The BBC reports that today’s concerned parents are denying their children the basic right to roam, and often don’t allow them out of the house.
Apparently, in 1970, an average 9-year-old girl would have been allowed to stray some 840 metres from home, but this had shrunk to a dramatic 280 metres by 1997, and the perceived safe distance is ever-descreasing.
The home is “Ground Zero” for modern parents
The Coach decided to look into the figures and discover exactly what is the safe roaming distance for the child of 2007.
Let’s look at that graphic above. A girl allowed to travel within 1970’s safe distance would in fact cover an area 9 times the size of the 1997 safe area.
This is a horrifying statistic for any parent to deal with. For every doubling of the roaming distance, the area covered multiplies by a terrifying 4 times, and therefore similarly the chances of a paedophile living within that zone also quadruples.
Exponential Danger Growth
But look again, armed with an extra crucial part of the puzzle. A roaming child doesn’t expand to fill that entire paedo-friendly area, but merely travels within it.
At any given moment in time, the child exists in a small child-sized area, and the average distance to any given paedo remains a constant.
The Coach says: risk does NOT increase with roaming distance.
Let your kids go where they want. Let’s face it, as recent news events will tell you, a child is at risk even when it’s tucked up in bed at home. Especially on holiday. If anything, the risk to the child increases the further a parent travels from the home.
STOP PRESS
The Coach has teamed up with the Ramblers Association, to bring you the National Safe Kid Network - a network of routes calculated to be the most child friendly in the country.
How we did it:-
We took a map of the UK, and plotted the areas covered by The Sun’s “Top 100 Paedo-Hotspots 2007″ pull-out supplement, together with RoSPA’s accident blackspot data, then found the roads that don’t bisect these areas. This is the National Safe Kid Network.
And remember the motto that goes with this map: Stay in the white zones, and out of the red. Nothing in this game for two in a bed.
Sleep well.
