What is Safety?

In a world where police officers shoot people they have prejudices against, where individuals get assassinated because they express their opinions openly, where pilots crash planes on purpose, and where people get arrested for allowing their children to walk home from school unsupervised, issues of safety are a top priority. While the degree of actual threat varies greatly depending on neighborhood, social class, ethnic identity, racial appearance, economic background, sexual preference, and gender, we are all united in the high concern for our own safety and that of our family and friends. As best we can, we try to regulate our environment by controlling the social world that we engage in. The general rule for this is: The more expensive the neighborhood and the home property prices, the lower the crime rate and the better the school district. Although this helps asserting a feeling of increased security, there is no guarantee that a higher-end neighborhood will actually prevent you from any kind of harm. You can never completely control your environment and have to live with the fact that in the end, something could happen (and it does), even in the most expensive neighborhoods. Despite any efforts, you still may encounter random school shootings, abductions or any other random acts of violent aggression.

Constant concerns for the physical safety of children turn parenting into a special challenge. While helping on the National Incidence Study of Missing, Abducted, Runaway, and Thrownaway Children (NISMART 2) as a research assistant more than a decade ago, I learned that 1,315,600 children went missing in the U.S. during the period from 1997-1999. The enormous number can partially be explained by the fact that it also included children that voluntarily ran away from home and those that were missing for more than an hour due to misunderstandings between child and caretaker, but reappeared. Last year's number for missing children, whose absence had been reported to the authorities, amounted to 466,949, which means close to half a million! So far this year, Amber Alert helped recover 758 missing children. These numbers demonstrate that the perceived threat to our kids' physical safety is real and has to be taken very seriously.

Another danger that we think about quite some time, and that unfortunately becomes real all too often, is gun violence. Many of the incidences could be easily prevented with stricter gun laws. This would alleviate us from the worry about angry criminals roaming the streets waiting to kill someone (or like in our neighborhood recently a suicidal, armed veteran who roamed the area close to the local elementary school). The change in legislation would make guns less accessible and prevent many of the violent incidences that occur in a heated moment when there is easy access to a gun. Often times fatalities happen unintentionally, because of simple avoidable mistakes like storing guns inappropriately and not keeping ammunition separate from firearms. Remember the unfortunate incident last year when a 9-year old girl shot her shooting instructor with a machine gun in Arizona? Or the more recent incident from last December when a 2-year old boy unintentionally shot his mother in a Walmart store with a loaded gun that his mother carried around in her purse while shipping? Unfortunately, there are many more horrific, unforgettable incidences, like school shootings, drive by shootings and lethal hostage crisis that further highlight the danger of accessibility of firearms.

Even if we act responsibly and are successful in raising our kids to become upright and respectful citizens, we cannot control our environment and guarantee that we or our children are safe. No wonder that as a result, parents often become overprotective of their children. The constant fear that something could happen to them while playing outside, keeps parents worried non-stop. In other countries that have a much lower crime rate and where guns are far more regulated than in the U.S. (like Scandinavian countries or Germany), children of all ages have a lot more freedoms and parents worry much less. Kids there are encouraged and taught how to use public transport alone, how to ride their bikes to friends' houses (even if that may be a few miles away) and how to walk to a shop unaccompanied. Nobody in these cultural environments finds this dangerous, irresponsible or unadvisable. In fact, studies have confirmed that it helps kids to learn how to become responsible, independent, and find their place in society. The current generation of children in the U.S. not only does not have a life similar to those children, but they also don't have a life similar to that of their own parents who enjoyed many of the same freedoms that kids in other countries still have. Due to the understanding of safety in the U.S., kids have a very structured life where they go from one supervised activity to the next and barely have any unstructured time. While this method assures us that they are accounted for, it also deprives them of acquiring many skills learned by free play they will need as adults. We have yet to see, what kind of effect this will have once this generation enters the workforce.

But today's threats on personal safety do not come from violence alone, but also from the foods that we consume. Often times we don't check carefully which foods go in our mouth and may not be aware that we stuff ourselves with harmful ingredients. Lots of foods are genetically modified, enriched (with chemicals) or processed in ways that are dangerous to our bodies. While many of us check the labels and try to protect ourselves from as many harmful substances as possible, often times information about certain ingredients becomes confusing, and as consumers we don't really know what is safe and what not. In those moments, the thought in my head is often, 'If official/authorities allow foods to contain these ingredients, then they cannot be so bad, right? After all, they are the experts and they wouldn't want to people to get sick.' But should we really trust this inner voice? In some other nations food labeling and identifying harmful foods undergoes much stricter guidelines than in the U.S.. I remember in a Danish supermarket that Heinz ketchup had a big neon sticker across the label indicating that the product contained high fructose corn syrup and that the local authorities highly discouraged the consumption of this product, because this ingredient was harmful. The point is, consumer self-education to a certain point has to be expected, but it should also be in the interest of the authorities here in the U.S. to create awareness and educate. They should alert us about potentially dangerous foods and prevent these foods to enter the market while instead directing consumers to cleaner and healthier choices. If no attention is raised about harmful ingredients, serious health hazard remain disguised.

Another threat that has become very real for many families is that more and more kids grow up with dangerous, sometimes fatal food allergies. I got to know a family with a child haunted by severe peanut allergy. For the kids it could be fatal just by coming in contact with peanuts or food containing them and by coming in contact with something that had touched peanuts or foods containing them. For this particular family it meant that the mother accompanied the child everywhere to supervise the surroundings and make sure that it was safe, at least until school age. Once the child started Kindergarten, the mother still came to school to observe the child's lunch and eliminate potential threats. Since a drastically increasing number of children suffer from allergies, more and more parents have to send separate snack packages for their child to those birthday parties that they attend, pass on eating and drinking instructions to the supervising parents before playdates, and have to trust that they will remember this significant information. All these considerations lead to constant worries on behalf of the parents, something that earlier generations of parents did not have to do.

What does this all mean? That we as individuals, consumers, and parents should remember our right to the pursuit of happiness which clearly includes issues of safety. We should demand more protection against threats from guns and harmful foods that could be eliminated with the right kind of legislation. For officials and authorities it should be a clear priority to protect the rights of the people to personal safety and not place economic gains of big corporations before the needs of individuals. With stricter gun laws and higher health standards in place, we may even be able to revive some of the lost freedoms for our children and us.