Don't go out alone, Jimmy.

If we accept the Government's statistics (and the very fact that I have to make that caveat speaks volumes) overall crime figures are falling, and yet the public perception is that we feel less safe than ever. Most parents today wouldn't give their children a tenth of the freedom I enjoyed as a child. And yet is a child wandering around on their own any more at risk today than 60 years ago? The statistics (same caveat) say no. So just what's going on? It seems to me it's all down to the power of information. When I was a kid, if a child was abducted in Brighton, let's say, then unless you lived in Brighton, you were unlikely to hear about it. It would probably make the local press, but not the nationals. Today it would be headline news in all the papers and on TV. So it may well be that children, and indeed all of us, are no more at risk today than back then - maybe even less at risk - but thanks to the media we are more aware today of just what that risk is. Ignorance is bliss, goes the saying, and that I think is the essential difference between our perception of safety today and what it was in the past.