Tabloids' bigger crime to foster fear

A less-obvious evil and danger lies behind the News of the World's hacking of the phones of the missing 13-year-old Milly Dowler and the victims of terrorism.

And the closing of the paper and the inquiries that ensue will not address it.

News organisations like to play on fear. Human emotion is a key news value. It is not necessarily to gain more audience, but because journalists, too, are human and stories about victims of crime and terror touch them, too.

Journalists will do a lot to get those stories, even stooping to illegality, as the News of the World scandal illustrates.

The story of Milly Dowler plays on every parent's worst fear – the kidnapping, sexual abuse and or murder of their child. Appealing to that primal fear results in saturation media coverage.

"Milly Dowler" yields hundreds of thousands of hits on Google, nearly all of them from mainstream media sites. The investigation into the 2002 abduction lasted more than six years and the man responsible was found guilty last month.

Similar media treatment was give to British three-year-old Madeleine McCann who went missing in Portugal in 2007 and the Beaumont children (1966) and Graeme Thorne (1960) in Australia.

These cases got, and still get, massive media coverage. Nearly all the stories are completely accurate, but overall the picture is a distorted one. And a dangerously distorted one.

Parents can easily imagine their child being abducted. They can empathise and identify with the parents in the highly publicised examples. And they do this fairly frequently. As a result, parents believe the incidence of child abduction by a stranger is far higher than it actually is. They greatly over-estimate the risk.

In fact, the risk is so minimal that parents can, and should, dismiss it.

In the US, which has a substantially higher crime rate than Australia, the Justice Department puts incidents of child abduction a little over 100 a year. There are about 75 million children in the US, so the chance of a child being abducted in the US is less than one in half a million. The UK figures are similar to those in the US.

In Australia, precise figures are more difficult to come by. The Australian Institute of Criminology's latest (2009) figures put the total number of kidnappings at 564 and murders at 264. But the bulk of the murders are among brawling young men; victims of robberies gone wrong; or victims of domestic violence. The bulk of the kidnappings involve adults or in-family abductions.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics tells us that just 15 children under 15 were murdered in Australia in 2010, out of more than four million children.

We cannot tell how many of those were abducted by a stranger before the murder, but reported cases are so hard to find it may be none at all.

Yes, it is appalling and shocking for a child to be abducted and sexually assaulted or murdered by a stranger. But it is extremely rare. Probably less than one in a million. It is so small that it can be dismissed, especially in middle-class areas where crime is generally lower.

And it should be dismissed, because the media-engendered fear of child abduction by a stranger is hurting our children. The vast majority of children are being denied the joy and social interaction of unstructured, unsupervised play because of this utterly unjustified climate of fear.

That is going to cause long-term damage to children. Further, the fear is keeping children indoors where they lead dangerously sedentary lives and are exposed to the dangers of obesity, inactivity and excessive television-watching.

Men who are strangers and aged between 40 to 70 (the supposed pedophile age) are many thousands of times more likely to help than harm a child lost or hurt.

Any child could knock the door of any house in Australia and ask a stranger to help and be safer than wandering lost or injured trying to get home on their own.

Politicians love to play on the fear – elect me and I will make your child safe. Police love it – give us bigger police forces to make your child safe. Security companies love it – install more cameras and alarms. But it means less money for education and sport.

We should act on the real dangers to our children. Murder, abduction and sexual assault of children are many more times likely to come from within the family than from a stranger. A child is 10 times more likely to die in car accident than be murdered. And even that it is a fairly low risk.

But fear-induced obesity and lack of exercise look like a major long-term threat to our children.

Then there is fear of terrorism. Terrorism gets massive media coverage. Yes, it is terrible. Yes, we should know about it. But we should not allow our consumption of media coverage of terrorism to result in needless fear and acquiescence in various disproportionate political actions to prevent it: engaging in far-away wars, massive spending on intelligence and security and unnecessary infringements on civil liberties.

And the News of the World used to revel in criminal violence perpetrated against the aged. Yet the over-60s are the least likely to be victims of crime. The result: some aged people too fearful to go out on their own and being denied exercise and social contact.

Crime is falling. It has been steadily falling for all the time we can get information about it (going back to the Middle Ages in Europe). The only exception was a period between the 1960s and 1980s when the very numerous baby boomers were mostly aged between 18 and 30 – the largest crime-committing cohort.

In the developed world, we now live in the safest time in human history.

In a way, the exaggerated coverage of crime and terrorism without sensible information about the real risks to dispel unnecessary fear is perhaps a greater sin than hacking a few phones, and all media are to a degree guilty of it. Each individual story may be accurate, but the overall impression is grossly and dangerously misleading.

Lastly, the News of the World's hacking of celebrities will unfortunately lead to clampdowns on media which might hamper valuable investigative journalism, where, for example, one might be justified in hacking the phone of the executive of a chemical plant that was tipping toxic sludge deadly cyanide into a nearby river or lake or trespass at an abattoir to expose cruel practice.

The upshot of the News of the World scandal will be a greater public belief that journalists are prying, snooping, phone-hacking, law-breakers who will stop at nothing to sell a newspaper.

Politicians and big business will do whatever they can to reinforce that view so that any exposure of their failings by journalists can then be dismissed as muck-raking and of no matter to the public.

Meanwhile, the real risks in society go ignored.