Traffic Tragedies: Police, Children, and Safety in the Age of Automobility

In the midst of a public panic over the apparent rise in child sex slayings in 1956, Toronto’s police chief relativized children’s vulnerability. Since 1928, Chief Constable John Chisholm claimed, Toronto had experienced only three child sex murders. The heinous nature of these crimes had exaggerated the actual threat posed to children, he observed, obscuring a more common and persistent hazard to childhood: the traffic accident. Over those same twenty-eight years, 350 children had died on the city’s streets in tragic encounters with cars, trollies, and trucks.¹ In the postwar era, the Canadian media declared accidents the “greatest child killer