A child is lured behind a bush on North Temple by a man promising to show her a rabbit, and he rapes her instead.

A group of children are invited to join a stranger to search for wildflowers on Capitol Hill, where he attacks a 12-year-old girl.

A "big burly tramp" takes a 14-year-old boy into a Springville trainyard, puts his hand over the teen's mouth and rapes him.

Research into the history of child sex abuse in Utah shows a prevalence of brazen, broad-daylight assaults -- and may reaffirm the value of educational campaigns that help make today's children more cautious, says a local historian and child advocate.

Doug Miller, director of the Davis County Children's Justice Center, researched 2,800 cases of child sex abuse covered in Utah newspapers from 1870 to 1910. The stories suggest children then were more susceptible to stranger attacks than they are now, he said.

Accepting gifts and rides from strangers may not have been such obvious no-nos to children a century ago, Miller said. He points to an 1898 account of a man who invited a 10-year-old to join a choir and promised that members would receive "lovely dresses." She followed the stranger behind a Salt Lake City building so he could "measure her;" instead, he allegedly tried to rape her but was stopped by a passer-by.

There was a Box Elder County case in 1911 in which a traveler coaxed an 8-year-old into his buggy, took her to a field and attacked her, Miller learned. The man told a judge that he was driven to violence by a "terrible headache."

But what children have gained in street smarts since then, predators have gained in strategy, Miller said.

"People who have a proclivity to abuse kids have better techniques," he said. "They rely on grooming and try to establish a relationship with the child that on the surface seems like a positive relationship … and exploit that relationship."

Victim advocates have tried to respond with increasingly sensitive abuse-prevention campaigns, said Anne Freimuth, executive director of Prevent Child Abuse Utah, which develops awareness campaigns for schools.

Schools began teaching "stranger danger" in the 1980s, Freimuth said. For a time, "stranger danger" was emphasized so strongly that it not only obscured the risks posed by acquaintances -- responsible for 98 percent of all abuse, she said -- but it kept kids from differentiating between helpful and suspicious strangers.

She pointed to the case of Brennan Hawkins, who was 11 when he got lost hiking in the Uinta Mountains in 2005; he was so wary of strangers that he did not respond to adult rescuers because he was afraid they would kidnap him.

In the late 1990s, schools began teaching more about acquaintance abuse, Freimuth said. Now, prevention messages return to a simple message, Freimuth said: Listen to your instincts.

"For a little kid, it's telling them, 'Trust your uh-oh feeling. You can always say no, even when it's a grown-up, then you go tell,'?" she said. That establishes a sense that children have a right to be in control of their own bodies, she said.

The main "stranger danger" now is when they let their guard down in front of their computers, Freimuth said.

"The stranger we are concerned about is on the Internet -- the one who purports to be your 14-year-old buddy," she said.

Kids today "are pretty savvy" and guarded about strangers who approach them on the street, she said.

"The harder component is that kids need to be aware of people who are in a role to love and protect them," Miller said. "How do you go into a school room and say, 'Watch out for your grandpa'?"