‘Stranger Danger’ Viral Video Promotes Awareness And Fear Mongering In Equal Parts

stranger dangerA Youtube video showing a stranger walking up to kids at the playground and luring them away in seconds is making parents clutch their pearls this week, especially since the mothers of these children claim they had spoken to their kids about stranger danger before.

Youtuber Joey Salads, typically known for his prank videos, changed it up this week with a video he calls “Child Abduction (Social Experiment)”. In the video Salads approaches three separate mothers on the playground and asks them if they think their child would leave with a stranger. In each instance, the parent claims their child knows better, and then Salads walks over to the child with a fluffy white dog and within seconds takes the child by the hand and off the playground under the pretense of going to see more puppies. Here’s the video:[youtube_iframe id=”gGIDHrYKJ2s”]

Before you lock the door and start looking up ways to permanently attach your children to your hips on Pinterest, consider that there’s a lot this video doesn’t show. While all three children in the video go off with Salads and the puppy, the video doesn’t state how many children he approached were unwilling to leave with him. It’s also possible that these children saw their mothers talking to Salads before he approached them, and that may have skewed their perception of him as a non stranger. And with the current helicopter parenting culture, the odds of your child being alone in a park and abducted by a stranger are slim, as you’ll likely be there supervising.

Salads states at the end of the video that over 700 children are abducted each day, a number that’s actually low. FBI statistics for missing children in 2014 indicate a total of 466,949. But its critical to note that the vast majority of children’s kidnappings are carried out by a family member of someone who knows the child. Abductions by a stranger are rare, in 1999, reported as approximately 115 nationwide.

That being said, even one child abduction is too many, so if this video motivates more parents to talk to their children about stranger danger it’s all to the good. But your child is far more likely to get hurt on the playground than abducted.

(image: /Shutterstock.com)

Similar Posts