"Panic mode"

It's so easy to slip from healthy dozes of precaution and suspicion, to seeing ghosts everywhere.

Story:
In an example of how Internet rumors can take on a life of their own, suspicions and anxiety quickly filled the void of information after several Southwest Austin residents reported seeing a white van cruising their neighborhoods.

When calls to police yielded no immediate information, one resident e-mailed a bulletin to several of his neighbors and local media outlets that said police hadn't responded to reports of an attempted abduction of a 13-year-old girl by several men in a white van with Georgia license plates.

In response to a wave of concern from parents, three principals of area elementary schools put their campuses on lockdown, forbade students to walk home unescorted and sent letters home warning of possible danger.

The all's-clear came Sunday when police reported that several white vans full of door-to-door salesmen from Georgia combed Southwest Austin last week. They were selling magazines.

Child abductions are rare: Of about 797,500 children abducted in a year in the U.S., according to a 2002 Justice Department report, 7.3 percent were taken by someone other than a family member and less than 1 percent, 115 children under 18, were victims of strangers or of people with whom the children were only slightly acquainted.

"Unfortunately, parents are continually fed a diet of scare stories. When confronted with unusual circumstances, they can easily shift into panic mode," said Frank Furedi, a researcher on responses to fear and the author of the book "Paranoid Parenting."

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