Val, it's easy to massage numbers, and I don't have the time at the moment to engage in a full-fledged debate here. I don't accept your number of under 1 in 1,000, based on the opinion piece to which you linked, as being the true number of children who suffer child sexual abuse.
Among the many questions I could ask based on your presented snippets would be, "Why do you assume, based on your chosen opinion piece, that all acquaintance rapes of children happen inside the home?" But like I said, we don't need to get into that here.
I never fail to be amazed when someone puts incidences of child sexual abuse on the same footing as aggregated reports of car accidents, large and small, as if one were no more horrible than the other. Would you go a little further to protect a child from third-degree burns, even if the risk of occurrence were far lower, than you would to protect her from a risk of a paper cut? Also, do you think it's possible that someone could grow up to be an independent, free-thinking, courageous adult without the "free range" approach? Where are those statistics, so we can assess just how unnecessary are the extra risks of predation and other harm caused by that approach, negligible though you may think them to be?
(Trying to resist the urge to put a grand-looking timestamp here.
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