US living in fear over 'summer of child abductions'

It is turning into the summer of child abductions in America. Ten days ago, the headlines were dominated by the ghastly tale of Samantha Runnion, a five-year-old from Orange County, California, who was lured away by a man claiming to be looking for a lost puppy. Her body, showing signs of sexual assault and asphyxiation, was found on a lonely road near a mountain lake.

Last week, it was the turn of seven-year-old Erica Platt from Philadelphia, who was considerably luckier. Less than 24 hours after she was grabbed on the street outside her house, she managed to escape from her two abductors by gnawing through the masking tape holding her wrists and ankles and squeezing through a window.

Then, over the weekend, came a new tale of horror: six-year-old Casey Williamson was snatched from her home in St Louis and found dead at an abandoned glass factory.

Such stories have rocked the country and induced an almost psychotic state of worry. If girls can be snatched on the street outside their respectable middle-class houses, or – as in a couple of recent cases – seized at gunpoint in their own bedrooms, whose child can be said to be truly safe?

At parks, playgrounds and beaches, parents can be seen eyeing their offspring with palpable nervousness. Mothers scold their children with unusual vehemence if they so much as dip out of view. Others worry about the vulnerability of their homes, even in safe areas.

Fear, though, is one thing, and actual risk quite another. Just about every body responsible for the well-being of children notes that abductions by strangers remain extremely rare – about 100 a year, out of a total 59 million children in America. The number has fallen steadily from a peak of 200-300 cases a year during the 1980s. This year, for all the sensational media coverage, the figure is lower than usual.

"The odds of a child being abducted by a stranger are less than 1 in 200,000. The chance of almost any other harmful occurrence is higher," said a circular distributed last week by Bright Horizons, a national chain of pre-schools. "We want our children to learn sensible precautions without scaring them to death with a view of the world based on our fear and horror of the moment," it said.

The intense media focus began in February when Danielle Van Dam, aged seven, vanished from her bedroom in suburban San Diego. Her naked body was found 26 days later beneath a tree on a mountain road, and a neighbour was arrested and put on trial.

The Samantha Runnion case seems to have had a particular resonance, not least because she was a popular and good-looking girl.

In some ways, the media coverage has been beneficial. A suspect in Samantha's case was identified and arrested with lightning speed. Sheriff Carona called the public the modern equivalent of a posse from the Old West.

But the media has also skewed the issue and played a primary role in unnerving the public. The National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children has tried in vain to draw public attention to recent cases in which the victims were not picture-perfect suburbanites but poor Hispanic or black kids. Their cases are just as deserving of sympathy but in a country with many issues of race and class still to resolve, they are not deemed good television.