ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the construction and mobilisation of parental fears for children’s safety in public space. It begins by looking at where and why parents are most fearful for their children’s safety and by considering their risk assessment and management. In particular, it focuses on stranger-danger discourses, arguing that global reporting of violent crimes against children – terror talk – may distort local fears by heightening parents’ awareness of extreme and rare events causing them to restrict their children’s use of space excessively. Paradoxically therefore, as people’s knowledge of the world expands, so their children’s experiences of their local worlds contract. The chapter then goes on to focus on the way parents’ and schools’ squeamishness about talking about the body and sexuality with children results in a crude message of public space equals danger; versus private space equals safety being fed to children through educational programmes and campaigns. This message enables parents and other agencies to warn children about potential danger while robbing it of any sexual content. At the same time ‘terror talk’ represents the male body as saturated with threat and so contributes to shaping the way that adults and children relate to each other and (re)produce public space.
