Stuff You Should Know - Stranger Danger!

Episode Date: July 20, 2021

If you grew up in the 1980s, you thought you had a 50% chance of getting kidnapped every time you left your house. But like with the Satanic Panic and other 80s hysteria, it was much ado about (almost) nothing. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Munga Shatikler and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-Pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too.

Just a Skyline drive on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Chuck Wicks from Love Country, Talk to Chuck, where we bring you what's really happening in the country music family. We also, if you love country, here's the deal, you love country music. You can be on the podcast. So if you're a fan of country music or you can call in any time, you're like, oh, I want to talk about this.

Hall Cogan called in. He's like, Chuck, Zolkster, I love your podcast. Jason Aldeen, Jimmy Allen, Carly Pierce, Lauren Alaina. Welcome to new episodes of Love Country, Talk to Chuck every Monday and Thursday on the Nashville Podcast Network, available on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey, everyone, and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and we're flying solo today, but that's cool because God is our co-pilot. That's a good one. I thought so too, because God has nothing to do with you and me. That kind of, unless he was one of us, or she. Right. William, what a song, what a great song. I can't wait till that comes back in five years.

Who was that? Oh, I think he may have been a one hit wonder, but it was one heck of a one hit. Like, I'm going to say Tori Amos, but it wasn't Tori Amos. No, it definitely wasn't. No, it was like Diane Weist or something like that. Yeah, Tori Amos is too good for that dribble. She was good. I thought that was a pretty good, good little song.

I liked the message. Sure. Just a stranger on the bus. Just a slob like one of us. Right. That wasn't the lyric, was it? Yeah. Just a slob?

Kid you not, my friend. Oh boy. Yeah. Just a slob like all of us. No, that was being insulted when I was grooving out to that song on the dance floor. You couldn't feel her super numerary finger poking you in your chest? I could not. So Chuck, I feel like we should stop this chit chat and get down to it because we're

talking today about something that made up our childhood and I was very dismayed to learn. Still makes up some kids' childhoods, a lot of kids' childhoods still being taught today and that you could conceivably make the case that it eroded at the very fabric of society, a very misguided campaign that came about in the very early 80s that had the very catchy term known as stranger danger. Yeah. It's funny when you look at this and you couple it with everything else, the 80s had a lot of misguided campaigns, didn't they?

Yeah. Just say no. No, they're all over the place, satanic panic. It's really weird. I think it was, I mean, when you look back, it was clearly like, I think there are a lot of factors like the, I think the Reagan era sort of moral majority years conspired to kind of just, they wanted to scare everybody away into everything. Yeah.

Scare you straight, straight into their political ideology. Maybe. Yeah, that's definitely part of it for sure because there is a definite, and this isn't just me riffing here, like I saw this in multiple places with legit sources even, and we'll talk a little bit about legit sources or not, and I think there's some good examples in here of being careful who you listen to, but there does seem to be kind of a general consensus that part of those moral panics in the 80s came from Christian conservatives who very much and to their credit are dedicated to the idea of protecting children from predation

at the hands of adults. Sure. And that that's where a lot of that stuff came from, but that it was really done poorly and probably overblown, and in very short order, it was not the Christian right that was leading in charge anymore, it was everybody. Everybody was involved in this kind of stuff. Yeah, because I think if you were a kid in the 80s, you knew a few things. You knew that if you listened to rock and roll music that you might be possessed by

the devil. If you went outside to go play by yourself, there was a really good chance you might not come home, and that if you traveled to like a New York City, like the big city or someplace, you stand a really good chance of being murdered. Yeah, it was just going to happen statistically speaking. If you went to New York City, you're going to be murdered. Yeah, and none of those things were true, or if you smoke a cigarette, then you're going to end up like a cocaine fiend.

Right, or if you take LSD, your children's genes are going to be all sorts of messed up and you'll be addicted to LSD for the rest of your life and have to take it multiple times a day. Yeah, and you'll have flashbacks for the rest of your life. That's right, that's right. If only. Yeah, for real. Free trip.

But we'll go ahead and start because this editor, Grabb Nowski, the Grabster, helped us with this, and he very logically started out with some statistics. The National Crime Information Center from the FBI, they kind of are good at collecting missing persons, stats, they've been doing that since the Crime Control Act in 1975, and it's like with anything else, when you collect statistics on like missing children, let's say, you also have to clean up that list every year because a lot of kids run away from home. A lot of kids come back home, a lot of kids were never lost to begin with that are reported

missing, that kind of thing, and in 2019, I believe once they added and then subtracted, they added about 609,275 missing persons. That is eye-popping. Yeah, and that's all missing persons, that's not just kids. For that year though, that's not over the course of a century, that's in 2019 alone. Right. So they also purged 607,104, leaving about 2,000 actual missing persons remaining in their system, and about 100 of those were juvenile, and then some of those are kids

who ran away from home more than once, so they're on the list more than once. So if you just look at naked statistics, an actual kidnapping in modern times of a child is really, really rare, and even rarer still to be kidnapped by a stranger. Exactly. So Chuck, I got my trusty old calculator out, and I got a lot of stuff wrong, but I'm going to read what I came up with, okay? Does it say boobless? Right.

Man, you just got me with that. So out of the, let's say 2,000 people who are, 2,000 kids who are abducted every year, that's what I saw in one place, I think from the FBI, 2,000 kids were abducted. That means that out of these 74 million kids in America in 2011, each one technically had a.00027% chance of being abducted, and that's just abducted, okay? So hang with me for one more second. You have a quarter of a millionth of a percent of being abducted, statistically speaking, if you're a child in the US in 2011.

Of that quarter of a millionth of a percent chance, you had an additional two hundredths of a percent chance of being abducted and murdered by a stranger, which is, as anyone will tell you, the money fear of being a parent, and that is what drove it, that there was this irrational fear of the worst case scenario, even though the chances were vanishingly remote. Every single parent in America, starting in the very early 80s, was staying up awake at night. For decades, worried that this was going to happen to their child. Yeah, and you know, we were talking 2019, which is the lowest number since they've been

keeping track. I think that number peaked in the 90s, but even in the 80s, it wasn't a common occurrence. These days with camera doorbells and cell phones and CCTV and house security cameras, obviously, that kind of stuff isn't going to happen as much because it's just harder to get away with it, and you can make a case that in the 80s it was easier and maybe happened a little more for that reason, but it still was founded upon parents' worst fears. And it was never a statistical probability. No, not even remotely.

And there definitely were more kidnappings in general. I think they used to get around a million entries rather than the 700,000 or 600,000 in change. And so that's definitely gone down, and we'll talk about why. And then the recovery rate has actually gone up from the 60th percentile to the 90th percentile. So it definitely has improved, but like you were saying, even at its worst, it was driven by fear, which makes it the definition of a moral panic. Yeah, and driven by the media, Ed has this statistic, 96 percent of newspaper articles

about how to protect kids, focus on threats from strangers, and only about 4 percent talk about abuse within the family, which is far and away the most common threat to a child or people within the family, very sadly. Yeah. I think something like 58,000 kids were abducted by familiar non-family members, like people they already knew, and most of the time they were targeted for sex. So it's not to say like there isn't a big problem with child sexual abuse. Like I think it's even at the time it was a hidden problem, even when everyone was focusing

on it because everyone was focusing on the wrong group, strangers. It's like, no, you're far more likely if you're going to be sexually abused to have been sexually abused by someone you know or even a family member. Yeah. You know, the stranger picking you up, abusing you sexually and then murdering you, it just almost never happened in the United States. Did you happen to sit through the frustrating experience of abducted in plain sight? Was it a...

The documentary? No, I didn't see that one. Don't bother. Well, I kind of like those vintage like PSA films. I mean, it's a remarkable story, but it's on Netflix. It is one of the more frustrating things that you will ever, ever sit through in your life. Do they keep like going further and further back in time to give more and more backstory and context?

No, it's just the story of this one family, but I don't want to give anything away if you want to watch it. Okay, all right, all right, don't. It's just you're going to want to throw your television into the street. Abducted. You're going to be so frustrated. Abducted in plain sight. Yeah.

I mean, I don't know if I can recommend it. You know, it's one of those things that's just like, I'm kind of glad I watched it, but it was just so frustrating. Like listening to the Shaggs album or something. Hey, did you ever see that one after school special where Helen Hunt smokes PCP and jumps out of like the second floor window at her school? That was a great one. Yeah, all time.

So what were you about to start with? Let's take a break. Oh, I think that's very appropriate, man. Yeah, we'll take a break and we'll come back and talk a little bit about the beginnings of the stranger danger era in the late seventies right after this. Hey, everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn?

So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren and Nova Scotia, who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at Airbnb.ca slash host. I'm Mangesh Atikulur and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking.

You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop, but just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down.

Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, Chuck, so this is one of those rare things where you can kind of point to a moment in history where society changed, there was a sea change, and it really happened in May

of 1979 when a little cute, cute little six-year-old boy named Eaton Patz vanished. He was walking for the very first time in his life by himself to the bus stop two blocks away from his family's house in Soho. And by house, I'm sure I mean like a 200 square foot studio apartment. Yeah, nearly. Yeah. So the last day of school before summer, this was his last chance as a six-year-old to walk by himself like a grown-up to the bus stop.

His mom let him do it because it was a hectic morning and she knew he was really wanting to get more independence. He had a dollar in his pocket for a soda, his favorite Eastern Airlines hat on, and he was never seen again. To this day, they have no idea what happened to him really. Yeah, and this was a huge, huge news story, partially as we'll see because it was a little white boy who was very cute and media heavily slanced their news stories toward white people in general, white kids.

Yeah. And like I said, we'll get into that more in a minute. His dad was a professional photographer, so. That definitely helped. There were tons of great photos of Eaton that the news could dig into and put all over the place and they did. And like you said, this is one of those deals that it's the parents' worst nightmare. So when a news story gets run like this, every parent in the country is going to pick up

the phone. These days it would be online, but they would pick up the phone and call their friends and say, did you see what happened? Did you see what happened? Right. Like this is the kind of thing that we're also scared about and it's actually happening. It does happen. Yeah, and there were some other extenuating circumstances too that just made it even worse.

Like this school didn't bother to call to ask about where he was when he didn't show up. I guess they didn't know he was walking by himself the first time ever. And so his parents went the whole day without being aware at all until he didn't come home from school that he had never showed up. There was just a lot going on. For something about it, it just struck everybody in just the right way. It was just heartbreaking.

And it scared parents to death. And that was in May of 1979. And you can fast forward to just over two years later. This time in Hollywood, Florida in 1981, another six-year-old, another cute little white kid named Adam Walsh was abducted from a seer store while his mom shopped like two miles over. He was playing like video games in the store and his mom was doing some shopping, something that parents did all the time back then.

Like it was astounding that he was even in the same store at the mall as her. He could have been anywhere in the mall like at that time. And he was abducted while she was just a few aisles over and then even worse than I think Eaton. And this really kind of cemented like the Eaton Pat's disappearance wasn't a one-off. Like we're dealing with a huge social problem now is that Adam Walsh's poor little head was found floating in a canal about 10 days after he went missing. And that that was it.

I mean, that was it. That didn't just scare parents. That scared everybody. When you heard about it was now scared to death of stranger danger and abductions and being murdered by some rando who picks you up. Yeah. And if you noticed Josh earlier say we don't know what for sure would happen in the Eaton Pat's case.

His body was never found in 2012. There was a man named Pedro Hernandez who was a store clerk that worked in the same neighborhood in New York who confessed to killing him and he was convicted in 2017. But it was a pretty flimsy case and a flimsy confession. And I think generally everyone kind of says it's not case closed. We still don't really know for sure what happened even though there was a confession. Because there was no body that was ever found and I don't think the parents ever felt closure like they deserved.

No, no for sure. And they had already previously zeroed in on another suspect named Jose Ramos who was somebody who had a relationship with one of Eaton's babysitters and who was a pedorast. And I don't know if he ever admitted to it or not but he was never charged but the Pat's has won a civil suit against him that saying he was responsible. So two people have been, one's been convicted and one's been ruled against two different people in the murder of him even though they have nothing to do with one another. Right.

So that brings us to the famous milk carton kids campaign. Not the amazing folk singing duo that I'm a big fan of. Is that the name of a band? Yeah, these two guys, they're great. They sort of a Simon and Garfunkely, Everly Brothers type of thing. But they like play it straight. They might be giants or something. No, I mean the music is played straight but there is a lot of humor in their banter but

they're not like a joke band. Okay, gotcha. Hey. Yeah, it's good stuff. I don't know if they might be giants, could be considered a joke band. Well, no, no, no, I don't mean they're a joke band. Not like Weird Al. Right.

Gotcha. Oh boy, here we go with the emails. Have you ever heard his real polka stuff? It's great. Sure it is. Everybody loves Weird Al. Hey man, back off. His non-parody music is wonderful.

Did you see the documentary, it was not a good documentary at all but it was still really interesting about The Amazing Jonathan. I never saw that. It's very interesting in that it really kind of explores The Amazing Jonathan but the documentary itself is not great. The documentarian even knows it. Part of the documentary is him struggling with figuring out how to do this right. Yeah, there's nothing worse than a great documentary subject being made by a C-grade

documentary filmmaker. I see. There's a chance that this guy is listening right now because he looked at me like a stuff you should know listeners so I'm just going to say, no, no, give it a shot. Well, I'm not saying this was a C-grade filmmaker but I've seen plenty of C-grade documentaries about really great topics. I know. That's all I'm saying.

I know. So, The Milkart and Kids, not the folks in Induo. This began in Iowa and the disappearance of Johnny Gosh in 1982 and Eugene Wade Martin in 1984, both 12-year-olds, both newspaper boys and Des Moines, kind of spurred this campaign. I do love that Ed, dear sweet Ed, when he gave credit to the Anderson, Erickson, Derry in Iowa for starting this in 1984 and he said, the only source I could find was something called, quote, Uncle John's Bathroom Reader in quotes.

Ed, have you ever listened to the podcast before? I could just sense you going like, what, something called Uncle John's Bathroom Reader? What is going on here? It's like I'm in a bizarro world or something. Well, that's good enough for us and I think, I believe it, I think they were probably the first company to put kids on the side of a milk carton to raise awareness and say, hey, here's a picture of this kid, here's what they look like, how tall they are, when their birthday is, you know, some things they might, just like little clues how to identify this

kid if you see him out. Some clues. There's like, they're like, put on your pirate hat because X marks the spot and we're going to go find Johnny Gosh. Here are your clues. Well, I mean, this was, this is the best they could do pre-internet is like, what's always sitting on the table while you're having your breakfast cereal that you're staring at?

Yeah, totally. Is that milk carton? It's a great idea. You know, there's no good carton out of boredom when, you know, there's no good cartoons on or something like that. You just kind of read this stuff. So yeah, it made total sense. And from what I understand, yes, Anderson Erickson was the first dare to do that.

And it also makes sense that they would be the first one because they were in Des Moines and Johnny Gosh and Eugene Martin were both abducted from Des Moines two years apart probably by the same person from what I read. And they, so like this local dairy doing this is like part of a get out the info campaign makes a lot of sense. I did see that a local grocery store chain was actually the first to print their images and missing like info on their bags and that Anderson Erickson probably got the idea or somebody got the idea and went to Anderson Erickson and they said, sure, the upshot of

this, they were the first producers of the milk cartons and a lot of people say, well, it was Eden Patz who was the first kid who was on a milk carton probably on a national level, but on a milk carton ever, it was two kids. It was Johnny Gosh and Eugene Martin and both of them were paper boys abducted from their routes in the early morning. It was just their stories are so sad, man. Yeah, super sad. The milk carton thing picked up again in Chicago and then California.

And then like you said, eventually became a national thing in 1985, the National Child Safety Council, which is a nonprofit. They launched this nationwide campaign and that's where Eden Patz probably comes into play. And then it was on, you know, a lot of stuff. It was on grocery bags and pizza boxes and it wasn't around long though. Like I kind of thought it might still be a thing even, but I think it only lasted, you know, a handful of years and by the nineties, mid nineties, the whole milk carton thing

had kind of gone away, gone away with people saying, you know, it was successful while it lasted, but it just had its run. And then other people, of course, now look back and say, but was it really successful in that did it lead into you finding some of these kids? And I don't necessarily think that is the only measure of success. If it's an awareness campaign, but they definitely can't go back and say, well, yeah, look at this list of kids that were found because of the milk carton campaign. And actually there is, I saw the number three, that there are three named kids who were rescued

and found and returned based on milk cartons, but there's only one actual name I can find. And you can find it all over the place. Her name is little Bonnie Lohman. I added the little, her first name is actually Bonnie, not little. And she has one of the most little Bonnie Lohman, yeah, until you reach, you know, middle age and you're like, oh my God. So she has one of the most amazing stories you could possibly encounter when it comes to kids on milk cartons, don't you think?

Yeah. I mean, she was kidnapped by her mom and stepdad. And as the story goes, recognized her own image on a milk carton and like kept it, you know, cut it out and kept it on her wall. And I guess a kid's or a friend's parents saw it and called the cops. But is that, that's not true though, right? My friend, I would put a significant amount of money on the fact that Bonnie Lohman is not a real person.

It is an internet legend. Is it good that far? Yes, dude. I looked on the New York Times website, I searched for Bonnie Lohman missing milk carton. I even put quotes around Bonnie Lohman, did it on the Washington Post website. I did it on the Denver Post website and Denver is supposedly where she was found living abducted by her mom and stepfather. I mean, nothing comes up, not even a vague reference, she's an internet legend and we

figured it out. We think until someone writes us and says, no, no, no, I knew little Bonnie Lohman. Right. And we'd say the Bonnie Lohman and they say, well, I don't know, actually it was my cousin's friends and co-worker who knew Bonnie Lohman. But no, another giveaway, Chuck, is that the story is repeated almost verbatim around the internet. We don't say where she was abducted from and returned to, the only thing I've seen consistently

is that the story itself and then that it happened in Colorado. And then a lot of the sites that carry this story are like Jesus Daily or BoardGameTips.com, not necessarily the most credible sources for like an actual like child abduction case. So I think we may have rooted that one out. All right. So what's going on here is panic. These milk cartons come out, it's a good campaign, but all that does is sort of reinforced to parents that a stranger is lurking outside your home kind of at all times, just waiting

for your kid to be playing on the playground by themselves for just a minute and then they're going to get snatched. And while this panic is going on, there are people that were sort of ringing the bell for good sense. Way back in the 80s, even the famous pediatrician, Dr. Benjamin Spock, he was quoted in the Washington Post in 85 as saying, children are bombarded by more than photographs. They stand in line at mass fingerprinting sessions and shopping malls and watch cartoon characters on TV reminding them to be wary of strange adults.

There's a little bit more to the quote, but he was kind of saying like, we're going overboard a little bit here and we're actually maybe doing harm by raising children in this culture of fear. Were you fingerprinted as a child? I was never fingerprinted, but I certainly remember everything else. I mean, I forgot about the Saturday morning cartoons. It was stuff all over those too. Yeah, McGruff, remember the crime dog?

Yeah. You teach you how to run away from strangers. And like that's what they would teach you is like, you should scream and yell and kick and run for your life if a stranger ever approached you. Like if they just hit the basic minimum thing, we're like, okay, strangers approaching you run as fast as you can for your little life. And it's definitely easy to buy into the idea that that culture of fear had real repercussions on us growing up because I remember I was scared of all this and my dad took me to get

fingerprinted. Oh, you were? Yeah. I was like, why are we doing this again? He's like, just in case they find you with their head cut off one day, we can identify. I might have been fingerprinted. Something about that really seems familiar to me. Yeah.

And I know I didn't commit a crime. No, no, not a little chuck. Little to this day all bet. No, I've never been arrested. That's good. And you know, I realized later that my dad preemptively ratted me out to the cops. Did he really? Well, yeah, by having me fingerprinted.

Oh, okay, gotcha. But that was the level of like, my dad took me to a fingerprinting fair for little kids so that they had your fingerprints in the system in case something bad happened to you and you turned up, they could identify your body or you even if you'd just been abducted. But you knew what was going on. You knew why you were going there and that definitely did affect me and I think a lot of kids our age. Yeah.

Ed has a, and this is one of those kind of stats that I think is a little dumb, but from the early nineties, there was a study that found that 72% of parents cited abduction as something they worry about. That's just a little weird. I mean, I think every parent that is a deep down worry that it could happen. But it's not like, I don't know, there's just so many qualifiers there, like how much did they worry about it? Sounded like it was one of their chief fears along with like failing their kid, not providing

for their kid, like deep down fears, like a big fear. That's what it sounded like in the abstract I read. I didn't read the whole study, but that's how they dogged it up on me. I guess prominent fear would be the word I'm looking for rather than big fear because it is the biggest fear, but whether or not you think it's a reality that you really should worry about a lot as a different thing. I don't know. I would bet dollars on donuts that they, it was a prominent fear in your definition

for sure. All right. It did do some harm like in actual instances that we can cite in the Boy Scouts, they still teach Stranger Danger, and in 2005 a Cub Scout was lost in the woods and actually evaded rescue for a few days because there were people there trying to help him, like, hey, are you lost little boy, and Stranger Danger would run away. In that case, this kid was trying, people were trying to help him out and he ran away from him.

That's one definite instance. Yeah. In that 1985 Wapo article that you mentioned earlier, it was just rattling off. This is 85. Like right in the middle of all this, it was kind of rare to question this mentality, and they were rattling off all these instances of kids just losing their minds out of fear. They mentioned a girl who got hysterical when it was her time to get off the bus because she lived on a railroad, and she was sure that if she walked alone down this railroad,

she will be kidnapped as just a certainty in her mind. Kids were like, anytime there were parents that said hi to the little kids, they got freaked out. You just couldn't give any attention to little kids or else they would be really scared. There's this aspect of the moral panic as far as Stranger Danger goes, where the dangerous group is not Satanists, it's not witches or something like that. It's strangers, and all of us are strangers to somebody else, so that means that everybody is under suspicion of everyone else at some point in time.

We're a suspicious character to somebody who doesn't know us, and possibly a kid. Then that alters how you act around kids, and that that has had over the years an impact of how adults deal with kids, and it's removed us from that. It takes a village to raise a child kind of community where it's like, that's your kid. I'm not going anywhere near him. I don't even want to look at him because I don't want somebody to think I'm trying to kidnap him or something like that. That has had a real impact on how adults deal with kids, and that is surely having an impact

on how children develop in a community, in society. Yeah. Didn't you find a thing where it said that men, and these days men, are more reticent to help out a child because of that fear? Yeah. Something like 67 or 70% said they would not help a kid who needed help. They would, like some smaller percent, basically most of them said I'd just keep walking because I'd be so worried that people were wondering why I was approaching a little kid, and then

a smaller proportion said that they would go find a woman to help, or maybe the cops or something like that, but they would not step in and fulfill their normal social roles in adult helping a kid in need. That was a UK survey, I think, but that definitely applies over here as well, too. I didn't know it was the UK. You should have told me that. Why? Did the study say 100 men on the way to the pub survey had said, just a little humor there,

trying to lighten the mood? I liked it. It worked. It also made me want a nice draft beer. Oh boy. I went to this great pub in Manchester when we did that show. That was one of my great days in England. It was so awesome.

That place was on a probably a one foot slant that floor. It was so old. That's awesome. I actually found a topist place in Manchester, because remember, we were there for a couple of days, and I ate there probably three or four or five times. It was so good, but I was aware that I was eating at a topist place in Manchester. I finally hit a pub in... No, I did. I hit one in Manchester, too, by the venue.

They're pretty neat little places, aren't they? That's a good time. Yeah. For sure. There's something called the Children's Independent Mobility, and it's a measurement of how free your kid is to move about your neighborhood and to explore things without supervision. Sure, walk down to the playground or walk down to your friend's house, that kind of thing.

A higher CIM is a really good thing that correlates with psychological development, with analytical skills, with motor skills. That gives the kid just more confidence and knowledge about their community and get this. It makes kids more aware of true dangers than if you're constantly watching them. Instead of stranger danger, it makes kids more aware of a real danger that might be out there. They have done studies and figured this out. Right.

We talked a lot about that in our Free Range Children episode. I don't know if we talked specifically about that measure, but we definitely found that, yes, your kid is just more well-rounded and developed if they're allowed to explore the world on their own terms. Within reason, nobody's saying let your kid play with flaming knives or anything like that. Right, like we did. Exactly.

Also known as the swing set, but there's a pendulum that swings between things like that and it has swung way too far in the other way if you guys will just allow me to get up on my soapbox for a second. Please do. I'm done. You're just on it. That was it. I just got one toe up and then came back down.

All right. Well, you're off your soapbox. Let's take our final break. We'll talk a little bit more about the criticism of stranger danger and some of the best practices these days right after this. I'm Mangesh Atkala and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking.

You might not smoke, but you're going to get second hand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop, but just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down.

Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so we mentioned earlier news stories as far as child abductions covering cute little white kids.

And that's kind of always been the case, and that's one of the biggest criticisms of media coverage is it very much disproportionately covers white children in those cases and ignores cases of people of color. There's an organization called Black and Missing because of this, and they report that 37% of missing kids just a few years ago in 2018 were people of color, which is a much higher percentage proportionally than the overall population. But you're not hearing about this stuff in the news like you would if it was the pageant queen.

Right, exactly. And it's just, I mean, the statistic kind of gets it across pretty clearly. Yeah. So what we're not saying is that there is no risk to your kid being abducted by a stranger. It obviously happens because we do see it on the news, and it is every parent's worst nightmare. And I think that's probably why it's always been such a thing is because it's the worst thing you can imagine happening.

Because not only has that happened, and that is horrific in its own right, but that also means that you have failed to do your number one job is to protect your kid at all costs. Right. Yeah, man. I can't. And it's astounding that people can go on from that. They can manage to keep living, you know? I don't get it at all.

But it's one of the things that they do though, and I think one of the things that gives them purpose in life from that point on is a lot of parents, especially some of the early more prominent national cases, like Eden Patz's parents, the Walsh's, Adam Walsh's parents, and Johnny Gosh's parents, they all threw themselves into like lobbying for social reform. And their lobbying efforts did lead to things like the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to be developed, and National Missing Kids Day to start to be recognized on May 25th, which is the anniversary of Eden Patz's disappearance. The Walsh's, I think, set up the Adam Walsh Foundation four days after Adam Walsh's funeral.

And then John Walsh is very famous for doing the whole America's Most Wanted thing, and has legitimately dedicated himself to like stopping this, and so has a lot of other parents. So I think that's one way that they've put their time and effort and energy into this, imported into doing what they can to make it so that other parents don't go through this. Yeah, there have been quite a few of those, the 1994 Jacob Wetterling Act that created the sex offender registry, and interestingly, his mother eventually on a podcast said she expressed regret about these registries that were expanded. She felt like overly expanded and endlessly punitive, basically, in saying like you're

on this list forever, and you're never allowed to reintegrate into society. And is that fair, especially when they've expanded those registries to include things like if you got caught urinating in public, you were a registered sex offender, which is really interesting. I've never been caught, but boy, I've been in public plenty of times. I've got a little bladder, and sometimes I just got to go. But that happens, and apparently, again, especially the one where you're having consensual sex as a teenager, and depending on your state, say you're 17 and the girl's 16, if you're

caught, if the parents prosecute, you may be on the sex offender registry for the rest of your life. And apparently, that happens disproportionately to kids of color. So the whole thing is like the sex offender registry is not in and of itself a bad thing. It's meant to be a tool to warn communities like, hey, there's somebody who has perpetrated, in many cases, a crime against a child, and you should know that they live at this apartment. But it's not just a cut and dried issue. People can be categorized unfairly, get caught up in that dragnet.

The categories can be far too expanded. And then, yeah, like Jacob's mom was saying, there's no redemption there. In fact, there's only in most towns, because you can't live within X number of feet from a bus stop or a school or a playground or a park. There's very small pockets where a sex offender can legally live. And that means that you've got these little sex offender islands, yeah, of sex offenders who are on the sex registry list, and they become shunned and outcast, and a lot of them get run out of town or run to go live homeless under overpasses and that kind of thing.

So there's a lot of tinkering that can be done to make it more just if that's kind of where our minds are. But I think when it comes to sexual abuse of children, justice isn't necessary. Justice for the perpetrator isn't where America's mind is typically, you know? Right. I mean, Jerry Seinfeld is a registered sex offender on his TV show. For what? What did he do?

He peed in the parking deck and got caught in the parking deck episode. Is that right? Yeah, when they couldn't find their car and they were all split up and looking for their car, he peed and got caught. Someone else might have peed too. George might have peed. But yeah, I mean, technically Jerry's registered sex offender on the TV show Seinfeld. So like, I mean, that's a good example of how it could be made better.

But the point, the upshot of the whole thing is that there is a need and a desire to protect kids, and that's great. And we should be putting our efforts toward that, but we can figure out how to direct it more smartly, I guess. And in doing so, help kids more effectively, you know? Yeah, and the UK is a good example. They have a campaign instead of like a stranger danger. It's called Clever Never Goes, which it doesn't jump off the page as self-explanatory at first

as an American. But the point of it is, is like, not every adult is waiting to kidnap you. Go to someone with a uniform or a badge, even if that's like a store clerk or, you know, a nurse. You don't have to be a cop walking the beat if you feel like you're in trouble or something like that. You can approach responsible adults, and the idea of Clever Never Goes is, you know, never go anywhere with a stranger, because that's how they operate, which is, hey, get in my

car because I have a cool cartoon playing at my house, that kind of thing. Like never, ever go somewhere with a stranger. Clever Never Goes. And speaking of the UK, I saw something, Chuck, that I thought was a little surprising. So they used to have this cartoon PSA for kids called Charlie Says, and this cat would keep his little human friend out of danger by, like, going ballistic when the kid did something dangerous. And there was a 1973 PSA about stranger danger, about not going with strangers.

Oh, really? So this was, yeah, almost a full decade before the US was even tuned into this stuff, that UK were already scaring their kids. Good for them. Yeah. So we've got to talk about the Amber Alert, because this is sort of the smarter version of the milk carton kid, and it actually works. This is named for the very sad case of Amber Hagerman, who was kidnapped and killed in

1996, and Amber Alert started going out to, initially, to nearby radio stations. And now, thanks to the ANS, the Alert Notification System, you're going to get that on your phone, you might get that on your weather radio, you might get that, if you're driving down the highway, that's a big one, these sort of electronic highway signs. Those are huge, because they can actually say, there is a brown Ford Taurus with this license plate somewhere on this road within the last hour, and I believe they have caught close to 1,000, or recovered close to 1,000 kids, thanks to the Amber Alert system. So it's pretty effective.

And those electronic billboards that they have on highways can now flash like their picture too, along with the other stuff, and supposedly, from people who are in that industry of recovering children who are missing or abducted, say that the number one far and away best way to recover a kid safely is to get their picture out far and wide immediately after they go missing. And that's now kind of a big retroactive criticism of the milk cartons, is that they're circulating these kids' pictures often years after the abduction, and they probably don't look anything like those pictures anymore, and the trail's gone cold, and the idea that

doesn't mean that pictures don't work, it's just the timing of the pictures is a paramount. Yeah. I mean, man, nothing is more sad than when you read a story of the kids that there's never closure, and the parents just never know what happened, never a body, never a confession. It's just my kid disappeared 37 years ago, and we don't know anything. It's just, man, it's hard to even read those stories. Yeah.

Yeah, I can't think of anything much sadder than that, man. I do have one other thing too. I saw also, in addition to that clever never goes, that people are teaching their kids now, they're kind of focusing more on what abuse is like, like what sexual abuse is like. They're not touching, they're teaching kids that they're in charge of their own bodies, and they don't have to let somebody, yeah, makes total sense, because it's more laser focused in the actual danger that kids can face, which is sexual abuse, because apparently

we do have an enormous sexual abuse problem. The problem is, is we've been looking at strangers and ignoring the fact that it's almost always a family member or somebody that the kid knows, so if you can teach the kid what sexual abuse is like and how to look out for it, and what to do if somebody makes advances on them, then they can trust strangers, because they can trust people in general, they can just know that that can come from anywhere, and if it happens, this is what you do. So I can imagine kids learning that today will turn out a lot better than, a lot less messed up than you and I and our generation did.

We're so broken. Yeah, and the body autonomy is not just for, it's obviously great for that, but it's kind of for everything. It's about with other kids, like they don't want to be pushed that way or played with that way. It's like it's their body, you got to ask them for permission to do whatever you want to their body, and kids, my daughter from the time she was in preschool, they were teaching them that, and she'll tell me when she doesn't want me doing something, she'll say, no daddy,

my body, and I'll say, you got it. That's great. Yeah, that was something I saw. It's like you really have to back them up. So like if Angela comes over and wants to plan a big wet kiss on there, they don't want it. Yeah. You have to listen to them.

Yeah. Or else, what is it worth? You know what you taught them. So. Exactly. So way to go parents of today. I'm glad you guys are figuring it out, and I'm glad that we could lead by example, right Chuck?

Our generation. That's right. If you want to know more about stranger danger, there's a lot of it on the internet. Just be careful to verify what you're reading and where it's coming from. And since I said that, of course, the S-Y-S-K, one of our mottos, that means it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this love from an army bet. Nice.

Hey guys, want to thank you both for being such a valuable new addition to my routine. I'm currently going through a particularly nasty divorce and have lost my career in the process. I've been a paratrooper and a medic in the army for about six years, but now I must find a new path while bearing this incredible loss because of this I've had to travel back home to live while I get back on my own two feet. I used to listen to your podcast in the army during field ops and began listening during the cross-country drive from Colorado back to the Midwest. Now that I'm home, I still find myself listening to at least one show a day.

Sometimes I find myself adopting a pessimistic view of humanity and it's been very therapeutic to know that such kindhearted people still exist in the world. Your podcast has not only grounded me and ignited my fire for curiosity again, but it's also refreshing to hear from two people who understand the unending beauty of the world. Hummingbirds, anyone? I just want to say thank you for the enormous presence you have been keeping in my life, making it fun and beautiful. Never underestimate the value of what you do.

PS, has there ever been a consensus on how to measure standing water in your lawn? Nope. Okay. And Chuck, PS, PPS, I also love tiny things. We used to get tiny little one-inch Tabasco bottles in our MREs in the army and everybody loved them. There's something about them. They still pack a punch.

It's just a little bit of it. Sure. I'm going to keep this anonymous because I didn't hear back from the person. Okay. Good enough. Thank you, Mr. Anonymous Army Bed. That was an all-time great email. Thank you, Anonymous.

That was really, really moving. I'm glad we can be doing something to help you keep going during this time and keep your chin up. Everything gets better. Right, Chuck? That's right. Just stay away from those strangers. Right.

Clever never goes. Yeah. If you want to get in touch with me and Chuck and Jerry or Frank the Chair or anybody, guest producer Dave, real producer Dave, God, who knows. You can get in touch with us by sending us an email at stuffpodcastiheartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts on iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. We find in major league baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your

podcasts. Hey guys, I'm Kaylee Shore. On my podcast Too Much To Say, I share my thoughts on everything from music to martinis, social media to social anxiety, regrets to risky texts, and so much more. I have been known to read my literal diary entries on my show and sometimes I do interviews with my crazy group of friends. So if you guys want to tune in, you can hear new episodes of Too Much To Say every Wednesday on the National Podcast Network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or

wherever you listen to them.