First, why do we think that children are inherently safer in the hands of older women? I think that's a pretty big assumption and doubt we really can find reliable and recent data to back it up. I've read somewhere that more and more violent crimes are committed by women. I think it's much more likely that women are only in recent times being tried and found guilty of their crimes instead of getting softer treatment from the so-called justice system....I have no data to support this, but it's a gut feeling - maybe I'll go see if I can find some data.
Experts routinely advise parents to instruct their young children that if they ever, say, get lost in a shopping mall, they should find a woman and ask her for help. Preferably a mother. Even male security guards aren't necessarily safe -- security guards sometimes have criminal records. Women are much, much less likely to commit violence on an unknown child (I said in an earlier post that physical abuse of children is the one kind of violence for which women's rates are higher than men's, but this mainly involves
their own children, and again most likely because they spend more time with them).
Has it ever happened? Of course. But statistically, it's much rarer. Yes, I read the horrible details about Myra Hindley's crimes. Like most women convicted of killing a stranger, she was the partner of a man (very few women murder strangers on their own). And even so, she is an anomaly. When you think about your own experiences hearing news stories about abductions and murders, how often are they committed by women, as opposed to men?
*While in college I studied the German-American Christian theologian Paul Tillich. ... In his seminal work Systematic Theology Tillich points out that love is something more than mere emotion. In a philosophical sense it is far more important than that, and he defined it basically as the drive toward the reunion of the separated. ... Existential anxiety is really the key to understanding why people do awful things to one another.
Thank you, Gary, for explaining this. Tillich sounds interesting, and I may go to the link you posted and read more. We all have different philosophies and theologies that to us have the ring of truth. From what you've said, I don't think Tillich's views would necessarily mesh with mine. Maybe our backgrounds partly influence this process. You were raised a fundamentalist Baptist; I was raised in a very secular household (even my grandparents -- on either side -- were not churchgoers). However you or I may have come to question the teachings of our childhood, we're probably seeking different things.
One thing I want to clarify -- and this may not contradict anything you said, but just for the record. To me, the absence of love is not hate. I don't love heinous killers, or necessarily hate them. Still, it's hard to read the account of Myra Hindley's crimes and not have some kind a strong emotional reaction. I guess I'd characterize it more as horror and despair.
Do I think Myra Hindley is evil, in the sense of being fundamentally different from all other humans? No. On the other hand, do I think that if you took any random person off the street and put them in her circumstances, that pretty soon that random person would be helping her partner abduct, rape and murder children? No, I don't. If I did think that, I'd be even more despairing about humanity than I already am.
According to the New Testament, Jesus told us to love our neighbor, he told us to love our enemies, and he told us to turn the other cheek. These are the things a person of faith would do. And that’s because to have faith is to be at one with the world, to accept the world, and everything in it.
Well, I probably don't have faith. I tend to be more of an empiricist. So I really don't accept the world and everything in it -- the heinous murders, the tsunamis and hurricanes that kill lots of innocent people. The best I can do is to try to focus on the good things that happen and that people do.
* Update: In the part of my response regarding women and violence, please note that I'm not saying this to attack men or proclaim women superior or anything like that. Those just happens to be the facts. Maybe the difference will disappear as our culture changes -- that is, if the violence differential is cultural rather than biological (I believe it exists cross-culturally, but I don't think anybody can say exactly what causes it).