IT’S 3.15pm outside Alexandra Parade Primary School in the East End of Glasgow. A gaggle of anxious mothers peer through the bars, trying to catch a glimpse of their children as they cross the playground towards the school gate.
Once they arrive, little hands are clasped tightly, or arms entwined, as they walk the short distances to their Denistoun homes.
Parents who as youngsters had the run of Glasgow’s streets now keep their sons and daughters close to their sides. In
21st century Britain parents are terrified of the hidden threats, the lurking paedophiles, the child snatchers, that may or may not be there. In the wake of the murders of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, those fears and tensions sit very close to the surface.
Janice Glen, who is collecting her 10-year-old daughter Andrea, says: "I used to take the bus by myself from Barlanark to Springboig, but I wouldn’t dream of letting Andrea do that.
"Before Holly and Jessica were killed, I had started letting her go out to the park on her own, but I’ve stopped that now.
"And she understands why. She knows about the girls and that if anyone tries to hurt her she must scream and run away.
"It’s sad. I don’t want her to grow up mistrusting everyone, but what can you do?"
This is the legacy of the deaths of Jessica and Holly in Soham, Cambridgeshire: a climate where parents are too frightened to let their children out of their sight.
Long after the candles in St Andrew’s Church go out, parents will be keeping their children a little closer, curtailing their outdoor activities, and talking to them again about "stranger danger" and the need to "run, yell and tell".
Although statistics show there is more chance of children being struck by lightning than abducted by a stranger, the fear of paedophiles has replaced road traffic accidents as the number one fear for adults.
The result is nurseries and schools built like fortresses, and children who spend their summer months cooped up in houses or in tiny back yards.
Parents’ fears are understandable, but some experts believe they are holding back their children: that since only 9% of children walk to school on their own, compared with 90% 20 years ago, today’s young people are being denied the chance to learn basic survival tools, such as how to cross the road safely.
This didn’t start with Holly and Jessica, although the ordeal of their parents and the dramatic on-screen appeal to their abductor hammered the message home. Perhaps it began with Robert Black, who throughout the Eighties snatched children at random from country roads and city streets , and was consolidated by the murder of Sarah Payne, who disappeared in a moment while running home to her grandparents’ house.
Sarah’s death, at the hands of convicted child abuser Roy Whiting, was followed by a high-profile campaign by the News of the World urging people to out paedophiles living in their midst.
But many would argue the newspaper’s stance gave a distorted picture of the dangers to children, which have, statistically, decreased in the last three decades.
A UN report last year showed that the United Kingdom had one of the world’s lowest rates of child deaths caused by accident and abuse, second only to Sweden. Britain’s death rate from intentional injury was 0.8 per 100,000 children, compared with 2.74 in the US and 1.58 in France. Other statistics show that in the past 10 years, the number of children murdered has gone down by a quarter. And despite public perception, only five or six of the 100 or so annual child murders are committed by strangers.
Dry statistics, however, do not have the same impact as the CCTV footage of two girls in Manchester United shirts strolling and hanging around together.
It is the power of such images, seen also in the James Bulger case, that has led to children today being denied anything like the kind of independence their parents received. Childhood is no longer a world of unfettered exploration, but a succession of organised activities such as football clubs, girl guides and dancing classes.
After the murder of Sarah Payne, Stuart Waiton, a Scottish academic who runs Generation Youth issues, conducted a study of 45 Lanarkshire parents whose children used a local play scheme.
It found strangers were at the top of parents’ lists of fears at 94% with drugs a close second at 90%.
The things that had concerned their grandparents, such as accidents and traffic, had fallen well down the list.
"We found that while a generation ago parents were more likely to be scared of what their children would do to themselves, nowadays they were scared of what others would do to them," he says.
"Whereas children in the past, who had accidents, would have benefited from other people being around to help, today’s fears imply a concern about children coming into contact with other people.
"This could reflect a broader decline in trust that exists across society and a sense that other people, rather than being allies in the regulation of children playing around the estate, are a possible danger to them."
Half the children surveyed said further restrictions had been placed on their movement in the months after Sarah Payne’s death.
Dr Ellie Lee, a sociologist at Southampton University, believes our fear of strangers stems not from increased risk but from the global nature of news, which means we are aware of every child murder as it happens.
"I was in Chicago where there has also been an abduction, and CNN was covering it as a global abduction phenomenon," she says.
"Parents always told their children about ‘stranger danger’, but it was advice issued alongside other banalities like you must wash your hands before meals and brush your teeth after them. They did not attach any special significance to it."
Lee talks about the growing trend for a journalism of attachment where reporters become "secular priests", telling the nation how to feel.
But, she insists, it is not enough just to blame the messenger, particularly since this time round there has been some attempt by reporters to put the deaths into context, and a questioning of the lynch mob which screamed abuse at Maxine Carr as she turned up at Peterborough Magistrates Court.
"There has also been a wider cultural shift," says Lee.
"Adults no longer trust each other. They do not expect relationships, either sexual or platonic, to last a lifetime.
"Often, they don’t know their neighbours and their expectations of the people they know have been lowered. And they no longer trust institutions such as governments, the police or the church.
"This is why they invest so much in their relationships with their children, one of the few relationships they do see as enduring and genuine.
"But the more they focus in on that relationship, the less they are thinking about the real issues at stake."
The mistrust also places adults, particularly men, in an impossible position. What do you do if a child is crying or playing on a dangerous road: do you intervene or walk by in case anyone misinterprets your motives?
At Parent Network Scotland, they try to walk the tightrope between informing children about potential dangers and paralysing them with fear.
Parent facilitator Sheryl Richards from Edinburgh, who has sons aged 13 and 16 and an 11-year-old daughter, knows the subject will come up at the parenting courses she helps to run.
"That’s the biggest challenge: trying to strike the balance," she says. "We would love them to believe they are safe, because that is good for self-esteem, but on the other hand, we want to protect them.
"What I want for my children is for them to be resilient, to be able to cope with whatever comes their way.
"You can’t assume anyone is 100% safe, but you hope they will be observant and look at what is happening around them."
A spokeswoman for the Children’s Society adds: "The thing is children should learn skills such as crossing the roads gradually.
"If they are too sheltered they will turn 16 and find themselves daunted by everyday tasks.
"Sometimes it takes a child to put your own fears into perspective. When, in the wake of Holly and Jessica’s disappearance, I told my four-year-old son, Jamie, never to talk to strangers, he listened intently and then said, ‘But how will I make any friends then?’"
In the sheltered new-build Springhill Farm estate off the M8 at Baillieston, sun-tanned children are still out playing on tricycles and scooters, but parents can be seen hovering at windowsills keeping them within their sights.
Alison McMillan says they’re lucky: they know all their neighbours and a stranger’s car would be very conspicuous. It’s an old-fashioned community where they all look out for each other’s children.
Despite this, Alison won’t let Guy, eight, and Bethany, three, go very far.
"I had an awful time recently when I couldn’t find Guy for half an hour," she says. "I ran out the house in a panic and I was screaming at a man with a drill, ‘Turn that thing off, I’ve lost my wean.’
"It turned out he was at a neighbour’s house and he swanned back as if nothing had happened, but I was petrified."
Guy and Bethany have been told not to talk to strangers. "If anyone comes near me I’ve to shout, ‘Get lost you old pervert,’" Guy volunteers, to the embarrassment of his mother.
Christine McGlin’s twin boys, Christopher and Ross, are 14, strapping lads, but she still picks them up from school.
In some ways, in fact, it is worse now, since as teenagers they are straining on their leashes.
Recently, however, she was called to pick them up after they were verbally abused on their way home.
"They’re really tall, but it doesn’t stop them being rattled when something like that happens," she says.
Both McMillan and McGlin agree it’s a different world for children nowadays. But then McMillan remembers something from her past.
"Right enough, someone tried to abduct me when I was seven," she says. "I was standing in the close with my sister when a man walked up and asked, ‘Do you know Mrs Hart?’ Then he grabbed me.
"He was trying to undo his zip when my father heard me screaming and ran out of the flat with no shoes on. He ran across glass and everything to get me back. The man ran off and was never caught."
Child abuse, it seems, has always existed. It’s a blight on society and children should be warned to spot the danger signs.
But for many the overwhelming worry is turning parenting into an exercise in safety management, rather than an opportunity to create rounded, capable adults.
"The idea of childhood being the best time of your life no longer fits for many parents and is likely to impact on children’s view of themselves and those around them," Waiton says.
"With this level of fear it is questionable to what degree today’s working class children are becoming streetwise, and able to look after themselves."
dgaravelli@scotlandonsunday.com
The full article contains 1933 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
