"Why do you assume, based on your chosen opinion piece, that all acquaintance rapes of children happen inside the home?"
My mistake. I should have written "in the home or by people who are known and trusted by the child/family."
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.
Not quite sure what you're getting at here; my point was that car accidents are often horrible things, too. They can be lethal, they can result in lifelong injuries, and the emotional scars can last a lifetime. They also happen commonly -- far more commonly than sexual abuse by strangers. I'm not saying stranger sexual abuse is more or less horrible; it's just less common.
All but one of the sites I referenced were reputable: most were .gov and the other was cornell.edu. The remaining one wasn't a great pick, but a google search restricted to .gov sites gave the same kinds of numbers about stranger abuse. Try it yourself.
Sexual predation by strangers is sensationalized by the media. The numbers that I threw out were approximations, but the magnitude was right. This fact is well-established among researchers and government statisticians, but the media doesn't seem to be interested. Put it another way: if kidnappings by strangers are really so common, why do only a handful of stories appear, and why do we hear about kidnappings that happen thousands of miles away? Why do these stories stay in the national spotlight, when a story about a lethal car accident usually doesn't get out of its region, and fades quickly?
All I'm trying to say is that getting the most accurate numbers possible from objective sources is one way to enable informed decision making. I'm
not trying to tell others how to raise their kids or advocate on behalf of an Free Range Kids, an organization I only learned about this morning.
Val
