Child Safety: Is this the only way?

I grew up, like everyone else, on a healthy diet of comics - Winnie the Pooh, Dennis the Menace, Noddy, Casper the Friendly Ghost, Asterix and Charlie Brown. No one at that time and age, ever bother bothered about issues like racisim, child abuse and sexual harassment. We read them and enjoyed them. After I grew up, the same comics were read only when I was ill and in bed and Charlie Brown to a little girl I knew. There were ceratin people who decided to take a dark look at these funnies and came up with stuff that said that the characters in these comics were politically incorrect and rascists.

Where has the innocence of childhood vanished?

A couple of weeks ago, I was with a friend at a local mall, and he tried to speak to this cute little girl who came to him on all fours. For him, it was like talking to his own neice, almost the same age. For me, it was fun to see my buddy bend at his substantial middle to chat up with a two pony-tailed, chubby-cheeked, rhapsodic small child who could barely manage to be still. For others, it was something very ordinary. All Indians have an inborn love for small children and will go out of their way to be friendly and make an affectionate contact with them.

But it's an extremely different story in other parts of the world. Stay away from strangers - is the rule. Try to kiss an American baby or pat a British baby - none of whom you've ever met before - and the next you'll find yourself behind the bars with a lawsuit for sexual harassment. Children at a very young age are taught to beware strangers, ofcourse with some justfication. They are hardly allowed to play in gardens/playgrounds or any other public place without adult supervision.

Is this a good thing? Isn't this a loss of human innocence? Or is this the best possible way left, to keep your child safe?