I think that the average abduction would be significantly harder without the use of an automobile, with many more opportunities for someone to see / apprehend / alert of the guy carrying a screaming / unconscious / bound child.
In the US, abductions are also very rare. I think the last average I saw was 800,000 a year. Of those, about half were family abductions. After factoring in runaways, accidents, etc., the number of abductions was down to a quarter, or something like 200,000. In a population of over 300,000,000, that's pretty rare indeed (though I admit, high enough to be concerned with in a metropolitan area).
Only 21,000 (oops, originally wrote 58,000 which was wrong) were stranger abductions (http://www.ygoy.com/index.php/child-abduction-statistics/). Only 115 were "sterotypical kidnappsings" ( child is detained overnight, transported atleast 50 miles, held for ransom or intended to be kept permanently or killed).
Thank you -- I think that's the link I was ad-hoccing numbers from, but I couldn't find it.
58,000 is indeed a much lower number than I was even putting forth, though again, as irrational a fear as I know it to be, it's still a consideration for how far my daughter is allowed to go, and the time of her curfew.
21,000 is actually higher than I thought. Very roughly, the average kid has a 0.5% chance of being abducted by a stranger by the time they are 18. That's much higher than I would expect, I personally don't know of anyone who was ever abducted by a stranger as a kid. But maybe it's happened more than I know, it's not something people will generally talk about.
21,000 stranger abductions / 74 million kids under 18 = .000289 = 0.03% chance of being abducted per year
(1-.03%) = 99.97% chance of not being abducted in a given year
.9997^14 = 99.6% chance of not being abducted in 14 straight years (from age 4 through 17, assuming kids under 4 are virtually never left alone).
Thus there is a 0.4% chance of being abducted by a stranger by age 18. Of those <1% suffer injury or death. But about half suffer some form of sexual abuse. The other half are unharmed. So the chance of having a traumatic abduction by the time a child reaches 18 is ~0.2% or 1 out of 500.
The reason kids over 5 are not running around town is not fear of cars, it is the fear of abduction. The abduction does not require a car either.