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)
Just another player in the culture of fear (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Fake Statistics Hurt Real Victims (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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 almost comparable to itself, since there cannot be less than one person interviewed, the minimum error rate is 1. And thus 1:5 lies between bounds of 0:5 and 2:5. It also implies also an even spread of these cases, oversimplifying the problem.
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. Make this known , and we wont have to worry about the FUD.
Re:This is a good thing. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Public baths (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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.
Re:This is a good thing. (Score:5, Insightful)
Solution: Ban real-life contact and restrict our kids to online interaction only.
Re:This is a good thing. (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
You'd rather tolerate bullshit? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Numbers (Score:5, Insightful)
When you've learned the lesson of the story, come back and we can continue this conversation.
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.
Re:Public baths (Score:1, Insightful)
Ok, that is a bit harse. (Score:3, Insightful)
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 "last seen with adult". In other words, many of these cases are custody cases where one parent left the state either before the custody case went to court, or after a court decision the parent didn't like.
I'm not condoning running from the law here. But these children really aren't likely to be in any danger. They are with a relative - just not the one the judge ordered.
I think it's disingenuous to lump them together with the runaways and children kidnapped by strangers who actually are in danger. It elevates the level of public paranoia by making the number of dangerous kidnappings seem higher, and uses that elevated paranoia to get a sympathetic populace to essentially enforce orders from family courts instead of focusing on finding the truly endangered.
Re:The zero isn't really zero (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:This is a good thing. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:fearmongering and false complacency (Score:3, Insightful)
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 of these girls was molested as a child or adolescent (before the age of 14). Every single one was molested by a family member or family friend. It was usually the mother's boyfriend who did the molesting.
Are you going to be killed by a terrorist? No. You're more likely to die by tripping over your own shoelaces than to be killed by a terrorist. Again, if you are murdered there is almost a 100% chance it will be by a friend or even more likely a family member.
Worrying about terrorists and online predators distracts from the real dangers we face daily - like that commute to work. 40,000 people die every year on the US highways, while only 3,000 died this entire century from terrorists. I'd like to see some of that homeland security money go to guardrails and other highway safety improvements where it would actually save lives.
People like you with attitudes like youres are a big part of the problem. Shut off that damned TV once in a while.
Re:fearmongering and false complacency (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Injustice and False statistics (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:This is a good thing. (Score:5, 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."
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.
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.
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.
Re:This is a good thing. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It's about control (Score:1, Insightful)
Fighter pilots, who had the highest mortality rate, had the lowest rate of PTSD because they felt like they had more control.
Is the causality proven? Remember, dead pilots don't get PTSD, so the mortality rate alone would depress the PTSD rate. Even if you only look at the survivors, the mortality rate has an effect on the length of service, which could well account for the PTSD.
Re:Fields was hateful, I am fearful. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This is a good thing. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This is a good thing. (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
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.
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:3, Insightful)
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:Missing the point (Score:3, Insightful)
Not having your kids in approved car seats is probably a far far greater risk. No one should paint sexual exploitation as trivial, but don't you think a proper accounting of just what is most likely to harm or kill your kids is in order before we start talking about things like impinging on liberties?
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: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:3, Insightful)
Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in the pool.
Re:The truth hit me decades ago (Score:1, Insightful)
You hit a huge hot-button issue of mine. I would only amend your statement to say; teach them to be experienced in dealing with adults and the adult world.
Being out-going and conversational with strangers, in or out of peer, is a personality trait. Knowing what to say when the clerk shortchanges you is a matter of experience.
I sold seeds door-to-door (not successfully, saw an add in the back of a magazine) at age 8. I mowed lawns in the neighborhood at 9-10. I took a paper route at 11. I worked as a carry-out/bagger at a grocery store at 15. I graduated High School having seen ALL kinds of people in ALL kinds of environments. Good AND Bad.
MY kids put on a baseball cap, turn it around backwards, hold their fingers a certain way, and believe they are worldly. OMG.
Worse, we fulfill their fears of the world with horrible predictions (statistics). We shackle them to school (was a day when kids appreciated school because it was *rare*). We hobble their ability to explore (ever decreasing driving hours and modes - even bicycles some places are licensed). We channel their creativity towards electronic devices like video games and cell phones. Scouting is considerd Gey. Sports is considered Gey. Stage, FFA, clubs - all Gey. Mostly, I believe, that's a reaction of fear in part from our own influencing of them.
We're not raising competent people this way...