Happy Halloween!

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Good evening, all. October 29, 2021.  A fine Friday night, just 2 days from Halloween.  The past couple of years have certainly had peaks of fear and scare, who needs Halloween? Well, a lot of us do!  

A number of years ago there were news reports of poisoned candy, razor blades or needles embedded in treats, kids getting seriously sick — and some died.  The news media jumped on these incidents and pointed fingers at evil strangers adulterating treats for their own perverse pleasure.  But, as you may know, initial reports are usually highly speculative and often wrong.  Remember, one goal of news media is the “breaking” story, and being the first to report is generally regarded as positive.  Whether the information presented is accurate seems to be beside the point.

Studies of kids admitted to emergency rooms around Halloween have shown these reports greatly exaggerated.  Further investigations often came to different conclusions.  One child who died had gotten into another family member’s heroin, and the rest of the family covered by afterwards sprinkling heroin on candy and blaming strangers.  Another child was poisoned by a parent to collect insurance.  (Who takes out an insurance policy on an elementary school age child?  That’s a red flag right there.)

Now, all these stories are between 20 and 40 years old.  I first looked at this issue probably about 15 years ago.  I thought it time to update my info, so went online.  I checked on Snopes.com, and most of their articles are from  about twenty years ago.  Then I went to PubMed.  If you’re not familiar with PubMed, it’s a database of peer-reviewed research.  I was hoping there were more recent articles, but no there were not.

Seems this issue’s shelf-life was limited.  Which brings up the issue Pumpkinof what’s news-worthy, and what’s in the news cycle reflects more a cultural fear than real trends in events.  Was there a cultural zeitgeist at that time, a sense of worry that one’s social environments were changing, that your neighbors came from different, strange, backgrounds, and the unknown was less certain?  And this is how it got expressed?  A time capsule, so to speak, of social concerns indirectly expressed.  We do discuss mass media and its impacts in our six week Self-Defense 101.

Even though these stories are decades old, they still pop up every year, seems the initial reporting became the real story and subsequent investigations and conclusions didn’t exist.

What is a real danger this coming weekend?  Cars hitting pedestrians.  That rate JUMPS on Halloween night.  More people out on the street, maybe excited and not looking, and drivers not taking extra precautions on streets they routinely use.  

Stay safe, stay aware when trick-or-treating (and driving!), and live life.

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“Superpredators:” Blast from the Past

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Students who have taken my six-week self-defense course for women already know this:  the rate of violence has been in decline for the past couple of decades.

But that was not at all obvious a couple of decades ago.  In fact, the early 1990s saw a spike in youth violence.  Some experts were predicting the worst was yet to come, and felt they needed to deploy hyperbole on what they saw as the inevitable.  The term “superpredator” was coined by political scientist John DiIulio to describe teens who were increasingly violent.  These teens were supposed to unleash chaos upon our fair Gothams.

It never happened.

Almost as if on cue, after these predictions hit the mass media, the crime rate began dropping.  And dropping.  And dropping.  Today’s rates of violence are at record lows.

(if the embedded video is not visible here, go here.)

However, hyperbole won out over fact.  Punitive punishments and harsher penalties for juveniles became the law.  Panicky policy repercussions from that era have lingered a long while.

When you consider your personal safety risks, what do you value?  How do you distinguish the hype from the fact?  Predicting the future will never be easy, but you can do better when you winnow out the alarmist labels and recognize the “dog whistles” for what they are.

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