Lie By Omission

[elfs]

Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, following in the grand tradition of attorneys general by being utterly opposed to the Constitution of the United States, yesterday asked Congress to pass laws requiring all web pages on the internet to be rated, much as movies and video games are rated (what's next? ratings for books? At least one Christian "family" group has endorsed the idea).

Gonzalez cited a study by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children that showed (you've seen these billboards) that one in five children between the ages of 10 and 17 was "sexually solicited" (whatever that means).

What Gonzalez did not tell Congress was that, in that one-in-five result, most of the "solicitations" came from other children in the same age group. Come-ons from one teen to another are the on-line equivalent of adolescent sexual fumbling, rather than a vicious preying upon our children by dirty old men.

Impeach the whole lot of them. Now.

Comments

[funos.livejournal.com]

And I bet that the distribution of that data is strongly skewed towards the upper half of that range, turning that number into an even more innocuous truism.

"1 in 5" sounds like a lot, until you take in account the mean, mode, and distribution. This is (very) elementary statistics.

[rarkrarkrark.livejournal.com]

I'm still surprised it's that low. I remember being under 18 and on BBSes and having a lot of difficulty with solicitations from men, some of whom were twice my age. One particularly memorable fellow managed to carry on a very one sided cybersex conversation involving himself, me and an 'orgasm gun', much to my bafflement (Cybersex I got, since I was doing it with sheer_panic back then, but orgasm guns? :) Wasn't doing a darn thing for me) but it wasn't just one or two guys, it was a constant issue.

I have to wonder what percentage of those kids are even allowed to chat or give out their email addresses such that they'd be at risk for a solicitation.

However, I fail to see how labeling web pages would address the issue in even the smallest fashion.

[aprivatefox.livejournal.com]

So, thirty seconds with a search engine got me the NCMEC page (http://www.missingkids.com/), and from there I found the document they cite to get that fnording one-in-five statistic. Here are links to the topline report (2 pages) (http://www.missingkids.com/en_US/documents/internetsafety_surv.pdf), and the full report (62 pages) (http://www.missingkids.com/en_US/publications/NC62.pdf) - they go into enough detail in the report itself that there are a whole slew of interesting things you can learn from it, once you get past the sensationalist headline.