Spreading "1 in 5" Number Does More Harm Than Good

Regular Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton has some opinions on child safety online and the use of fear mongering. Here are his thoughts. "The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has been running online ads for several years saying that "Each year 1 in 5 children is sexually solicited online", a statistic that has been endlessly repeated, including by vendors of blocking software and by politicians who often paraphrase it to say that 1 in 5 children "are approached by online predators". While others have quietly documented the problems with this statistic, lawmakers still bring it out every year in a push for more online regulation (preempted this year only by the topic du jour of cyberbullying), so it's time for anti-censorship organizations to start campaigning more aggressively against the misleading "1 in 5" number. That means two things: framing the debate with more accurate numbers, and holding the parties accountable for disseminating the wrong ones -- and that means naming names, including those of organizations like the NCMEC that are normally beyond reproach." Read below for the rest. I have no doubt that on balance, the world is a better place because of the NCMEC and what they've done, and God knows how I'd feel about them if they'd helped me find a lost child. But the good things they've done shouldn't be viewed as political capital that they can withdraw against in order to be above criticism for spreading the "1 in 5" meme. The longer they go on implying to parents that there is a 1-in-5 chance their kid will be asked by an adult to meet in person for sex, the more I think it tarnishes their whole legacy. (The NCMEC did not respond to contact requests for this article.)

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:

• 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.

• 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%.

• The number of survey respondents who actually befriended an adult online and then met the adult in person for sexual purposes, was zero.

Specifically: About 19% of respondents said had received a "sexual solicitation or approach" (my emphasis), and "sexual solicitations and approaches" were defined as: "requests to engage in sexual activities or sexual talk or give personal sexual information that were unwanted or, whether wanted or not, made by an adult". That means any unwanted sex talk, including from other teens, even if limited to one occurrence in the entire previous year, would cause a respondent to be included in the 19% figure (which, when you define it that broadly, actually sounds pretty low). To say that those 1 in 5 minors were "sexually solicited" -- literally, asked for sex -- is simply false.

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:

• 1 in 7 respondents received unwanted sex talk or sex talk from an adult, at some point in the past year.

• 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.)

• 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.

Comments

This is a good thing.

[Lilith's Heart-shape]

Bullshit needs to be exposed and countered, even when propagated by well-meaning members of benevolent organizations.

Re:This is a good thing.

[gnick]

Your kids are no worse off on the Internet than they are out on the public streets. That's why I'm surprised that the numbers quoted are so low. By the definitions they're giving ("...requests to engage in... sexual talk or give personal sexual information..."), almost any sexual discussion could be considered "solicitation". Who went all the way from age 10 to 17 without ever discussing sex? The only caveats in there are the "unwanted or... made by an adult", but some of my peers in high school were technically adults and, being adolescent males, you bet we discussed sex. And, when I was 17, the sexual advances between myself and a couple of fondly remembered older girls were initiated by me. By their definitions, any of these events would qualify as me receiving a "sexual solicitation or approach" if it had happened online instead if in person.

Solution: Ban real-life contact and restrict our kids to online interaction only.

Don't Question It!

[FatSean]

You'll become a social outcast. It is OK to lie about statistics because child molestation is so serious that truth and justice can be thrown out to 'get the bad guys'. Ends justify the means type shit. At least, that's how it appears to me. It's enough to make a guy avoid any and all children when in public.

Re:Don't Question It!

[MightyMartian]

And this is the root of the whole problem. The media, governments and children protection agencies and organizations make it seem like if you turn your head away from your kids for five seconds, some sort of murderous raping child predator is going to swoop them up. It makes it sound as if there's a pedophile on every street corner.

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.

with some hard work and organization

[JeanBaptiste]

we can get that number to 1 out of 4.

Re:fearmongering and false complacency

[MightyMartian]

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

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

[ArsenneLupin]

I am personally dating a person who did exactly that and was with said adult (she was a minor at the time, he was 13 years older) for a year. First it was casual sex, then it was a relationship. I was personally dating a person who claimed was solicited, when he was 14, by an adult (who was 28 at the time) in the changing rooms of a public pool. But he declined the offer, so it was left at that. Should we now close all public pools to underage kids in the name of "save the children"?

If she were in the survey, would she spoil that zero number or not? Yes, indeed, the number would no longer be zero, but it would be labeled as "statistically insignificant". You need a much larger sample size to make a pronouncement about such rare incidents.

Re:erring on the side of caution

[DragonWriter]

I think the idea here - by most of those organizations - is to err on the side of caution.

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

[tverbeek]

I think it would be interesting to do a study using the same methodology for offline activities. For example, what percentage of 10- to 17-year-olds received "requests to engage in sexual activities or sexual talk or give personal sexual information that were unwanted"... at school? It's been a while since I was in high school, but I remember it happening to me... and I was a dweeb. So I bet it'd be pretty high.

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.

The truth hit me decades ago

[BenEnglishAtHome]

The truth about how much the "Save Our Children" folks will lie to garner sympathy, donations, fame, etc., hit me hard almost three decades ago.

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.