alt Hacker NewsFor what it's worth, this is commonplace in Australia too. I feel like you're describing a general safe country thing. I've lived in Japan so I know it's probably one of the safest places in the world, but I feel like what this thread describes is more US/Canada/some Euro countries being particularly dangerous, and not Japan being uniquely safe.
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I think it's more high-trust than high-safety. Most American cities (and certainly suburbs) are quite safe, and have only been getting safer over the past decades.
And yet we are constantly bombarded with fearmongering around children getting kidnapped on every street corner, every hour of the day.
I'll absolutely agree that a place like Tokyo is safer for a child on their own than NYC or SF, but the gap isn't as wide as the mainstream media would seem to suggest.
Canada is not particularly dangerous, but it has a horrible case of being drowned out by American culture (which strongly influences Canadians' subjective perceptions of their environs), and having the same kind of problematic urban planning as the United States.