Teaching Fear

This week in North Philly Notes, Nicole Rader, author of Teaching Fear explains how parents’ fear of crime influences how they (think they) protect their children.

Parents who watch the news regularly see images of kidnapping and homicide victims and hear about school and mass shootings. Most recently, parents were bombarded with images of four young college students at the University of Idaho who were brutally murdered while sleeping.  These horrific and fear-producing crimes make parents think twice about sending their children to school, activities outside the home, or anywhere. Parents teach kids how to protect themselves from crime when they are away from home and provide a variety of lessons about stranger danger. Studies have found that up to 70% of parents are afraid of crime for their children. A recent Gallup poll study found that one in three parents recently said that they were worried about their children being a victim of a school shooting. Fear of crime is high on the list of things parents worry about for their children.

Parents may be surprised to hear that most of their fears for their children are based on myths passed down from generation to generation and reinforced by the media. These myths emphasize a fear of strangers, a fear for young, white girls, and a belief that if one tries hard enough, victimization can be prevented.

Most parents are surprised to learn that strangers rarely hurt children. When children are victimized, they are typically victimized by a family member. 

Parents are also surprised to hear that children are rarely kidnapped, and a known offender typically takes those children who are kidnapped.

Finally, research has found that school shootings are sporadic and that children are actually safer at school than almost anywhere else, including the home.  

In other words, the reality of crimes against children looks quite different from what most parents have been taught to believe about crime and victimization. What this means for parents is that they often worry about the wrong types of crimes, people, and locations of crimes happening to their children. Crime myths, then, fuel fears of strangers, fears of kidnapping, fears of school shootings, and fears of public spaces, but, ultimately, when children are kidnapped or hurt by others, it is almost always a known person in a private location (like a home). 

Parents operating with misinformation make choices on keeping children safe by taking a litany of precautions that will have little payoff in protecting children from crime. Because of fears related to stranger danger, parents avoid public locations, restrict children from being alone outside (even in the front yard), track children on their phones, and expect constant communication with their children when they are unsupervised. This exhaustive list becomes the gold standard for protecting our children. 

What this list does not include are actionable items parents can take to arm their children with accurate knowledge about crime and victimization.  The conversations with children about how to talk to others if someone they know hurts them or how to seek help when they know about friends who are being hurt by loved ones are lacking by most parents. These conversations seem harder to most parents than talking about stranger danger.  

Teaching Fear examines where parents learn crime myths—from socialization agents like parents to school, and the media—and how these agents influence what parents teach their own children. I spent 20 years researching fear of crime and safety precautions, and did a deep dive into other research, public policy, and public opinion on crime to not only outline the problem of how we teach fear to children today, but also provides parents with the tools to “teach fear better.”  

Temple University Press staff picks for Black History Month

This week in North Philly Notes, Temple University Press staff members select their favorite titles for Black History Month

Ann-Marie Anderson, Marketing Director

I was totally captivated by Lucy Maddox’s The Parker Sisters! In 1851, the two free black sisters were kidnapped from a farm in Chester County, Pennsylvania, and sold back into slavery for a full year. Their story reads like a novel with twists and turns at every angle as the true story of the two young sisters unfolds. True freedom was not to be had for many African Americans during that time, and for both the free and fugitive living in border areas like here in Pennsylvania and nearby Maryland, danger lurked everywhere. Slave catchers were a mighty force, getting legal and illegal assistance from both black and white. Through newspaper accounts, diaries, and courtroom documents, Maddox traces the sisters harrowing experiences and provides a glimpse into what life was like in mid-19^th century America.

Gary Kramer, Publicity Manager

I’m a complete sucker for Sandra Bullock and her film The Blind Side. But after reading Matthew Hughey’s The White Savior Film, I can’t look at this (or any other) film about racial uplift the same way again. Hughey’s cogent unpacking of “saviorism” has prompted me to call it out when I write about film, and also to find films that eschew this trope that perpetrates stereotypes about race, class (and even gender). Reading Hughey’s book makes me even more conscientious of racial equality in film. And “The DuVernay Test,” named for African American filmmaker Ava DuVernay (I Will Follow, Selma), was devised to monitor films to ensure “African Americans and other minorities have fully realized lives rather than serve as scenery in white stories.” The current Oscar-nominated film Hidden Figures, which features a trio of female African American mathematicians playing vital roles at NASA, passes the DuVernay test, and despite scenes of saviorism, is decidedly not a White Savior film. These women were real people whose abilities paved their way to success. Incidentally, Hidden Figures also evokes another Temple University Press title, Swimming Against the Tide, by Sandra Hanson, about African American girls and science education, which also demands reader’s attention.

Mary Rose Muccie, Director

Thousands of people come to Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia each year to visit the Liberty Bell, Independence Hall, and the nation’s first White House, known as the President’s House.  There they’ll also see the only memorial to slavery on federal land.  As Roger Aden explains in his book, Upon the Ruins of Liberty: Slavery, the President’s House at Independence National Historical Park, and Public History, the memorial’s location is more than a gesture. When he came from Virginia to live in the President’s House, George Washington brought with him nine African slaves and later found a loophole in Pennsylvania state law that allowed him to avoid granting them their freedom.  The stories of freedom and liberty associated with the events that took place in Philadelphia rarely if ever acknowledged the existence of the slaves present as history was being made, and Aden’s book speaks to the importance of expanding the “history” commemorated at the site and describes the perhaps unexpected issues around doing so.  Its discussion of the sometimes uncomfortable presentation of this piece of our history speaks to many of the threads woven into Black History Month and to the need to change what we’re taught about how the notion of  liberty was applied.

Ryan Mulligan, Editor

We’ve seen sports serve as an intensely visible and symbolic ground to showcase the slow march towards progress that has, in fits and starts, propelled black history. In sports we’ve seen exclusion become segregation, participation met with resistance, success met with fear, and finally and most ironically racial pride become national pride. This last transition is visible in the distance between now and the 1968 Olympics, when Tommie Smith scandalized America by celebrating his gold medal in the 200-meter dash with a raised fist gloved in black as the National Anthem played. That scandal forced spectators to reconcile America’s progress with its work to be done, that if it wanted to take pride in its native son’s achievement, it would also need to hear his protest. This seems to me emblematic not only of a step in black history but also in the telling of black history. Black history, taught and learned well, cannot be restricted to a story white people tell about statuesque historical figures frozen in time but must give a platform for those figures to speak for themselves. That is why I’d like to call attention to Silent Gesture, which Temple published 10 years ago in which Tommie Smith tells his own story and his silent gesture takes on a living voice.

Aaron Javsicas, Editor in Chief

Dan Biddle and Murray Dubin’s Tasting Freedom: Octavius Catto and the Battle for Equality in Civil War America is a masterfully told story about this important figure in both Philadelphia and American history. Catto’s heroic activism and tragic murder at the hands of a racist mob on election day in 1871 foreshadowed the century of civil rights struggle to come. As Philadelphia prepares to unveil a statue memorializing Catto’s life later this spring on the grounds of City Hall, please consider picking up a copy of this engrossing and important biography.