20

A commonly taught adage is to never accept a ride from a stranger. This applies mostly to children and goes hand in hand with warnings about accepting gifts from strangers.

Now, having grown older, I cannot think of anyone amongst my friends, associates or acquaintances that would ever willing harm a child by giving them a lift and stealing them away. Is riding with strangers truly unsafe for children?

To help define the question: How many child kidnappings (or other crimes) began by the child accepting a ride from a stranger? How does this compare to other kidnappings or other sources of danger for children?

The bonus question here involves hitchhiking, which is essentially the same thing but over long distances and usually by people much older.

MrHen
  • 6,113
  • 37
  • 59
  • 24
    You might suffer from sample bias here. First, the people who wouldn't harm a child by giving them a lift aren't the people who hang around with their car near an elementary school in the first place. Second, many cases of child abduction/abuse are done by people you would never expect it from. – Lagerbaer May 26 '11 at 18:31
  • 1
    @Lagerbaer: I don't disagree. But that thought prompted the question and I thought, "Hey, I know some people who could help answer this." – MrHen May 26 '11 at 18:39
  • @Lagerbaer the elementary school closest to where I live shares its parking lot with a housing area and a supermarket. People hang out there all the time :) – jwenting Mar 14 '12 at 06:26
  • Your question title and text doesn't match, IMHO. You seem to ask more like "Are child-kidnapping strangers a real/big thread", i.e. ask for the probability that this will happen, but the current title ask if riding with strangers is unsafe per-so, i.e. would something happen if a child accepts a ride by a stranger. Both are different things. Simply because this kind of kidnappings don't happen often it doesn't make it safer to enter the starting scenario of one. Your Q is good but the title makes it sound that "No, riding with strangers is safe" would be a possible answer, which is absurd. – Martin Scharrer Mar 14 '12 at 08:58
  • @MartinScharrer: The title is worded that way because this is the phrase that parents and adults use to tell kids not to accept rides from strangers. I would be perfectly accepting of an answer that said, "Riding with strangers is safe." Why would it be absurd? – MrHen Mar 15 '12 at 10:32
  • 2
    @MrHen: The idea that riding with strangers is safe(r) because most other kidnappings are occurring with a higher frequency is absurd. Both your question and the accepting answer are going into this direction. It's like saying eating unknown mushrooms from the woods is safe(r) because most of the death by poison is due to food poisoning from bought but went-bad food. The fact that other things happen more often doesn't make the less frequent things less dangerous if they happen. I get your idea:you want to know if car kidnappings are a real high risk or not, but that's not how the Q is phrased – Martin Scharrer Mar 15 '12 at 10:43
  • @MartinScharrer: The problem is in trying to find an answerable form of the question. It seems reasonable to expect the data on how many kidnappings occurred from entering a stranger's car. It doesn't seem reasonable to be able to contrast that against how many times kids enter strangers' cars. I would be most happy with that comparison; but Skeptics.SE doesn't actually do well with questions like that. My experience here has taught me to ask the question as formed. In other words, I agree with you but the appropriate form of the question is unsuitably difficult to answer. – MrHen Mar 16 '12 at 00:48
  • 2
    All these years after this question was asked, riding with strangers has become more common: it's called getting an Uber/Lyft. [Neither company](https://www.ridester.com/lyft-uber-minor-policy/) allows minors to ride unaccompanied, but that doesn't stop some people from trying. – Laurel Jun 10 '19 at 21:20

2 Answers2

22

Here is a link that puts child kidnappings and disappearances in context. The figures are for Canada.

The first thing to notice is that of the 60,000 or so missing children in a typical year, there are about 100 times as many runaways as there are kidnappings. Of those kidnappings, 80-90% are parental abductions. The number of kidnappings by someone other than a parent (not necessarily a stranger) are around the 30-60 range per year. Essentially that means your likelihood of having a child kidnapped by a non-parent is about the same as winning a million dollars on the lottery.

Here is an exceptionally detailed study of kidnappings in Canada.

Laurel
  • 30,040
  • 9
  • 132
  • 118
DJClayworth
  • 57,419
  • 26
  • 209
  • 195
  • 11
    Kidnapping is not the only risk. Mugging/robbery is much more common. Assualt, rape, or murder are also to be considered. Not to mention what do you do if they do not go where they are saying and drop you off somewhere you do not want to be or know where you are? – Chad May 26 '11 at 21:06
  • 3
    Given that the question specifically mentioned children I assumed kidnapping was the main cause of concern (murder would be included in the figures and study above, since the child would be considered missing before it was known they were dead - unless the murderer dumped the body in a well-frequented place). – DJClayworth May 26 '11 at 21:27
  • 12
    It's worth noting how rigorously children are taught not to get into cars with strangers. If we lived in a society where this was not such a pervading teaching, then there may be considerably more car abductions. These statistics don't suggest that getting into a car with an adult is safe (like the OP was asking about). Rather, they may suggest that hardly any children will actually get into a car with an adult. – Casey Patton May 27 '11 at 08:54
  • 1
    I'm Canadian, and when I was in my elementary school years I had a number of experiences that I knew better than to get into (thanks to my parents telling me not to go with strangers) -- one was a guy in a car offering me $20 (or $50) for no apparent reason, another was a couple of teenagers asking me to enter a house they claimed was theirs to get something for them, a few times people tried to recruit me into what I knew to be local gangs, etc. This crap really does happen to kids, and I strongly believe that children with the right information can avoid a lot of problems on their own. – Randolf Richardson Jun 30 '11 at 04:03
  • 1
    You (or the OP) seem to misunderstand statistics. Just because most of the kidnapping are not car related etc., it doesn't mean it's actually getting saver to ride with strangers. It is an answer to "Does this really happen often?" but not "It is safe?". Imagine all other kidnappings would be rise 10x then the *percentage* of "stranger kidnappings" would be 10x smaller, but this doesn't make it any safer! – Martin Scharrer Mar 13 '12 at 10:59
  • @MartinScharrer 30-60 a year for all of Canada makes for pretty safe. It may well be safer for example than having the child walk home or remain standing there waiting for a parent or school bus (don't have statistics on that, just an example). If you want total, absolute, safety, you need to lock that kid in a padded room and even then things could happen (like a meteor strike, food poisoning, etc) – jwenting Mar 14 '12 at 06:29
  • 1
    @jwenting: My point is: If a stranger ask a child to come into his car its mostly unsafe! The fact that other things simply happen more often makes this not more safe in any way. So IF IT HAPPENS it is highly unsafe, it simply doesn't happen often. You would need the number of strangers which picked up children the number of these which lead to a crime. Then you would have a good indication. Not some "What happens more often". Like I meant earlier, the OP seems to actually ask a different question than written in the title. His question is more like "Does this happens often" not "Is it safe". – Martin Scharrer Mar 14 '12 at 08:52
  • 6
    I don't say children should hop in a stranger's car, but don't assume it's necessarily with nefarious purposes that someone offers a child a ride. The adult could see the child in what he considers an unsafe situation and try to help (and that's me saying, a registered paranoid person). Or would you rather see a child standing alone in the dark on the side of a road, waiting for a parent who's already late and getting later by the minute, maybe has had an accident and can't come at all? – jwenting Mar 14 '12 at 09:21
  • 3
    @MartinScharrer "If a stranger ask a child to come into his car its mostly unsafe!" You absolutely have no evidence to back that up. The questions "Does this happens often" and "Is it safe" are ALWAYS related. Is it safe to ride the bus, or walk down the street? Your answer would seem to be "no", because people have been harmed doing those things. But most people's answer is "yes" because those incidents are very rare. – DJClayworth Mar 14 '12 at 13:13
  • 1
    I think there are two very different scenarios getting lumped here: When a child is in trouble many passersby would offer them a ride to get them out of the bad situation. The odds are very high they're safe. If a child isn't in trouble why would they be offered a ride, though? Likely because the offerer has ulterior motives. – Loren Pechtel Jun 11 '19 at 04:25
  • 1
    @LorenPechtel I'd look dreamily at things like Porsches and Lamborghinis as a child. If the owner'd seen me he might well have offered to take me around the block for a few minutes just for the experience. No ulterior motive, just someone being nice. – jwenting Jun 11 '19 at 11:11
  • 1
    I'd think this misses a more serious risk than abduction, and that's getting hurt in a traffic accident. If you don't know the driver, you can't know if they drive safely and responsibly, after all. – jwenting Jun 11 '19 at 11:12
  • 1
    Strange logic here (in the question and this answer). If the question was "Is wrestling alligators safe?", and the answer showed that injuries from people are 100 times more common than those from animals, and 80-90% of injuries from animals are from a family pet, and maulings by alligators are vanishingly rare, does that mean it's safe to wrestle alligators? To be meaningful, incidence of feared outcome needs to be proportional to incidence of risk situation - the (low??) frequency of adults approaching children they don't know in a non-emergency and talking them into a lift in their vehicle. – user56reinstatemonica8 Jun 16 '19 at 21:04
4

Mostly it is going to depend on how safe of a driver the person is. Because most people are generally good and unless you provoke them excessively are not going to harm you. But some people are just bad drivers and I would wager that the odds are more in favor of being harmed in an accident caused by their bad driving than any ill intent.

This link shows over 2.2 million accidents with injuries in the US in 2009. (Note 2009 is not abnormally high). There were about 500000 missing people reported in 2002 that were not family abductions. This number includes people who have runaway or just gone missing. But assuming that even 50% of these are stranger abductions there is still a greater risk of being hurt in a car accident than of being abducted.

Acquaintance kidnapping involves a “comparatively high percentage of juvenile perpetrators, has the largest percentage of female and teenage victim, is more often associated with other crimes (especially sexual and physical assault), occurs at homes and residences and has the highest percentage of injured victims.”

Stranger kidnapping “victimizes more females than males, occurs primarily at outdoor locations, victimizes both teenagers and school-age children, is associated with sexual assaults in the case of girl victims and robberies in the case of boy victims, and is the type of kidnapping most likely to involve the use of a firearm.”

(source: Code Amber News)

Laurel
  • 30,040
  • 9
  • 132
  • 118
Chad
  • 9,099
  • 6
  • 49
  • 96
  • 10
    Interesting point about bad driving. That would be a fun one to pull out at a PTA: "Did you know that if your child accepts a ride from a stranger, they are more likely to be injured in a subsequent car crash than get kidnapped?" – MrHen May 26 '11 at 21:05
  • 6
    While providing interesting input to the question at hand, your answer is not properly referenced as required for this site. – Lagerbaer May 26 '11 at 21:07
  • 4
    Driving fatalities vastly outweigh the number of non-parental kidnappings given by the other answer http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0908129.html. Lagerbaer's sample bias argument should also be taken into consideration, but considering DJClayworth's statistics in conjunction, I agree with Chad that unsafe driving is certainly the largest risk at least in the most likely situations where a ride from a stranger would be offered or requested. – Dan Brumleve May 27 '11 at 03:55
  • 1
    It seems that I compared apples and oranges! The point is still valid because there are orders of magnitude involved. – Dan Brumleve May 27 '11 at 07:04
  • Wearing the wrong colours at night definitely can be a factor, but in my experience body language plays a much stronger role. Are you walking like a victim, or with confidence? Are you paying enough attention to what's going on in the local area, and can you be astute enough to realize when something's out of place (it may be very subtle)? – Randolf Richardson Jun 30 '11 at 04:07
  • Sure pick on my first post here :) – Chad Mar 12 '12 at 12:57
  • 1
    Selection bias kicks in here. Sure, most people will not harm a child. But those people will also not offer rides to random children. The question is whether most people *who offer rides to children* are going to harm them. – DJClayworth Jun 12 '19 at 16:44
  • But to put facts on this, [the number of children who are classed as missing because of an accident is about the same as the number kidnapped by non-parents](https://web.archive.org/web/20120308232351/https://www.cbc.ca/news/background/missingchildren) i.e. very low. The number who run away is hundreds of times higher. – DJClayworth Jun 12 '19 at 16:48
  • Almost all of the non-family-abduction missing persons cases are runaways, not stranger abductions. – Mark Jun 14 '19 at 02:24
  • "... people are generally good", sure, but also, people generally don't approach children they don't know and ask them to get into their car. What matters is, the % of the small number who *do* who have bad intentions. – user56reinstatemonica8 Jun 18 '19 at 17:18