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News Crime

Reports of mayhem, fear distort reality: Crime on the decline

Are you afraid?

Afraid of crime sprees, murderers, sexual offenders living down the street, home invasions, traffic homicides, child molesters, sex in school and violence in schools?

These are dangerous times.

Anyone who doesn't arm himself is a fool about to be a victim.

It all is part of the truest lie ever told.

The media have turned the news into a pulp-fiction novel populated with the wildest assortment of crimes, criminals and characters you could ever imagine.

It all is true because what we report did occur to some degree.

It also is all a lie because it greatly distorts reality as a whole.

The world is becoming a safer place on the street but a more dangerous one in our minds.

Consider these numbers compiled by the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire:

From 1992 to 2009, the rate of sexual abuse of minors declined 61 percent nationally. It declined 81 percent in Florida. Physical abuse of children was down 75 percent. Child neglect was down 57 percent.

This trend also is found in federal reports.

One of the great bogeymen haunting our waking moments is the online pedophile trolling for kids.

But a national study done for 49 state attorneys general in December 2008 said the fear is greatly exaggerated. It reported that sites like Facebook "do not appear to increase the overall risk of solicitation" of children.

The study noted that most children who engaged adults online were post-pubescent minors, often from broken backgrounds, who knew what they were doing.

Normal, healthy kids avoided these predators.

This was highlighted in a PBS documentary that noted: "Most importantly, all the kids we met, without exception, told us the same thing: They would never dream of meeting someone in person they'd met online."

Give kids some credit.

They certainly are doing better than the last generation.

After falling for years, the teen-pregnancy rate hit an all-time low in 2009, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. It was the smallest number of teen births since 1946. This includes teens from all racial and ethnic groups.

Compared to kids in 1991, kids in 2009 were more likely to wear seat belts, less likely to have sex, more likely to wear a condom if they did, less likely to have sex with multiple partners, less likely to get in a car with a drinking driver, less likely to carry a weapon, less likely to smoke a cigarette, less likely to take a drink and less likely to attempt suicide. This comes from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Don't get me started on the kids from 1969.

So many kids are going to college now that we are seeing stories that ask: Are too many kids going to college?

For all these people who email me about how much harder school was back in their day, let me ask this: Did you start algebra in elementary school? Because kids are doing it now.

As for how much safer things were back in their day, Florida's crime rate hit a 40-year low in 2010.

You are safer on the road as well.

Traffic fatalities are at their lowest point in 32 years even though we have double the population as we did back then.

We have a lot more than double the media outlets.

A study by Florida State researchers in the 1990s linked fear of crime to time spent watching television news.

"Seeing local television news seven or more times a week is a fear trigger,'' said FSU criminologist Dr. Ted Chiricos. "People who watch with that kind of frequency are twice as fearful as those who don't watch local news at all."

News sites on the Web now are piling on, fiercely competing for clicks with sex, crime and mayhem.

You'd think we were living in the days of Mad Max, or even worse, in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Thank God that parents didn't have cable and the Internet back then. They never would have survived. or 407-420-5525

Copyright © 2014, Orlando Sentinel
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