What the figures actually show
Abduction by someone outside the family is rare. Police across England, Scotland and Wales recorded 870 non-parental child abductions in 2016/17, a rise of about ten per cent on the year before. It is a real crime happening to real families, and it is nothing like the scale that news coverage implies.
The more useful numbers are about who rather than how many. The Crime Survey for England and Wales, asking adults about sexual abuse before the age of sixteen, found that for contact abuse the person responsible was a friend or acquaintance in 37.7 per cent of cases, a family member other than a parent in 23.4 per cent, and a stranger in 21.0 per cent. For non-contact abuse a stranger was the commonest category at 34.7 per cent. The totals exceed a hundred per cent because many people reported more than one person.
Two things follow, and the second is the one usually left out.
A rule aimed only at strangers covers well under half the risk. The largest single category is someone the child knows and has no reason to suspect — which is precisely the person a stranger rule exempts.
But strangers are not a negligible share either. One in five cases of contact abuse, and the largest category of non-contact abuse, which now largely means online. Replacing stranger danger with reassurance that strangers are safe would be swapping one wrong answer for another.
And the part that neither version describes at all: in the NSPCC's UK-wide study, 57.5 per cent of contact sexual abuse against children was committed by other children and young people rather than by adults. No rule about grown-ups in cars addresses that situation.
Why the old approach does not work
It aims at the wrong people. The risk profile is not a man in a van. It is an adult or an older child already inside the circle of people a child has been told to trust, who has access and time and no need to persuade anyone to go anywhere unusual.
It disables a child who needs help. A child taught never to speak to strangers is a child who, separated from a parent in a shopping centre, will walk past the one person who could reunite them. The overwhelming majority of strangers help children. Teaching a child to avoid all of them removes a resource far more often than it removes a threat.
It relies on a test a child cannot apply. To an adult, "stranger" means someone unknown. To a child it tends to mean someone unfamiliar-looking, which is a different thing entirely. The man at the till whom their mother greets each week is not a stranger. A cousin's friend met twice is not a stranger. Someone pleasant and well-dressed does not feel like one. Appearance is what children actually use, and appearance carries no information.
The rule that replaced it
Clever Never Goes, developed by the charity Action Against Abduction, was written for infants and is used through the junior years and with children who have additional needs. It moves the question from who is this person to am I being asked to go somewhere.
The rule a child learns is that they never go anywhere with anyone — anyone at all, known or unknown — unless it has been agreed in advance. If it has not been agreed, the answer is no, and the next step is telling someone.
Three things make that better than what it replaces. It is one concrete question rather than a judgement about character. It covers the known adult and the older child as well as the stranger, because the rule does not care who is asking. And a child can actually use it under pressure, which a test requiring them to assess a person's intentions cannot be.
It works best practised rather than announced. Short scenarios — what would happen if someone said a parent had sent them, if someone said there was an emergency, if it was someone from school — and a settled list of who is allowed to collect them, which gets updated rather than assumed.
Family passwords have some use for an unexpected collection, though they are only as good as a child's willingness to insist on one in front of an adult who seems annoyed, which is a lot to ask. The rule about going nowhere unagreed does not depend on that kind of nerve.
Who a child should ask for help
This is the half that stranger danger removed, and it needs teaching just as explicitly as the rule.
- A police officer or police community support officer.
- Someone working where they are — a person behind a till, a member of staff in uniform or wearing a badge, a bus driver, a librarian.
- An adult who has children with them.
- Going back to the last place they were together, rather than searching.
A child should know that asking is allowed, that saying loudly that they are lost is allowed, and that no one will be cross. If a child gets lost covers the practical arrangements in more detail.
The conversation that does more work than any rule
The NSPCC's Talk PANTS material covers the ground that a rule about going places does not, in five points simple enough for a young child:
- P — Privates are private.
- A — Always remember your body belongs to you.
- N — No means no.
- T — Talk about secrets that upset you.
- S — Speak up, someone can help.
What makes it usable is that none of it requires mentioning sex or abuse. It can be taught entirely as a set of rules about bodies and secrets, starting simple and gaining detail over years as a child is ready for it.
The points worth drawing out:
- A child can say no to anyone, including family. Not being made to hug a relative is part of this rather than a separate question of manners.
- Doctors and nurses sometimes need to look or touch, and should say why and ask first. Naming the exception keeps the rule intact instead of confusing it.
- Correct names for body parts. Invented family words are affectionate and they make a disclosure incomprehensible to anyone outside the family, which is exactly who may need to understand it.
- The child needs to know who they would tell, that nothing of this kind is their fault, and that they will not be in trouble.
One line in that list carries more weight than the rest, and it is the secrets one. No adult has a legitimate reason to ask a child to keep a secret from their parents. A child who knows that single sentence has a test that catches the thing a stranger rule never catches, because abuse by a known adult runs on secrecy rather than on persuading a child into a car.
Why the real work is making telling easy
The case for all of this rests on what actually happens, which is that children mostly do not tell.
- Most people abused as children did not tell anyone at the time, and around one in five had never told anyone at all before being asked in a survey.
- Where the abuse was rape or penetrative, fewer than a third told anyone at the time, and almost half only told someone later in adult life.
- Any official agency knew at the time in under one case in ten.
- Children who did tell mostly told friends or family rather than a professional.
- Where the person responsible was another child or young person, 82.7 per cent told nobody. Where it was an adult, 34 per cent told nobody.
The reasons given are not complicated: embarrassment, fear of not being believed, and fear of being humiliated. None of those is addressed by a safety rule. All of them are addressed by a child's accumulated experience of what happens when they bring an adult something awkward.
Which is why the single most protective thing available to a household is not a rule at all. It is a child who expects to be believed and not blamed — and that is built out of very small incidents, years before anything serious, in how a lost jumper or a playground falling-out or a bad mark gets received.
There is a sharper version of this point. A child who has been told off for talking to strangers now has a reason not to mention that they talked to one. Rules that carry a penalty for breaking them buy silence about the circumstances in which they were broken, which is the opposite of what they were for.
Keeping the fear proportionate
The cost of overdoing this is not merely that a child is anxious, though that matters. It is that a frightened child stays close, and a child who stays close never practises the judgement that actually keeps them safe at twelve and sixteen. Confidence and one clear rule beat suspicion and a long list.
It helps to say the true thing out loud rather than only the cautionary one: nearly every adult a child meets would help them, and some of them are the people to go to.
If something is said
Where a child says something worrying, the useful response is to listen rather than question — no leading questions and no pressing for detail, since both can make a child's account harder to rely on later. Take it seriously, say plainly that they were right to tell, write down what was said as closely as possible, and get advice rather than deciding alone.
The NSPCC helpline is 0808 800 5000, staffed around the clock, and will advise an adult who is unsure. Children can contact Childline on 0800 1111. The Clever Never Goes materials, including scenarios for practising with a child, are at clevernevergoes.org.
The online side of this — which is where the stranger category has largely moved, and where the pattern is financially motivated blackmail rather than abduction — is covered under teenagers and online safety.