One of the oldest adages parents tell their children at a young age is "don't talk to strangers."
You may have repeated this to your kids a thousand times. But if the situation actually presented itself, would your son or daughter actually comply?
That's what YouTube star Joey Salads set to find out in a recent social experiment. Salads, usually known for pranks such as stealing from other people's grocery carts and pretending to drink bleach, decided to use his popularity for a public service announcement in his latest video.
In the video, he approaches parents in an unidentified park and explains the experiment he is conducting. After getting their parents' permission, Salads, holding a puppy, approaches several children. In the video more than a couple of kids are willing to leave with him, a stranger, much to the shock of their mothers.
The caption in the video reads "one share can save a life." It's already reached more than three million hits on YouTube. Salads, whose real last name is Saladino, told Yahoo Parenting that the idea was originally supposed to be a prank:
“As I was thinking of extreme prank ideas, I had an idea where I would abduct a child, but I can’t abduct random people’s kids, so I scrapped the idea. Then I thought, I wonder how easy it would be to abduct someone else’s child? I thought I should put this to the test because no one has ever tried it, and I thought: Are kids actually safe from predators?”
But several parenting experts told Yahoo that the experiment had been done plenty of times previously, noting that about 100 children are abducted in a similar manner each year.
In addition, the parenting blog Free Range Parenting, which bills itself as a resource to help raise safe, self-reliant kids, disputes Saldino's claim that 700 children are abducted each day, citing U.S. Department of Justice data that pegs that number somewhere between 100 - 300 a year. It also questions the YouTube star's methodology in the experiment.
Isn’t it more than likely that these kids feel fine going off with this man because they just saw him talking to their mom? What’s more, their mom is right there! If she didn’t want them going off, she’d intervene.
Saldino has made several media appearances since the video went live Friday, and has been promoting the message he pushes in the video.
He also responded to criticism of his video on his Facebook page.
In response to those saying my video has a flaw, in which the child may have seen me talk to their parents.
A stranger could easily go over to the parents, start a conversation about a random topic just so the children see and to make the children think its okay to talk to him.
It could be all apart of the stranger's strategy.
And the fact is, I am still a stranger to these kids.