Spreading "1 in 5" Number Does More Harm Than Good 382
First, what the 1-in-5 number actually means. It originated with a study done in 2000 by the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, which surveyed 1,501 Internet-using youth age 10 through 17. The actual relevant findings of the study were as follows:
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The 1 in 5 figure was the number that had received at least one instance of unwanted sex talk (including from other teenagers), or sex talk from an adult (whether wanted or not), in the past year.
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The proportion of respondents who received a sexual flirtation from an adult, followed by a request to talk on the phone or meet in person, was about 1%.
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The number of survey respondents who actually befriended an adult online and then met the adult in person for sexual purposes, was zero.
The actual proportion of respondents who reported that someone made sexual overtures and asked to talk on the phone or meet in person -- what the study called an "aggressive sexual solicitation" -- was 3%, and 34% of those requests were known to have been made by adults. And even this overestimates the proportion of minors who were truly "sexually solicited", because all it means is that an adult started out by talking to them sexually, and then made some request for offline contact, which could have merely been asking for a phone number. So the scenario that comes to mind when hearing that "1 in 5 children is sexually solicited online" -- of being approached sexually by an adult and asked for an in-person meeting -- had actually happened to no more than 1% of respondents, and probably much fewer than that.
And this is just considering the percentage of youth who received solicitations, not taking into account how they responded. Out of 1,501 youth surveyed, none of them reported actually meeting an adult in person for anything that they described as sexual contact. Two teens in the study had "close friendships" with adults that the authors wrote "may have had sexual aspects". One 17-year-old boy had a relationship with a woman in her late twenties that he described as "romantic" but not sexual, and they never met in person. Another 16-year-old girl became close to a man in his thirties, and they met in a public place, but she described the relationship as non-sexual, and she declined to spend the night with him. (While these could still be considered "close calls", it's worth noting that even if the 16- and 17-year-olds had actually had a sexual relationship with their adult friends, that would have in fact been legal in many U.S. states, and in any case it's not what most people think of when they hear about "children" being "sexually solicited online".)
Of course all of this depends on the accuracy of the answers that the youth gave to the surveyors. But the "1 in 5" figure was based on the youths' stated responses as well. People who cite the study can't have their cake and eat it too, taking the "1 in 5" number as accurate but discounting the fact that none of the teens surveyed reported a sexual relationship with an adult they met online.
These were the data that were available in 2000, when the "1 in 5" number started being spread. The authors of the original study followed up with a 2005 report, "Online Victimization of Youth: Five Years Later", in which the corresponding statistics were:
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1 in 7 respondents received unwanted sex talk or sex talk from an adult, at some point in the past year.
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The proportion of respondents who received a sexual flirtation from an adult, followed by a request to communicate offline, was again about 1-2%. (4% of respondents reported a sexual flirtation plus a request to correspond offline. The new study reported that 39% of all sexual solicitations were made by adults, but did not say what proportion of "aggressive sexual solicitations" -- which included requests for offline contact -- were made by adults.)
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Out of 1,501 respondents surveyed in 2005, two did report an in-person meeting that led to a sexual crime -- one was a 15-year-old girl who met a 30-year-old man in person and had consensual sex with him, and another was a 16-year-old girl who went to a party with an older male she met online who later tried to rape her. But even these incidents (which were both reported to law enforcement) do not mean that the Internet is a more dangerous environment for youth with regard to interaction with adults. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's own Web site links to a study -- also by one of the authors of the "Online Victimization" report -- which found that when all types of abuse are counted, 20% of females experience some type of sexual victimization before adulthood, compared to 2 out of 750 female survey respondents in the "Online Victimization" study who reported sexual abuse by someone they met online.
The NCMEC has
updated
their Web site
to say that "one in seven youths (10 to 17 years) experience
a sexual solicitation or approach while online", although the banner ads
still say 1 in 5. But I
think the 1-in-7 versus 1-in-5 is hardly worth nit-picking, when the real
problem is that
the statement "1 in 5 children is sexually solicited online" is written in
a way that virtually
guarantees it will be mis-heard and
passed along as a statement involving "online predators" or "pedophiles".
"Authorities Say 1 in 5 Children Has Been Approached By Online Predators"
reads the sub-heading
of a
story on ABC
news.
"20% of children who use computer chat rooms have been approached over the
Internet by a pedophile" says an
online safety
site
sponsored by the Albemarle County government in Virginia.
"One in five kids in America are approached by online predators" says a
Congressman's
press
release.
The NCMEC itself never says that 1 in 5 or 1 in 7 children is
"approached by a pedophile",
merely that they are "sexually solicited online". I still think this is
false because that is
not the proportion of minors who are literally solicited for sex, but
suppose that you expanded
"sexual solicitation" to include all sex talk, so that the statement was
"technically true".
That still misses the point, because the issue shouldn't be seen as a game
where sides try to make
their statements as alarmist as possible while still being "technically
true", like the kid with
his
petition to ban
"dihydrogen monoxide".
If you say something that is virtually guaranteed to get
passed along as a wrong and alarmist statement about "pedophiles", aren't
you at least partly responsible?
Why, then, does the NCMEC do it? Their site does have a "Donate" link, but
it's very low-key,
and the site generally seems to steer first-time visitors towards actions
that they can take with
regard to their own children. So I'm not cynical enough to think the "1 in
5" statistic is a
campaign to scare up donations; I think they really do believe they are
doing good by getting
people to believe that number and to take action based on it. The problem
is that there is
such a thing as too much worrying and too much overprotection. Sites like
Facebook are often
used to organize parties and events and send out venue changes, just
because that's the most
efficient way to do it, and if your parents ban you from getting on
Facebook, you'll miss out
on simple things like that. What good does that do for anybody? Critics
of overprotection
often say that overly sheltered kids may rebel later on and get themselves
in worse trouble,
and that's often true, but so what even if they don't? Your quality of
life is still worse
off if you're the only one in your peer group who can't get updates about
your friends' parties.
And your parents'
quality of life will be worse if they're constantly wringing their hands
thinking that there is a
1 in 5 chance their kid will be propositioned online by a pedophile.
So I would urge the NCMEC to reconsider what they're telling
people. Regarding the "1 in 5"
meme that's already out there, it's spread so far that it's probably too
late for the NCMEC
to put the genie back into the bottle. But any anti-censorship group
participating in a
debate about online safety should put the real statistics forward, and
since many in the audience
will have heard the "1 in 5" figure somewhere, take a minute to knock it
down as well. You don't
have to commit political suicide by calling out the NCMEC specifically for
spreading the "1 in 5"
number, but put the right numbers out there.
Unfortunately the subject of child safety is such that wrong information,
from any source, is
unlikely to be criticized if it's erring on the side of caution, but some
memes die faster
than others. Microsoft's
resource
page about "online predators"
says that "if you find
pornography on the family computer" -- not child porn, but regular
pornography -- that could be
a warning sign that "your child is the target of an online predator". I
think that's a wildly
irresponsible thing to be telling parents, but fortunately the meme does
not seem to have spread
beyond that one page, which probably not one parent in a thousand will ever
actually read.
This is a good thing. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is a good thing. (Score:4, Interesting)
Look at some of the "truths" about marijuana. It causes cancer [jcrows.com] (no, that is of course not a mainstream link), it isn't addictive (unlike coffee or alcohol it has no physical withdrawal symptoms, although it is habituating, like orange juice), and rather than leading to harder drugs the laws against it lead to harder drugs ("Got any weed, man?" "No it's dry. Want some coke?").
Good luck with that "truth" thing. Ask "Swift Boat" John Kerry how much good "debunking bullshit" is.
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Re:This is a good thing. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:This is a good thing. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:This is a good thing. (Score:4, Insightful)
The smokers have only themselves to blame for outdoor bans. Indoors, they would never even consider throwing a lit cigarette on the floor and walking away, but outside, it is a frequent cause of forest fires, mostly tossed from car windows. Further, indoors, they would never toss and stomp them, leaving black marks and a pile of white butts, yet we see such egregious littering on America's sidewalks and beaches.
Simply put, if you don't want to be regulated, you can start by acting responsibly and cleaning up after yourselves. Respect the rights of others if you want them to respect yours. As long as a large percentage of smokers don't care about the cleanliness of their environments, people who do will continue to regulate where they are allowed to make a mess. Simple as that.
Re:This is a good thing. (Score:5, Informative)
We've seen forest fires and other major fires caused by lit cigarettes as recently as six months ago. From a quick Google search:
In fact, in Oregon alone, Cigarette-induced fires have killed 29 people and injured 129 since 2001, and have been responsible for 1500 residential fires, 70 forest fires, and $28 million in damage in that same time period. (Source: http://www.blueoregon.com/2007/01/firesafe_cigare.html [blueoregon.com]) Of course, that's a year old, so the numbers today would be higher, but that should give you a good picture of the problem, anyway.
Various states are passing laws to require fire-safe cigarettes (though don't kid yourself, these are not truly safe, just safer), but AFAIK, they haven't taken effect anywhere.
Re:This is a good thing. (Score:4, Informative)
Most people stop sticking gum everywhere when they get above about the age of six.
It's not a red herring at all. If you've ever walked on the beaches in L.A. even for a few minutes, you'd understand why they passed anti-smoking laws. If you comb a ten foot by ten foot area, you'd probably find 50-100 butts within the top foot or so of sand. It's really disgusting. Basically, people used the beach as a giant ashtray---not down near the water so much as up near the entrances that everyone has to use to get there. Either way, the beaches are a mess.
Each year, California does a costal cleanup day. Last year alone, they collected more than 347,000 cigarette butts on the beaches (Source; www.coastal.ca.gov [ca.gov]). For 22 consecutive years, cigarette waste was the largest single source of litter on the beaches, and at last count, made up a whopping 40% of the total debris picked up on the beaches. That's nearly half, which means it is almost as much as all the litter, driftwood, rotting fish, seaweed, etc. combined.
Give a hoot. Don't pollute.
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Oh, great. So I get to be a shut-in or a virtual amish
just because I don't want my health or comfort to suffer
for YOUR bad habits.
If your addictions impact other people, be a man and take responsibility for it.
Re:This is a good thing. (Score:4, Interesting)
That is not always an option, for every situation. Personally, I'd rather have smoking banned completely; I'm uncomfortable giving the government with that much power, and Smoking Needs to Go Away. There's no easy solution of how to do it. And don't give me any of that "personal/property rights" junk. Smoking damages the health of others, therefore it is a public health issue.
In our apartment, we recently discovered that our son's room is filling with secondhand smoke from our neighbor's apartment (our neighbor is a heavy smoker). Here are our options:
Obviously, #6 is out of the question, being Not a Nice Thing (and illegal).
#5 is not an option, as my son's health is paramount.
We've already been through #2 three years ago, when we had to leave another apartment, thanks to a cross-connected ventilation system. This is no guarantee of a (mostly) permanent solution. We also would have to move further out from town, or to a junkier apartment in order to keep the rents about the same (we got a really good rate on our current place).
#3 is really sucky, as the housing market is tanking. While we are saving up to buy a house, we were figuring on pulling the trigger in 2 years. From past experience, buying a house when our back isn't against the wall allows us to negotiate a much better deal.
So, that leaves #4 as it is the easiest, cheapest method. If that doesn't work, then we'll do #1 and see what happens. Starting to look for a house now is probably what we're going to have to do as well.
Net-net, this guy, smoking in the privacy and comfort of his own home, is affecting the health of others. Too bad, so sad, but smoking needs to go away everywhere, for everyone.
Re:This is a good thing. (Score:4, Insightful)
If you can't use detectors because the smoke sets them off, then your neighbour has likely tampered with his. It's quite common. A recent fire in Toronto showed that the detectors were tampered with. The landlords have to run the power to the bathrooms through the smoke detectors so that if they don't work, the bathroom stays dark and people complain.
Anyway, make sure you have working smoke detectors and make sure your belongings are covered by your insurance.
Re:This is a good thing. (Score:4, Insightful)
It doesn't matter is the stats say 0.01% of people are harmed - those people did not have a choice, so any number over 0 is unacceptable. (And I'm quite sure the number is far higher.)
And please don't repeat nonsense about going someplace else, before the indoor bans there WAS no other place.
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Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in the pool.
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As for the smoking: as a smoker you can not understand just how disgusting the smoke is to other people, add in the health affects on top of that, and you'll understand why people hate it so much.
Re:This is a good thing. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's SMOKE.
You know, that stuff that KILLS you usually.
In any other context, the overwhelming instinct and instruction
would be to flee from the source of the smoke and to try and to
avoid inhaling it. Crawl on the floor and try to get out the
door.
With anyone with allergies or asthma, the effects are very easy
to verify visually.
Re:This is a good thing. (Score:4, Informative)
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Note that it doesn't say addiction. It says dependance. And note where it got its graphics: the same place it got its funding. That's right, the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
Couldn't you have found a more scholarly link than a government-funded college? You expect them to bite the hand that feeds them
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Bullshit needs to be exposed and countered, even when propagated by well-meaning members of benevolent organizations.
Yep. To paraphrase Ayn Rand: FUD is FUD. (A is A). If we call malicious organizations to the mat for spreading FUD, then we have to call even well-meaning folks on it too. The bottom line is that this "1 in 5" meme is FUD, and it's pulled out like a weapon year after year to get fascist, draconian regulations passed on the Internet. Let's put an end to the madness and launch a "open source" marketing campaign along the lines of 'Get Firefox' --> 'Stop the FUD: Your kids are no worse off on the In
Re:This is a good thing. (Score:5, Insightful)
Solution: Ban real-life contact and restrict our kids to online interaction only.
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Actually they're in far, far more danger from pederasts and other dangers on the streets than they are on the internet. Want to fuck some youngsters? You can get on the internet, or just go to the mall. Preferably dressed in a police uniform, clergy collar, clown suit... or just get a job at a day care center.
I wrote a journal [slashdot.org] about that last year. It concerns a local man who had been a policeman, clergyman, clown, and day ca
Re:This is a good thing. (Score:5, Interesting)
(Rudd-Labor in bold to emphasise that this wasn't a problem under the Liberals, who had a realistic approach based on educating children, which was very successful, rather than trying to make the internet pre-school safe.. To any Aussies reading let's bring the Liberals back next election.)
Thanks for the well written informative article.
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Whatever does it for you buddy.
You'd rather tolerate bullshit? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Don't Question It! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Don't Question It! (Score:5, Insightful)
This bullshit has done harm. It's turned us into one of the most cowardly societies in history. We've raised a couple of generations of kids to be scared of their own shadows, and it's all largely manufactured. The TV and the Internet make distant and rare events seem local and common.
Maybe this organization thinks it's doing a good thing, but it's nothing more than a perveyor of paranoia. It has produced a neurotic society, not a healthy society.
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What are you doing in public that could result in children?
Re:Don't Question It! (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally I'm all for it. I'm sick of my indulgence in legal adult pleasures being prohibited or interfered with because of the "think of the children" asshats.
Oh...wait? What? You actually want freedom? Not this kind of totalitarian control?
Then let me say this loudly and clearly -- your children are YOUR responsibility, not society's. Get them out of everyone else's face.
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Mr. Fields? [wikipedia.org] I thought you were dead?
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Forget about molesters, what about MUBs? (Score:2)
Does that include "Kiss my ass!"? (Score:2, Funny)
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with some hard work and organization (Score:5, Funny)
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Just another player in the culture of fear (Score:5, Insightful)
Ends justify the means, eh? (Score:2)
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And a prison term of several decades seems harsh for fudging statistics in order to help a non-profit raise awareness and funds.
Ok, that is a bit harse. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Ends justify the means, eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
If we gave money based upon actual risk, street and highway safety and heart disease would dwarf anything else by an incredible margin. But these aren't "sexy" ways to die or get killed. They don't raise our bloodpressure, precisely because they are so common. The six o'clock news isn't going to up its viewership by saying "Bob in St. Louis died when he t-boned while on the morning commute" or "Jane in Seattle dropped dead from a heart attack in the shower last night", despite the fact that Jane and Bob are in fact far more representative of premature death than anything else out there.
I don't think anyone is arguing that we shouldn't be educating our kids on the danger of the Internet. But let's keep things in proportion here. What we really should be teaching them is "Don't always believe what the news media and non-profits tell you, because they have a vested interest in either scaring you or taking your money. Learn to weigh things on their merits, and not just on the hysteria they create."
fearmongering and false complacency (Score:4, Insightful)
you can always ferret out such people. the ones who see threats everywhere should be avoided. the ones who see no threat from anything anywhere should be avoided
but too much on slashdot you see a lot of warnings about dread and hysteria. well, the opposite is to be warned away from too: complacency has just as many dangers about it as hysteria
child abuse is real. terrorism is real. how much should you be concerned about either? it's obviously low but it's also obviously not zero. avoid those who aren't concerned at all and those who see pedophiles and terrorists around every corner, and you'll do ok in life
Re:fearmongering and false complacency (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that there are many unlikely dangers. Why are terrorism and pedophiles given top billing when, in fact, more people die every year in car accidents than are ever likely to die in the entire history of species from a terrorist bombing or a murderous pedophile? Breast cancer is far more deadly. Heart disease is far more deadly. Alcoholism and gambling are going to destroy more families. Hell, overindulgence of salt is far more likely to kill than some crazy Egyptian in an airplane cockpit.
What's lacking in all of this is a sense of proportion. Pedophiles and terrorists are by a wide margin extremely unlikely ways to get killed, injured or psychologically damaged. They aren't even in the same ballpark as most of things I list above.
It's about control (Score:3, Insightful)
I cannot control when and where a terrorist will attack.
I can control if my child will be a victim of incest at my hands. I have some control over whether she will be a victim of a family friend or babysitter, by choosing who she is allowed to be alone with.
I cannot control if my child will be a victim of a random kidnapping.
Lack of control causes fear, uncertainty, and doubt and frankly, it scares people beyond all reasonable proportion.
it's also basic human psychology (Score:2)
but we don't. and we never will
therefore, the deeper lesson is that human emotion carries into the equations. and talking about the issues without taking human emotion into account is wishful thinking, and ultimately fruitless thinking, since you will never remove human emotion from the equation, we will never become emotionless machines
in other words, talking about risks as related to terrorism and pedophilia as something cold
Re:It's about control (Score:5, Interesting)
"proportion" is a good word (Score:2)
in other words, your understanding of the issues seems to be summed up by actuary tables comparing relative risks. this is only part of the concepts in play. i won't be condescending and talk about the other (pretty obvious) concepts, but what i will say is that if statistics were the only way to think about these issues, the world be a lot simpler place. unfortunately, it isn't so simple
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Pedophiles are an extremely common way to get psychologically damaged. A great many women suffer for the rest of their life from sexual abuse as a child (and a number of studies have shown that an appalling high percentage of girls are sexually abused by a relative).
The last part of your statement is the important part. In the vast majority of sexual abuse cases, the victim knows the abuser. Strangers scooping up your kids is a comparatively rare occurance. This often gets overlooked because nobody wants to believe that their brother, father, sister, cousin, friend or neighbor would do such a thing to their kids. It is silly to think that it only happens to girls as well. I'm willing to bet that a lot of men have been victims and just choose not to admit it.
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It's close enough to zero that it shouldn't be given a second thought. You'ld know if you read my journals that I'm friends with more hookers (not mentioned in the latest journal, it concerns a violent lunatic) than I am a client of. People have a way of telling me things that they wouldn't tell anyone else. I don't know why, but it just is.
At any rate, every single one o
Solicited online? (Score:2)
Fake Statistics Hurt Real Victims (Score:4, Insightful)
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At least here there's a clear difference between the actual victims (kids) and the scare-mongers (
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Not all "1 in X" statistics are misleading. One reason the "1 in 5" NCMEC misleading statistic is dangerous because when people realize it is misleading, they assume that other similar statistics must necessarily be similarly misleading. The "1 in 4 women are victims of sexual assault" statistic usually comes from one of two CALCASA studies (one in 2000 the other in 2003), both asked if the respondent had been a victim of rape or atte
Statistics (Score:2, Insightful)
I have difficulty deciphering if the article is about how the 1 in 5 number is a statistical misrepresentation when taken into account errors and so forth, or a more general commentary on FUD-spreading by certain organizations and institutions.
The statistical debate is clear, 1:5 is an inaccurate because it is too close to the indivisible unit of the problem, i.e, one person. It actually introduces an error rate al
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Anytime you see social statistics on a sample size of many thousands or hundreds being represented in simple ratio of persons as 1:5 , assume that to be wildly inaccurate.
Actually, F one-of TAs [livescience.com], the study actually said:
"Almost one in five (19 percent)...received an unwanted sexual solicitation in the past year."
The 1:5 is just an approximation from the study because it sounds better. I'm not defending it as legit, I'm just saying...
I want a detailed breakdown (Score:3, Interesting)
For young children in child-safe areas of the net:
* 1 out of x gets sent porn
* 1 out of x gets an explicit proposal: "wanna f***"
* 1 out of x gets something that is clearly out of line
Ditto for young teens in young-teen-safe areas, older teens in teen-safe-areas, and most importantly, kids and teens who are in "unsafe" areas where they can be expected to be propositioned.
Of all of those, I'd want to know how many improper messages and pictures were sent by adults, how many by youth, and how many by children. I would also like the breakdown of whether the person sending the message or image believed he was sending them to a youth or child.
If some 8 year old girl is hanging out in #quickie-hookup-now on IRC and she gets sent pr0n, who is to blame? I say the parents, not the person who sent it to her. The person who sent it probably thought "she" was a horny 60 year old man pretending to be an 8 year old girl and was going along with it.
If the 8 year old is 13 I'd blame the parents and maybe the youth, depending on whether the youth knew what she was doing.
If the "kid" was 15, I'd almost always blame the youth if she were hanging out in adult chat rooms.
Kids are far more at risk for actual harm from their own family members, neighbors, and family friends than from strangers. If you aren't harming your kids and you minimize the time your kids are alone with other adults, the odds of your kid being sexually abused by an adult go way down.
Of course, there is still the very real problem of abuse by peers or slightly older children or youth.
one in five (Score:2)
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offline comparison (Score:5, Insightful)
The biggest problem with this survey is that it conflates two very different things: teen-to-teen interaction, and adult-to-teen interaction. Even though they qualify the teen-to-teen stuff they include by saying it has to be "unwanted", there's a fundamental difference between being hit on by that ugly kid in your Lit class, and being hit on by an adult sexual predator.
Wanna Cyber? (Score:2)
I think there were a lot of young adults there because I would often get requests like "ASL" (age/sex/location) and "wanna cyber" (engage in sex talk).
All of which could be considered solicitations and could easily be ignored.
A lot of such traffic could be suppressed if there was a public c
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Numbers (Score:2)
The fact that the statistic is inaccurate just means that it's no different from most other statistics that get thrown around.
Re:Numbers (Score:5, Insightful)
When you've learned the lesson of the story, come back and we can continue this conversation.
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Because the number is way higher than what people experience IRL. So parents will pressure the Gov't to make the safeness comparable to real life, saying that it's so dangerous that even if they try to protect in monitor their children, they will still get victimi
The Truth is not "Thruthy" Enough (Score:2)
There is a very simple reason for holding on to fallacious statistics like the "1 in 5" here. If you changed that to the real percentage, parents would worry less about it, and feel like their child was safe enough without implementing even the most obvious common-sense measures to combat a rare, but very real threat. These groups probably feel they need to have a scarier number to sufficiently motivate people, so they latched on to a stat that, with enough obfuscation and fudging of the actual information,
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The thing is, the reason they would feel that way is that it is pretty much true. The real level of the danger of this particular problem is such that special precautions against it are almost certainly unwarranted and a waste of time and effort that could be directed at dealing with ot
Misses an obvious source of skew (Score:2)
Slashdot needs Digg Links by default (Score:2)
Missing the point (Score:2)
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Not having your kids in
Did you know.... (Score:2, Funny)
The other four (Score:2)
Missing and Exploited Children (Score:2, Insightful)
When we hear all these scare statistics about the number of "Missing and Exploited" children, and see all the posters at such places as Wal-Mart, the term basically scares the public into thinking that huge numbers of children are being kidnapped for rape.
If you actually read the profiles under the pictures, you see that many of the children have the same last name as the
And the most common solicitation? (Score:2)
There are good and bad things about the Internet (Score:2)
The bad thing is used everywhere in the media; namely that it is easier for a sexual predator to get in touch with children without being seen.
The good thing is hardly ever mention in the media; namely that the online world is just that: the online world. In order to molest the child, the sexual predator has to move the interaction over to the real world. So essentially, there is a buffer between the child and the pedophile that the pedophile has to overcome and if the child
YOU SICKO (Score:2)
(Also, they're all terrorists who hate America.)
WoW! 1 in 5? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, my children, and when we discussed it (after kicking the offender from the group) they assured me that while it was a practically daily experience at high school, it rarely occurred on-line, and they never gave the time of day in either situation.
Obviously then, my kids should count in that "1 in 5". However, I still think it's alarmist - kids have been solicited forever, and educating them about how to handle such situations without fearmongering is the correct course of action.
The truth hit me decades ago (Score:5, Insightful)
The Phil Donahue show interviewed a guy from the major child protection outfit of the day. (I believe, though I'm not sure, that it was the NCMEC, back before they obtained quasi-governmental, beyond-reproach status.) This was back when the first scares about "your children are being targeted by slavers/devil worshippers/perverts" were first gearing up. The rep plainly and unambiguously said that 50,000 children a year go missing.
50,000.
The entire audience was nodding their heads and agreeing about how this was a terrible problem. Something, however, bothered me about that number. Then I remembered - I had done a report in school about casualties during the Vietnam war. We had about 50,000 casualties during the time period I looked at for the report.
Everyone I knew had some family member who was killed or injured in Vietnam. NOBODY known to me had a family member who was a "missing child." Something was wrong here. If 50,000 children a year went missing, there wouldn't have been anyone in that audience; they would have all been out looking for their children.
I actually did some investigating. The stats they were quoting resulted from adding up every possible definition of "missing child." They included children who were being cared for by the (legally) non-custodial parent. They included every runaway reported, even if the runaway child returned 10 minutes after the police were called. They included throwaways. They included every damn thing they could possibly count, including certain "projections" for any numbers they thought unreported. In other words, they weren't even terribly circumspect about the fact they were exaggerating like crazy.
Then I did some research on what we think of when we think of "missing child" - a little kid, snatched by a stranger for nefarious purposes. There wasn't a lot of data. The only organization that had done much research was the Illinois state police. They concluded that by-stranger abductions of pre-high school kids happened at a rate of, roughly, 50 to 150 times a year in the U.S. Those numbers had been stable for some time and, afaik, remain so today.
Yes, some kids to get snatched, raped, and murdered. But there are so few that it's impossible to protect against it since the circumstances are so statistically anomalous that they can't be predicted.
We would actually raise healthier, happier, more social and caring children if we'd teach them to strike up conversations with and be trusting of strangers at every opportunity. Strangers are so statistically unlikely to be a threat that they can be entirely discounted as such. Those 100 or so kids are going to cross paths with a truly evil person and die every year, anyway; there's no need to instill fear in all the rest to protect against something that can't really be stopped.
You wanna really protect little kids against real sexual abuse instead of wasting resources protecting them against some kid on the playground who steals a kiss or a boogeyman so rare as to be practically nonexistent? There are lots of guys who are a little dodgy but not a real threat; they would never dream of snatching a kid off the street. Put them in the house with a constantly available little girl or boy, however, and temptation starts to rise. If you really want to protect kids, here's what you do: Don't let Mom's new boyfriend move in. Even more generally - don't trust family members just because they're family members; they're the ones who will betray that trust.
That, however, isn't neat and easy like scaring parents because their kids are using the internet. That would actually require morality, hard work, a principled approach to the way people live their lives. That's way too much work. It'll never happen. Better to just go back to scaremongering.
Public baths (Score:5, Insightful)
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Should we now close all public pools to underage kids in the name of "save the children"?
This is somewhat of a straw-man argument. Very few people think that we should "close the internet" to save the children. In the case of a public pool one could make decent arguments for having separate "adult" and "parent/child" dressing rooms. This may not be necessary and it may be expensive and impractical, but it isn't impossible to achieve.
In the case of the Internet, such measures really are impossible to achieve. I.e. how do you check the age of participants in chat rooms, on Facebook, etc? Also, h
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Re:erring on the side of caution (Score:5, Insightful)
But, the thing is, there is no side of caution. There is merely a side that appears to be the side of caution, when you consider only one problem, and consider it in isolation, ignoring the actions that people will feel motivated to take out of "caution" when misled by the deliberately deceptive that organization present out of "caution".
When statistics that are sold as true to create a specter of a massive threat that is almost completely illusory, it is not legitimate caution, because when people are misled about the nature of the threat, they are motivated to take actions with costs disproportionate to the real threat, whether in terms of forgoing useful learning opportunities for their children, or supporting legislation that destroys freedom for everyone for no real gain in safety as a precaution against the illusory threat.
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Everyone knows that good sanitation improves health. Nobody knew just how much sanitation was required, so everyone erred on the side of caution. Now we have antibacterial soap everywhere, children don't play in the dirt anymore, everyone washes their hands all the time, etc. Everyone should be as healthy as a horse, right?
But no. Suddenly we're discovering that if you don't give the immune system something to fight, it will find something, and
Re:erring on the side of caution (Score:4, Insightful)
I was talking about both.
Spreading misleading statistics about the degree of risk makes it more difficult for people (whether parents acting to care for their own children, or citizens deciding among people selling government policies) to effectively weigh the risks being addressed vs. the costs of any option for addressing, mitigating, or controlling those risks.
The first amendment "has to do with" all speech. It also has to do with religious liberty aside from speech. But, anyway, I wasn't discussing Constitutional limits on government power even where I mentioned government policy, I was referring to the ability of citizens to properly weigh what policies were justified based on the facts.
No, the main problem here is that people are lying about what the problem is to scare people (parents in their role with regard to their own children and citizens with regard to their role in government, as well), and that those lies get in the way of dealing with this and other problems appropriately.
Whether or not that's true, the idea you present here is not what I argued, so I really don't care.
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But we're not "erring on the side of caution." We're doing things that have no impact, except make it acceptable to brand people and track them. So we're not doing anything to solve the problem, and we're introducing new problems. Why is that a good idea?
That being said, most sexual assaults happen from people children know, be it a family member or a neighbor.
Indeed. And given that, maybe we should take children a
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OK, how about as your doctor I "err on the side of caution". You probably have a cold, but there's a slight chance that you have blocked sinuses. Brain abscesses have been found to occur in some cases of sinusitis. Therefore I'd like to a) take a sample and culture b) perform a CT and MRI c) do a lumbar puncture d) rule out influenza, parainfluenza and respiratory syncytial virus e) rule out mucormycosis f) rule out lymphomas and other nasal cavity tumors.
Total cost: $23,000
You ca
Re:While I do not approve of internet censorship.. (Score:2)
Re:While I do not approve of internet censorship.. (Score:2, Interesting)
How low should the true rates of online sexual predator encounters be before we can consider it "not a threat"?
It's not the numbers that make it a threat, it's the event itself and how your child reacts to it.
If children were taught to ignore, block, and/or report such behavior and they did so, the threat to that particular child would be approximately zero for come-ons. There would still be some risk for emotional harm if the person sent porn with his first message, but that's not common.
Let's look at a slightly different threat: The threat of repeat sex offenders.
Some repeat sex offenders are at high risk to re
Re:Scary sounding words and volume truth (Score:4, Interesting)
Though I am sure some are responsive to soundbites, sometimes I think they exist to stifle and intimidate opposition. A thought terminating cliche [wikipedia.org] could be a good description. For example calling pedophiles, "baby rapers", even if they are two years older than their almost adult victims, and insisting that such people be branded in this way, really puts reasonable people on the backfoot.
No one really wants or has the motivation to get into a protracted and emotive argument with such people, and so remain silent. I think the silent majority really doesn't care about pedophiles as much as the media exposure would suggest, and I think most of the media exposure is fueled by a minority who actually enjoy hearing about, and overreacting to, such macabre and lurid reports.
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Does this mean that they went ahead and arrested the 30-year-old and marked him as a sex offender for having documented and absolutely unmistakably consensual sex?
Almost certainly.
When is there going to be a push to inform teens that they can completely ruin a persons life accidentally by having a serious and consensual relationship with them unless they completely hide any contact they are having with adults online and don't let anyone know where they are going or who they are meeting with.
The media itself is providing this education.
However, for decades if not centuries barely-illegal teens who knew exactly what they were doing have used sex with naive or sometimes not-so-naive adults so they can blackmail them.