I see it a little different. Life is full of risks. Anyone can be a victim at any time.
Well worth repeating, IMO.
We've been
forced to actually come face to face with just how little
real control we have over our day to day lives by life with DD. The actions of a person we will never meet could change our lives forever-- and they'd never even know.
We seem quite conservative about some risks, and quite cavalier about others, I am sure. But we basically look at an individual risk profile and work from what that data (and past experience) tells us is reasonable in a personal sense.
For most people, fearing a trans-oceanic flight is downright ludicrous. For someone with a medical disorder that can be
triggered by another passenger's (otherwise inoffensive) behavior, though-- it's probably reasonable to be nervous or even terrified. It's not phobia if the consequences are severe
and the probability of the event is reasonably high even with care on your part. I don't control what other people do. At the same time, we all live at one another's mercy on some level.
I'm fascinated by the development (or not) of
resilience. Nobody really understands why some kids rise above horrific adversity and others don't-- much less why parenting seems to have remarkably little impact on those outliers-- some of them had almost NO adult mentoring, and yet they rose above those circumstances. Why? What do they have-- and how did it get there? They don't all seem to be optimists, and the characteristic also doesn't seem to track with much of anything else. It's kind of a mystery, from what I can tell. Other than
avoiding the development of learned helplessness (which
does seem to result from some specific environmental cues), there's not a lot to go by.
A 40-ish co-worker recounted that when he was a kid growing up in the Midwest, he would play in the neighborhood, unsupervised, after getting home from school. At about 6pm his mother would go to the front door and yell "Jim, time for dinner!", and he would come. He does not consider his parents neglectful, and he has turned out fine.
An American woman has a 1 in 6 chance of being targeted for sexual assault in her lifetime, and 44% of the victims are under 18. So I'll go ahead and keep an eye on my daughter, regardless of how it worked out that one time for your male coworker (odds for an American man: 1 in 33).
StatsAlso WELL worth repeating. There are indications that if one includes less clear-cut instances of assault, such as intimate partner abuse, that the numbers rise even higher-- as many as 1 in 3, by some estimates. That means that anyone who reaches old age without
some experience of this is probably just...
lucky. But the vast majority of those people are victimized by those they know-- often WELL.
While we haven't completely gone the other direction-- after all, I encountered one of those very "rare" individuals as a child-- we do emphasize that adults should NOT be behaving in some ways or suggesting some things to children. Or teens. We have identified 'red flags' in adult (and older teen) behavior.
Still-- it wasn't enough to prevent a predatory older teen from victimizing my child, and I'm pretty vigilant. The risk in presenting "all risks are avoidable if you're careful enough" is that life is for LIVING... and that you aren't really doing that if you spend all of it imagining the ways in which you are vulnerable, and patching those things up. NOBODY is completely invulnerable, and even if you could be, it's no way to live.
That message is also laden with toxicity from the standpoint that it BLAMES the victim for
being vulnerable. Well, predators (and I don't mean only sexual predators) walk among us, and they look like us. You mostly don't
know that you're tangling with one until you're in it up to your hips (or higher).
