Yeah, crime rates in the US and most of Europe having been dropping precipitously for several generations now. I don't know if it's even that much of a perception that crime is higher, because there were plenty of politicians running on crime scares when I was a kid, too.

I think it's a combination of a bunch of cultural factors, from the high-level politicians using pedophiles as a scare tactic because pedophiles are the only group left it's universally okay to hate, to the mid-level how isolating society currently is in so many ways, to the very low-level that there just aren't as many kids anymore (there are now substantially more 30-39 year olds in the US than 5-15 year olds, for probably the first time in history) so people, including parents! just aren't prepared for kids to be around in the same way.