5 Things “Stranger Danger” Education Got Wrong, and 1 It Gets Right

Note: this essay is Part 3 of a 5-part series I wrote over a period of years prior to Election Day 2024. In Part 1, I described my personal experiences being groomed and the factors that continue to allow it to happen. Part 2 went into the role of generational trauma in child and intimate partner abuse. Here, I describe the failures of the "stranger danger" education I grew up with. Part 4 considers how our "hero" narratives keep us from solving the problem of (or healing from) child abuse. Finally, Part 5 offers some thoughts on how healing our own traumas could help us protect younger generations.

By now I think we all know child abuse happens regularly in the communities we trust the most, from families up through schools, churches, clubs, and so on. Yet, we continue to be shocked, dismayed, and angered when we hear about it.

Even if we don’t give in to the notion that abuse happens to other children in other communities, we still insist on believing that predators are “other”; the monsters lurking in the shadows around corners and behind bushes.

These were the threats I remember being cautioned against as I grew up in the late 1970s through the 80s and into the 90s, not least following the abductions and murders of Etan Patz in 1979, Adam Walsh in 1981, Shari Smith and Debra Helmick in 1985, Jacob Wetterling in 1989, Megan Kanka in 1994, and JonBenet Ramsey and Amber Hagerman in 1996 among many others.

But my parents’ best efforts to protect and guide me, backed by the society of their time, meant very little when I found myself groomed by men we all thought I could trust.

Failure #1: The belief that adults “know better” than kids

I have memories of my parents cautioning me to sit less provocatively on a bus where a young long-haired man was staring, unnoticed by me, at my bare leg. Indeed, he stopped after I tucked my leg safely away under my skirt (complete with eyeroll at my parents’ insistence).

I have other memories, too, from when I was very little:

• Being left with an older adult woman, a neighbor, while my parents went to the hospital for my brother’s birth.
• Riding in a neighbor man’s pickup truck, listening to Elvis on the radio just after the famed singer’s death.
• Later on, older, riding an elevator at my mother’s workplace with a young man my mother half-jokingly told not to molest me.

In each of these situations, my parents trusted the adults I was with, and that was good enough. In those pre-internet days, toddler rape was on no one’s radar at all. If my parents ever considered that the neighbors could pose a threat, whatever conversations they had dispelled those fears.

In the elevator, my mother’s word was supposed to act as talisman enough. She’d survived gropings and harassment throughout the 1960s and ‘70s in New York City, offering her experiences as proof that while I might be naive, she was not.

Such assumptions meant that if she and/or my father felt something was “off,” then it was off; if they trusted another adult, then so could we.

That was because in those days, no adult ever questioned ceding their own power – their own intuition, their still, small voice – to someone they believed they could trust.

Surviving “less bad” experiences, as my mother had, proved adults able to navigate threats and come out the other side. From there, they could communicate their lessons to others.

“Knowing better” was one of those values I’d heard a lot about growing up, often to describe actions or information it was assumed I already had. The main message I got was that when I didn’t know better, it meant I was incompetent to manage key elements of my own life.

I think a lot of adults think this way, and to some extent it’s even true. We do know, for example, that friend spats and clothing trends are temporary and will pass. Likewise, that some risks, like playing in the road or outdoors during a thunderstorm, aren’t worth the price of being wrong.

We also, however, place a little too much emphasis on “knowing better,” relying on both children and other adults to have the same information we have that can keep them out of trouble. When we learn they don’t, in fact, have that information, we engage in:

Failure #2: The victim-blaming emphasis on tactics

Somewhere along the way, adults lost the ability or willingness to teach children to trust our own gut sense. Instead, most of our lessons focused on abductors’ tactics. Kids in the 1970s and 80s learned not to trust strangers who:

• offered candy, money, or a small furry animal to pet
• told us our mother had asked them to pick us up and bring us to her
• asked us to help them move a piece of furniture into their home or vehicle

Other killers, we were led to assume, targeted and ambushed unlucky people who ran or hiked or lived alone, or who engaged in gay sex or sex outside of wedlock (especially for money), used alcohol and/or drugs, or hitchhiked.

The unspoken conclusion: you could avoid rape and murder by avoiding these activities. (Left unsaid were the ways the Zodiac Killer, Golden State Killer James DeAngelo, and “Night Stalker” Richard Ramirez targeted “normal” couples and families.)

In this context, I believed that my fascination with serial killers, coupled with my advancing age, insulated me from predation. This assumption made it easy for me and so many other girls to continue to insist that we’d “never” follow a virtual stranger into his vehicle, home, or submarine.

By shifting our attention to the salacious details of “stranger” killings and abductions, though, we laid the groundwork for the victim-blaming that ensued: our judgment on victims for their failure to protect themselves (or their children).

Even as other news items of the day demonstrated that less violent men could still prey on adult women serving in the most respectable roles as legal advisers, White House interns, and U.S. military and government personnel and spouses, we failed to realize the true threat:

Failure #3: The ignorance of grooming

Having learned our intuition had gaps, we learned to fill them in by shouldering the assumed benefit of our own and others’ experiences. Thus the adults in our lives left us vulnerable to a much different dynamic: the kind of “slow burn” grooming that happened on Bernard, Cardinal Law’s watch during that same era.

Indeed, 80 percent of sexual violence perpetrators are already known to their victims. These perpetrators, like so many other predators drawn to positions of trust and authority, manipulate relationships and power differentials.

Only one example are the priests Law ignored, who wielded their power over their parishioners and their children — particularly those with troubled situations.

I’ve written about how easy it becomes for victims, afraid of judgment and abandonment and craving a sense of connection, to mistake such tactics as part of normal relationship-building. That was my own experience being groomed in “safe” environments.

More confusing is that in this context, the idea that adults “knew better” extended to those adults we trusted not to abuse us. If and when they did, it would be our word against theirs.

By focusing on “stranger danger,” in other words, our parents’ well-meaning social messages enabled the other authority figures in our lives to deflect from the abuse happening behind our own closed doors.

They made it that much easier for predators to adapt and even blend in around our expectations of how predators prey, making it harder for everyone to understand how predators blend in — how they exploit adults, long before they ever exploit children.

It wasn’t until Ann Rule wrote her book The Stranger Beside Me about her friendship with Ted Bundy that we started to consider the lengths predators go to blend in. Yet still, Bundy and other killers of the era, including John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer, were considered outliers.

Failure #4: The “othering” of both predator and victim

Few people talked about the ways in which Gacy, Dahmer, Bundy, and others — in contrast to the “stalker” type killers — cultivated their victims’ trust. It was assumed that they targeted only the truly outcast, without much thought either for the way they cultivated trust before they attacked — or for what made the victims outcast to begin with.

In her 2012 article “The Truck Stop Killer,” author Vanessa Veselka describes leaving home at 15:

“People don't leave home because things are going well; they leave because they feel they have to, and right or wrong, that's how I felt. I lived with my mom in New York, and the fights between us were growing in intensity and emotional violence.”

You don’t, of course, have to come from a violent home to feel “othered.” In my case, my parents’ efforts to ensure I remained outside of the 1980s-era bubble of “in” clothes and toys and music contributed to my and my brother’s ostracization by the other kids.

Other parents, though, might have gone too far in the other direction, helping their kids blend in as a matter of social survival — thus locking away their sense of self and communicating that there was no space for them to be themselves.

Add in other factors, like a learning disability or neurodivergent brain, brown skin or a foreign accent, “poor” clothes that aren’t freshly laundered – and the pressure to conform mounts. These kids might learn they are too loud, too talkative, too intense, too sensitive, too undisciplined; singled out by adults who judge them right away for being “less than.”

The overarching message: you aren’t worthy of love unless you “behave yourself” by performing well in school, doing as you’re told, not being “difficult.”

These messages teach children to remain submissive to others’ whims, to the extent kids tend to bond over “power tripping” teachers or bosses. Less social ones, like me, might learn to go inward when they feel bullied or ostracized. We must, after all, have brought it on ourselves..

In my own experience, when this twisted version of my self-image met my normal, biological teen desire to strike out on my own – learn to take my own chances and make my own choices – my parents’ best efforts backfired.

Looking back on the child predators I encountered, I can see their approximations of "normal" and the way their not-fitting-in echoed and intrigued my own. I’d already decided I had no chance of a shot with “normal” boys, much less that I’d ever be able to practice “normal” dating social cues. So when these adult men came across like fellow loners or rebels, they represented a future of adulthood in which I might just be able to be successful.

I believe this was because at some point in their lives, my groomers were the “weird kids” too. Statistically speaking, they likely survived multiple kinds of abuse of their own, experiencing one of three outcomes:

• They kept it to themselves.
• They reported it, but were beaten and blamed and shamed.
• They reported it, but were ignored.

In other words, they’re used to being “othered.” That’s how they recognize other outcasts, how they appeal to their acute need for a sense of belonging, and how other outcasts come to trust them.

Which I think gets at the root of our continued, collective challenges ending child sexual abuse: by “othering” both our children and child predators, we unwittingly create the space of profound loneliness in which they can come together.

Failure #5: The inability to face our own blind spots

The problem with “othering” child predators is that when they, in fact, turn out to be men we trust with responsibility, the threat to family or community becomes too big to handle. As professor Gillian Harkins wrote in her book Virtual Pedophilia:

“The pedophile’s potential predation lurks on the surface of norms, not behind or beneath them. The sharks aren’t camouflaged; our eyes are. We are unwilling, or perhaps even unable, to see their looks as predatory.”

The alternative — to believe the victim's claim of harm — means shaking our foundations to their core:

• Estranging ourselves from family members we love because they would rather protect the perpetrating loved one than exclude them.
• Facing bedrock insecurity and instability because the abusive partner or co-parent controls the finances and housing.
• Leaving a beloved place of worship and having to start all over again in some new community because no one else believed what you believe.
• Facing authorities and authority figures we may not feel safe with, particularly if our children’s ability to remain with us is threatened.

To survive these kinds of shakeups — to be able to survive outside the structures that give us a sense of safety — we need a sense of liberty we may not always have; confidence that no matter what, we can survive on our own.

Most of us don’t have this degree of confidence. It’s easier to shift the “othering” focus to abusers’ accusers: to children, who we’ve assumed thanks to our cultural conditioning can’t know any better. The mistake must be theirs, not ours, because we know better.

Thus, perhaps it’s more accurate to say that we “other” child predators so we can maintain our illusion of control over life, even as those in power continue to work behind the scenes to strip us of ever more power. 

One thing “stranger danger” got right

Like Ann Rule, survivors of abuse frequently describe the duality of their abuser’s presentation: the side “everyone else” saw, versus the side the victim saw. “Like I didn’t know them at all,” is the language many survivors use to describe the utter lack of empathy the abuser displayed.

In short, the person we thought we knew so well turns out to be an utter stranger after all.

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