Stranger Danger
when it comes to avoiding weirdos, are you smarter than a 5th grader?
2007-10-03
By Eric Easter

In my East Coast all boys high school there was a known pedophile among the football coaches. His predilections were acknowledged openly by the victims’ brothers, several of whom also attended the school. All of us on the sports teams he coached knew it, as did the students in the academic classes he taught.

I’ve talked to many of my former classmates about this over the years and one troubling similarity comes out -  none of us ever said anything. Not to the principal. Not to our parents. At that point, most of us had long ceased communicating trouble – or anything else for that matter – at home. Not to mention that the guy was the coach and the one teacher you had to pass to graduate. We didn’t want to cross him in fear of not getting into college.

Stories like that happen to hundreds, maybe thousands of people each day. Both the weirdness and the silence. People around us exhibit bizarre, sociopathic, dangerous and otherwise anti-social behavior and we take much of it in stride, as long as they don’t get too close to us personally. The people become the subject of jokes, rumor and happy hour talk, but too rarely police reports.

In the best cases, those people go away to bother someone else. In the worst cases, we have Columbine, Virginia Tech, postal rages and the hundreds of cases of missing adults that have become the lifeblood of the 24-hour news networks.

What is perhaps most striking is the dramatic difference between our lackluster response as high school students versus what it certainly would have been had we been in kindergarten. At a mall in Washington DC I once saw a three-year-old girl who was separated from her mother. As adults gathered to help her and ask her name, she yelled at the top of the lungs, “Stay back! You’re not my Mommy!” Good for her. Her screaming and the scene she caused was much more effective than any random search effort for her mother.

With the help of media, we have now institutionalized the system of child protection. What parents don’t teach, schools reinforce, and a whole new market of stranger danger videos drill in with emphasis. The irony here, of course, is that according to the Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the vast majority of children who are kidnapped are actually abducted by family members or people known to the family, not complete strangers. Still, the end justifies the means.

But after a certain age, generally around 13, we begin to abandon the natural parental instinct to instill fear in our children of other people, and start re-prioritizing danger from the people they meet to the things they do – driving, skateboarding, drinking, freak dancing. At that point, we treat our children’s dealings with people as part of the socialization process. When faced with troubled personal relationships, we too often offer advice on how to get along, and not how to screen, avoid and emphatically end those relationships.

By late high school and certainly by college, the die is cast. We let our loved ones go with a “be careful” and a silent prayer. The screening of friends ceases and an illogical trust in common sense prevails.

But we give adults, others and ourselves, far too much credit for good judgment when it comes to people. Beyond rapes, muggings, murders and attacks (where no one can be blamed but the criminal no matter what the previous relationship), there are infinitely more circumstances where the caution instilled in us as children should apply.

From toxic love relationships to the harassing co-worker, internet scams and the cousin we let in the house even after he stole his mother’s TV, grown folk who should know better let people into and around our lives who have no business being there.
It defies logic. Knowing what we know about people by say, age 21, we all should be more cautious as we get older, not less.

I can’t say I have a solution, but like the girl in the mall, we all need to start screaming a little louder when we see trouble ahead, especially when it’s wrapped in false friendship. We also need to start being more aggressive in teaching our loved ones (and ourselves) how to screen and edit the people who are closest to them, not just the strangers.

Eric Easter is Chief of Digital Strategy for Johnson Publishing Company. He writes about politics, culture and technology for ebonyjet.com.