“Just walking down a busy city street can be like running the gauntlet for a child. There are bullies of all ages and races: there are maniacs on the road, driving at 60 mph along high streets. Worst of all, there are the sadistic, the insane, and the perverted.”
Quote: Walter Ellis, The Times, 1 August 1995.
Photograph: Deniz Arzuk, London, 2019.
After the murder of James Bulger in 1993, and the Merseyside killings of three children in 1994, there was a visible and tangible panic in newspapers. Journalists warned parents about the “predators about, ready to molest and kill” and called for extended caution to protect children from the dangers outside their homes. Several studies observe how this kind of panic reporting elevated parents’ anxieties, and others point that actual statistics didn’t support the perception of stanger danger. Although real numbers did not necessarily indicate that the danger was as great as parents perceived it to be, parents’ fear was.
However, almost simultaneous to the wave of moral panic about dangers, there came a second, and almost as strong a wave of moral panic about overprotection. “Today’s pre-pubescents possess some of the most sophisticated skills as consumers in the country. But they have less personal freedom than any previous generation – trapped at home by their parents’ fear of violence on the streets and in the playgrounds.” wrote Linda Grant for the Guardian. According to the newspapers, parents’ protectionism went a step too far, and this time, they were blamed for doing what they had until then been advised to do.
This second wave was supported by a series of surveys that studied parents’ responses to danger (Barnardo’s, Kidscape). One of the most cited of those was the PSI children’s independent mobility study, which was a follow up of a 1971 dated survey, and found that children’s mobility had significantly decreased over the past two decades. Although the 1990 survey predated the moral panic in the media over stranger-danger, it was often cited to illustrate how parents overreacted to the news, and overprotected their children at the cost of limiting their development as independent individuals.
It should be noted that both moral panics used the same top down approach and commanding language to instruct parents what they should be doing. However, the twin moral panics about children’s mobility burdened parents to resolve to a dilemma beyond their reach. They were expected to regulate to their own responses to the panic fuelled by news, and control their worries without any specific improvement of the circumstances.
Quoted news:
Linda Grant. “Children of the eighties.” The Guardian, 6 January 1996.
Walter Ellis. “The death of childhood.” The Times, 1 August 1995.
More on parental anxieties, children’s mobility, and the media:
Frank Furedi. Paranoid Parenting. London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 2001.
James Morrison. Familiar Strangers, Juvenile Panic and the British Press: The Decline of Social Trust. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
Surveys and reports:
Kidscape. How Safe Are Our Children? Kidscape: London, 1993.
Jennie Lindon. Too Safe for Their Own Good? London: National Early Years Network, 1999.
Di McNeish and Helen Roberts. Playing It Safe: Today’s Children At Play. Ilford: Barnardo’s, 1995.
Mayer Hillman, John Adams, and John Whitelegg. One False Move: A Study of Children’s Independent Mobility. London: Policy Studies Institute Publishing, 1990.
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