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 little
girl is dead, left under a clump of oak trees in the backcountry
east of San Diego. Many have seen her murder as a warning, applicable
equally to all mothers and fathers, that child abduction occurs
by random chance.
On March 1,
a day after the body of Danielle Van Dam was identified, the San
Diego Union-Tribune published a heart-rending account of parents
and school counselors trying to explain to children how it could
happen that seven-year-old Danielle was kidnapped and killed. "Mommy,"
a boy was quoted as saying, "I don't want anyone to steal me."
Counselors advised parents "to listen to their children's fears
and acknowledge them."
The unstated
assumption of much of the press coverage of the tragedy has been
just this: Children are afraid, counselors and parents are stumbling
to find something comforting to say, for what happened to Danielle
could as easily happen to any of our children. Since the grim discovery
was made, the nation has absorbed the message that Danielle's death
was an event without explanation or reason.
Or was it?
On the morning
of February 2, Danielle was found to be missing from her bed. The
man who has been arrested for her murder is 50-year-old David Westerfield.
Reportedly a child-porn enthusiast, he is a neighbor of Danielle's
parents, Damon and Brenda van Dam. That night, says the accused
kidnapper, he and Mrs. Van Dam had been dancing at a local bar.
Mrs. Van Dam denies dancing with Westerfield, but she does admit
being out till 2 A.M. without her husband. Nor do the Van Dams deny
the stories reported in Newsweek, stories that say they are
active "swingers" with a taste for wife swapping. The
Van Dams say their lifestyle has "nothing to do" with
Danielle's abduction.
Let us be clear.
This horrible death can be blamed only on the man who kidnapped
Danielle. But if the Van Dams are indeed "swingers," if
Mrs. Van Dam was carousing without her husband until rather late,
then these parents — who deserve our sympathy no matter what
their follies and vices may be — will have something in common
with the parents of many other abducted children, beyond the bare
fact that they have lost a child. For these terrible events do not,
for the most part, occur at random.
The National
Institute for Missing and Exploited Children supplies the figures.
In 1997, 24 percent of abducted children were abducted by strangers.
About half, 49 percent, were kidnapped by family members, typically
a divorced parent. Another 27 percent were kidnapped by an acquaintance.
In other words, 73 percent of abducted children suffered that fate
due in part to lifestyle choices their parents made: the choice
to divorce, or to befriend sleazy characters. When the media, by
ignoring these data, give the impression that child kidnapping could
happen to any family, the wholesome no less than the unwholesome,
we are once again being grievously misled.
This same notion
— that a certain kind of misfortune, in choosing victims, makes
no distinction between wholesome and unwholesome — animated
the AIDS scare of the late 1980s. Back then, the media and AIDS
activists asserted that the disease was about to erupt among the
population of heterosexuals who are not abusers of intravenous drugs.
It never did. AIDS, it's now acknowledged, is a killer with a marked
preference for people who engage in particular activities: anal
sex and needle sharing.
It does occasionally
happen that an unknown drifter will invade the life of an upstanding
family and steal and murder their child. That is what happened to
12-year-old Polly Klaas, abducted from a slumber party in Petaluma,
California, in 1993. It is what happened in 1981 to six-year-old
Adam Walsh, whose father, TV host John Walsh of America's Most
Wanted, initiated a campaign to place photos of missing children
on milk cartons and junk mail. That well-intended campaign has supported
the misconception that children go missing by chance. The brief
biographical sketch of the missing child never indicates the family
dysfunction that likely contributed to making the abduction possible.
Random kidnapping
is not what happened to Danielle van Dam, and the fact is worth
considering. For our actions have consequences — often unintended,
often for future generations, often tragic — and parents would
do well to remember this.
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