Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.forbes From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: OBSERVATIONS Date: Wed, 18 Nov 92 14:52:03 EST Message-ID: "Copyright 1992 Forbes, Inc. Any further reproduction or redistribution without the express written permission of Forbes and ACC is prohibited." OBSERVATIONS Long on claims, short on evidence A good deal of the current hysteria about child abuse is propagated by people with a vested interest in denigrating the family. BY THOMAS SOWELL Dr. Thomas Sowell is an economist and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, Calif. EVEN SMALL CHILDREN who are toilet- trained sometimes have embarrassing accidents. When this happened in nursery schools, it was once common for one of the adults to take the child to the bathroom, clean him up and try to soothe his feelings. Some nursery schools no longer do this. Today such an act of kindness could lead to charges of sexual moles- tation. This is only one of the costs of the hair-trigger legal and political en- vironment surrounding child abuse. Currently, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals is reviewing the case of par- ents who were jailed for child abuse, on the unsubstantiated charges of a woman who had been fired by several nursery schools for her obsession with child molestation. Tragically, this heedless and fren- zied atmosphere is an international phenomenon, deliberately promot- ed. A series of scary magazine ads on the sexual abuse of children ran in New Zealand publications a few years ago, and was used to raise money, as well as to expand the activities of social agencies claiming to be able to deal with the problem. Radical feminist activists were promi- nent among those promoting this cam- paign and proclaiming male oppression and the inadequacies of the traditional family. Statistics put out by those with a clear vested interest in hysteria and denigration of the family were as uncrit- ically accepted in New Zealand as they are in the United States. Fortunately, in New Zealand, a journalist named Emily Flynn decid- ed to write a story about child abuse. Initially sympathetic to the claims that were being made, Ms. Flynn discov- ered that the sources and methods used to generate scary numbers were sloppy at best and dishonest at worst. One ad featured a picture of a little girl in her bed holding a teddy bear, while in the background a backlit figure of a man stood in an open doorway. Above the picture, the headline proclaimed: ''It's not the dark she's afraid of.'' The caption under the picture assert- ed: ''One in four New Zealand girls are sexually abused before they turn 18. Half of them by their own father.'' Ms. Flynn could find no study to substantiate that claim, whether in New Zealand, Britain or the United States. Not even one girl in a hundred was sexually molested by her own father. Fathers were the least likely of all men to molest a girl. Much was made of a recent televi- sion special in the United States, broadcast simultaneously by two commercial networks and by public television, in which Oprah Winfrey interviewed half a dozen victims of sexual molestation in their childhood. There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Ms. Winfrey, who says that she herself was sexually abused as a child, or the sincerity of the people who appeared on the program. But sincerity does not make a show biz personality professionally qualified to analyze the statistics fed to her by activist organiza- tions with an axe to grind. No sane and decent person ques- tions how despicable and harmful the sexual molestation of children is. What is open to question is how widespread it is and whether the kinds of policies proposed are likely to make matters better or worse, on net balance. There are, after all, criminal laws on the books and there is no reason why degenerate parents cannot be treated like the criminals they are. But that is seldom what the promoters of child abuse hysteria have in mind. The bottom line for too many of the zealots is more money and more authority for outsiders to intervene in families before anything is proven. Instead of locking up abusive parents, activists want them turned over to the ''mental health'' establishment, which will then have a government- supplied and government-financed clientele. Like other groups who get their hands on the taxpayers' money by creating hysteria and promising mir- acles, the ''mental health'' establish- ment is long on claims and short on evidence. All too typically, research on the effectiveness of a California psychological program designed to help the families of abused children was conducted by the principal advo- cate of the program--and even he could find no real evidence that it worked. With child abuse, as with the sexual harassment of women, the issue is not whether such things happen. All sorts of misdeeds happen, from jaywalking to genocide. The real question is whether it happened in particular cases--and what we are going to ac- cept as evidence. to the authorities have died from fur- ther abuse before the social agencies could get around to them because these agencies were so bogged down in investigations of a deluge of un- founded charges against other people. Government is a blunt instrument. Its policies should be limited to what blunt instruments can do. We gain nothing by pretending to know what we cannot know and to be able to do what we cannot do. "This information is the property of Forbes, Inc., ACC takes no responsibility for its content, or the actions of any individual or institution, predicated on the information herin. Forbes Subscriptions are available to students and faculty members at the student/educator rate of $33 for one year, 27 issues. 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