Photo by Vien Dinh on Unsplash.
Everybody is talking about the kidnapping of Savannah Guthrie’s mother, Nancy Guthrie. Suddenly, we are seeing articles about installing cameras to protect “older” people. One Medium essay insists that nobody over 80 should live alone. The Wall Street Journal reports that families are rethinking options for elderly relatives.
Right now, I am very glad to be single. I do not have to waste my breath saying, “None of your business.”
The odds of an ordinary person being kidnapped are extremely slim. If there is a great deal of money in your high-profile family and relatives willing to pay ransom, you might become a target, though still against long odds. If you are an ex-cop who put away dangerous criminals, kidnapping is not the most likely outcome. You’ll probably be killed instead, wherever you are.
Even for children, the risk of so-called stranger danger is far lower than the risks of riding in a car or drowning. For older adults, falls, medical events, and financial scams are vastly more common than abduction. It’s part of the availability heuristic. It’s why we worry more about plane crashes than drunk drivers.
Of course, there are exceptions. There are always exceptions. I once heard a Moth story about a man who was severely injured when he was randomly chosen to be the “stranger” to be killed in a gang initiation. He walked down the wrong street.
But the fact that a story exists does not make it statistically meaningful. You are more likely to be harmed by someone you know than by a cinematic villain lurking in the bushes. Dating, befriending, marrying, trusting. Those are the real risk categories.
Meanwhile, some risks are normalized because they are institutional. Patients share hospital rooms with strangers who have not been background checked. Their visitors come and go. Hospitals tend to dismiss concerns, yet hospital-acquired infections and nightmare experiences are real.
Residents of nursing homes report theft, bullying, and mistreatment. Oversight varies widely. Families have little access to transparent data about what actually happens behind closed doors.
But an elderly person living quietly alone? The odds that they will be kidnapped or murdered are vanishingly small.
Anyway, this story is part of a larger conversation about keeping elders “safe.”
Safe to do what? To get older and sicker in controlled conditions? To restrict their movements further? To move them into short-staffed facilities? To trade autonomy for supervision in the name of risk reduction?
The question we hear constantly is how to keep older people safe. The question we almost never hear is what kind of life that safety is meant to protect.
Geriatricians often say that if you have seen one 80-year-old, you have seen one 80-year-old. Aging does not make people identical. It widens their differences. Some people become frail. Some lose cognitive capacity. Some run marathons, manage companies, travel alone, and continue intellectual work well past the age at which society expects them to fade away. Many could hold demanding jobs if age discrimination were not so prevalent.
A sensational crime involving a prominent family does not transform statistical reality for everyone else. It does not mean your independent mother is in imminent danger. It does not mean 80-year-olds should be treated as a homogeneous risk category. It does not mean you deny sane people the opportunity to choose their own risks;
You and your parents are extraordinarily unlikely to end up in a headline like Nancy Guthrie’s family. And if we are honest, many older adults (including me) might quietly say that being kidnapped would not be the worst possible fate. Not even close.
