupervised play and chaperoned to and from school rather than allowed to walk, with the consequence that many are now becoming obese.

Yet sections of the media, as well as politicians and the burgeoning child protection industry seem hell bent on scaring parents even more.

When the two girls first disappeared, most of the fevered media speculation centred around the possibility that they had been "groomed" and lured to their deaths by a paedophile lurking in a chat room or using e-mail. Amid all the horror stories, parents could have been forgiven for thinking their children merely had to switch on their computers to be at the mercy of a vast army of predatory paedophiles.

Irish Times columnist Kevin Myers argued that the "abduction of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman should finally confirm that we have arrived in a cyberworld of evil we do not let children near farm machinery, or plutonium, or live electricity: so why allow them to wander unaccompanied around that vast cyber-concourse of pornographers and child abusers?"

When police investigators in Cambridgeshire ruled out an internet connection, and two local residents known to the girls were arrested on suspicion of their murder, the dire warnings changed to "you cannot trust anybody, not your neighbours, not your friends, not even your family".

"Is any child safe?" screamed the front page of the Daily Express the other day. "Save our kids" ran the headline in the Irish Sun, which quoted the Director of Psychology at St Vincent's Hospital, Dublin, Dr Marie Murray, as arguing that in order to protect our children in future, adults should stop asking kids for directions on the road; parents shouldn't insist children kiss or hug adult visitors; the tradition of the bob-a-job for kids out of school should end; children should not necessarily be encouraged to be polite to strangers; and a child's habit of "telling tales" should not be frowned upon.

A spokesperson for the RSPCC told Sky News that parents should be suspicious of "anybody" who bought sweets or other gifts for their children.

The dangers inherent in all of this are far greater than the minimal risks our children face from abductors and paedophiles. We run the risk of suffocating our children, stunting their development as rounded individuals and bringing them up to be frightened and permanently mistrustful of the world around them.

Ultimately, we have no choice but to rely upon each other as adults to ensure children's safety. We cannot keep children under lock and key 24 hours a day. If they do stray and get lost or into difficulty, we rely upon strangers to help.

But if we poison human relationships by creating a climate where we are all constantly looking over shoulders with suspicion at one another, it will lead to a situation where people are reluctant to intervene even to help a child in need, for fear of their intentions being misinterpreted.

Thus, we will have eroded the quality of human relations while doing nothing to enhance the safety of children.