> >Must have happened recently. I lived in Japan for several years in the
> >50's and 60's.
> >My parents were never concerned about a female being attacked.  It just
> >didn't happen.
> 
> I recently noted the number of young (like 8 or 9 year-old) children alone, or
> at most in pairs, that were allowed to wander around Chengdu (Sichuan) in
> China.
> Chengdu has a population in excess of 10 million. I think it's a
> combination of
> realistically expecting that others in the "neighborhood" will look out for
> all of the kids, and less paranoia about the few horrible incidents that will
> inevitably occur. None of the panic-stricken look that mothers get when a kid
> of theirs gets out of sight in a suburban mall either.

Don't forget the ubiquitous American culture of fear; I think that has something
to do with it. When you hear about a rape/kidnapping every day on the news
(even if it's the same one, over and over), it heightens your fear of it in the
same way as people came to the hospital with SARS when it was in the news,
even if they had never been near Toronto or Hong Kong.

As for the porn thing, I think the primary problem with porn is that it tends
to focus on sexual degradation of one partner to the pleasure of the other.
Anything which generalizes degradation of a group (be it by gender, race,
religion, etc.) is unquestionably bad.  And I think the internet is accelerating
the process of, as Russell mentioned, increasing the "perversion" level, or
rather, the level of degradation required to achieve notoriety.

Mike H.
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