In the store, as they were browsing the aisles, a middle-aged customer — a woman — approached our son and started talking to him. Then she tried to touch him.

Now maybe it was meant as an innocent gesture. A pat on the head. There's a cute boy.

But my wife didn't take it that way. Alarms went off. My wife was suddenly overcome with the urge to tear this woman apart.

Instead, she quickly took the kids to another part of the store without comment or apology.

When I first heard what happened, I'll admit it: I wondered if my wife had overreacted. Of German, Irish and Russian extraction, she comes from a long line of Tempers of Mass Destruction (TMDs) that don't take much to ignite. But along with her TMD comes more than a little intuition. Her first impressions are usually right; she only deploys TMDs when absolutely necessary.

Who knows if this middle-aged woman meant my son any harm. Maybe she just had a weird idea about the notion of personal space. Maybe she genuinely liked kids.

But I can't fault my wife's reaction.

It's not paranoia if it actually happens.

Two days ago, the Joseph J. Peters Institute — a Center City mental health agency that tries to prevent and treat sexual abuse — announced that 270,000 adult Philadelphians were sexually abused as kids. More than a quarter of a million people, in a city of 1.5 million. That's one in six people.

This number was released the same day a Wharton professor emeritus was arrested at Dulles Airport for carrying mini-DVDs that allegedly contained footage of said professor engaged in sexual acts with what appeared to be 14- to 16-year-old boys. And just after the sad, strange case of John Mark Karr, who fantasized that confessing to the rape and murder of a preschooler would pave the way for Johnny Depp to portray him in JonBenet Forever.

The media seem especially preoccupied with child endangerment stories in the past few weeks, as if the Gods Who Control the News suddenly decided, Enough of this Lebanon shit. Let's put some kids in jeopardy — no wait, I know, let's dig up JonBenet.

But where does bugshit paranoia end, and healthy concern begin?

Parents my age (mid-30s) have a tough time relying on examples from their own childhoods. We belong to a generation who still could roam the city streets more or less at will, as long as we reported home in time for supper. Looking back, there were countless opportunities for me to die/be abducted/fall down a well, had there been a well anywhere near my neighborhood. Sometimes I feel like a fly who somehow traveled the length of an interstate highway without once, by some miracle, encountering a windshield.

Maybe that's just childhood. Still, I'm overcome with the urge to keep my kids away from that damn highway. Far, far away.

Which is wrong, of course.

I have a friend who's also a dad, but with much older children — teenaged girls. He, too, marvels that he made it out of childhood alive. My childhood was positively sheltered compared to his. One of his friends from high school is currently locked up for murder; another was a "power dealer" for a drug ring in his neighborhood.

"Sometimes, I think it's just luck," he said.

And he told me a brief story that I haven't been able to get out of my head.

One day, while hanging around with his pals — among them, the would-be killer, the drug dealer— my friend saw a girl he knew from school. A 14-year-old. Sweet girl. Quiet. She was walking down the sidewalk in front of the house.

"Hey," he called to her. "Come here."

She started hanging out, and eventually became involved with the dealer. In that moment, my friend told me, that girl's life changed forever. All because he said, "Come here."

Fly, meet windshield.

I know, I know — this is the fate of every parent: a state of perpetual worry. My friend's m.o. with his teenaged daughters is to strike that balance between being involved and being an ogre.

There's nothing we can do to keep them off the highway. Best we can do is teach them how to negotiate the traffic.

(duane@citypaper.net)