Why walking is more dangerous than flying, and some reflections on the sanctimony of ostentatious fear
"BUT THE CHILDREN!?!?"
This is not child endangerment.
In the video, a father leaves his stroller-bound child at a mall table for three minutes, presumably to claim a table at the lunch court and avoid the inconvenience of handling three things at once. An officious bystander berates the father on camera for endangering his child, indignantly asking, “You understand someone could have just walked away with your kid? Unacceptable! Not my kid, but unacceptable!”
The Reddit consensus about this video appears to be that although the cameraman was obnoxiously holier-than-thou in the way he chose to deliver this lesson, the lesson itself was sorely needed:
10.1k upvotes: Seems like a great time to sit down and educate a new father calmly and rationally…
-Concerned Redditor 1
5.9k upvotes: I get it, but I think it's really shitty to record this guy and put him on blast. I wish people would realize the long term value of a private conversation... He could have taught that young man a legitimate life lesson, instead of doing all this sanctimonious nonsense for social media clout.
-Concerned Redditor 2
What lesson is that? The legitimate life lesson that your child is unsafe if left unattended for a brief moment in a mall?
The base rate of child abductions in the US is incredibly low.
The federal government estimated about 50,000 people reported missing in 2001 who were younger than 18. Only about 100 cases per year can be classified as abductions by strangers.
If you follow the source, you will find that only 34 of these child abductions every year are of children under the age of 10. If we narrowed the stats down to just stroller-carried ages, we’d most likely be talking about between 0-10 abductions annually in a country with 23.4 million children below the age of 5.
Over 99% of child abductions are by a family member in the aftermath of an unfavorable custody arrangement.
In a mall, in public, in the richest and safest part of one of the richest and safest countries in the world, surrounded by security officers, with a father who probably maintained a line of sight with his child for some amount of those 3 minutes, and other concerned strangers present, the objective probability of the child being taken is less than it dying by lightning strike or by a motor vehicle accident on the way to the mall.
He may as well have berated a random stranger for letting their child travel in a car, or for failing to wear his running shoes in the event that he would have to catch a kidnapper. One may protest, “children are priceless, what is our convenience when compared with a child’s life?” Tell me, do you wear your running shoes every day, the better to overtake a possible kidnapper?
This is an example of the availability bias in action, where we assume the likelihood of something is equivalent to how easy it is to think of vivid examples. It’s the same fallacies that underlies the fact that fear of plane travel, the safest form of travel that exists (safer even than pedestrian travel, AKA “walking” for my non-intellectuals) is significantly more common than the fear of driving.
My friend expressed doubt that plane travel is safer than walking in the United States, so here’s the statistical evidence:
Since 1997, the number of fatal air accidents has been no more than 1 for every 2,000,000,000 person-miles flown (e.g., 100 people flying a plane for 1,000 miles (1,600 km) counts as 100,000 person-miles, making it comparable with methods of transportation with different numbers of passengers, such as one person ...
That is, there have been only 2 fatal accidents in the last 10 years of commercial aviation in the United States, killing a grand total of 2 people.
By comparison, according to the CDC:
More than 7,000 pedestrians were killed on our nation's roads in crashes involving a motor vehicle in 2020. That's about one death every 75 minutes.
Sweden is at least an existence proof that it’s possible to leave one’s children outside, stroller-bound, without incident. Presumably we could just condition the probability on whatever the rate of the relevant types of crimes is for the mall the man was, compare that to the relative to the probability of child abductions in Sweden, and come away with a figure.
(I get that there are national differences in rates of crime; my point is that the rate of crime in a mall court area is probably considerably lower than the national crime rate in Sweden, even if we’re talking about an America mall, but who am I kidding? With all this apologia, I must be some kind of child murderer.)