The Scariest Thing About Halloween

Trick or treat! Trick or treat! Do not snatch me off the street!

The big fear for parents this time of year is sex offenders. Municipalities across the country are passing laws that make it a crime for former offenders to leave the house on Halloween. In some places, it's against the law for them to turn on the lights. Is this because so many of them were preying on trick-or-treaters?

That's what Elizabeth Letourneau, a researcher at the Medical University of South Carolina's Family Services Research Center, wanted to find out. Are sex offenders really trolling the streets in costume? Are they grabbing grade-school goblins when they ring the doorbell? To find out, she and her colleagues pored over 67,000 crime reports from 30 states, dating from 1997 to 2005. They gathered their findings in a report titled "How Safe Are Trick-or-Treaters? An Analysis of Child Sex Crime Rates on Halloween."

So — how safe ARE they?

"There's just no increase in sex offense on that day," states Letourneau. In fact, "we almost called this paper 'Halloween: The Safest Day of the Year' because it was just so incredibly rare to see anything happen on that day."

Surprisingly, the researchers discovered that children were just as safe in 1997 as they are today, even though in 1997 there were almost no "Offenders must stay at home!" laws and today there are hundreds. That means that these new laws are protecting children from an almost nonexistent danger. It's as if a new law mandated seat belts on cafeteria benches to protect kids from falling off. Uh — they weren't!

More seriously, the new laws also mean that cops across the country are spending Halloween checking in on all the local sex offenders to make sure they're home (and sitting in the dark). That means the cops are not available to do other things, such as direct traffic.

This is too bad because even though there is zero increase in child sex crime on Halloween, FOUR TIMES more children are killed by cars than on an average night, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The reason is obvious: Far more kids are outside than usual. So if we put the cops on busy street corners instead of knocking on darkened doorsteps, we probably would be saving some kids.

Instead, we concentrate on sex offenders, says David Hess — a Baptist pastor outside of Rochester, N.Y. — for a simple reason. "We always need some sort of monster on Halloween. It's the nature of the holiday." Predators prowling on Halloween is, he says, "the new urban myth."

Before this, the urban myth of choice was the fiendish neighbor ingenious enough to poison candy bars but too stupid to reseal them neatly. That's why children always were instructed to bring their candy home for "inspection." Anything with a tampered wrapper was immediately thrown out (or eaten by the parent once the kid went to sleep).

But it turns out the poisoning neighbor myth was completely unfounded, too. Joel Best, a University of Delaware sociologist, studied Halloween crime reports going back to 1958 and found not one single child poisoned by a stranger's candy.

Considering how long that myth has held on, it's doubtful the sex offender myth will die any time soon, in this era of in-your-face Nancy Grace. But for your own sake and sanity, try to remember that the real danger on Halloween is cars.

Dress your kids in reflective clothing; teach them how to cross the street safely. And to keep calm, you know what to do.

Eat chocolate.

Lenore Skenazy is the author of "Free-Range Kids: How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children (Without Going Nuts with Worry)" and "Who's the Blonde That Married What's-His-Name? The Ultimate Tip-of-the-Tongue Test of Everything You Know You Know — But Can't Remember Right Now." To find out more about Lenore Skenazy (lskenazy@yahoo.com) and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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