I know a mother who holds her 5-year-old son in front of the television whenever a program about missing children comes on and says: 'You watch this. Don't you ever leave my side.' She is not alone in her terror of strangers. Indeed, a 1987 Roper poll found that 76 percent of children feared being kidnapped; it was their number one concern. In 'Parents' Worries About Children Compared to Actual Risks,' several Mayo Clinic pediatricians reported in Clinical Pediatrics (Vol. 30, No. 9, 1991) that 72 percent of parents feared that their child would be kidnapped by a stranger.

Public perception, fueled by highly publicized cases such as that of Polly Klaas, 'America's child,' snatched from her Northern California home last year by a bearded stranger, overshadows the fact that the number of stranger abductions -- 3,500 to 4,000 annually out of 64 million children in the United States -- has remained stable for the past decade, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. A child is far more likely to be abused or abducted by a neighbor, family member, or friend. Though one child abducted is one too many, fear of strangers is vastly disproportionate to the reality.

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...children are doomed to a life of self-imposed isolation, their 'community' little more than the treacherous space between destinations, bogeymen lurking behind every bush.

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It's difficult to keep this in perspective when the anonymous bogeyman is everywhere -- in articles such as 'What to Do When a Stranger Says Hello' in Family Life (Sept./Oct. 1994), for example. In a sidebar 'Note to Parents,' Lenore Wright reminds parents that 'children do not need to be afraid, they need to be careful and to be prepared,' but the headline communicates louder than her reassurances. Just when we start to calm down and get our bearings in fact, another headline hooks us with fear. The stranger abduction exception begins to seem like the rule.

But young children create images from the threads of stereotypes presented by television, family, and community. In a 1987 HBO television special entitled 'How to Raise a Street Smart Child,' children illustrated their concrete understanding of the world when they were asked to provide definitions of stranger. 'Big?.?.?. bigger than you, bigger than most people,' said one child. 'A stranger sometimes wears a hat?.?.?. sometimes a black or brown jacket and is a guy with a beard?.?.?. some hair and a mustache and some glasses,' said another. Still another described the stranger as 'a punk rocker that drinks beer all day and sits around in a vacant lot.'