With the recent shameful scandal involving ex-Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky, Richard Wexler fears we’re about to rush headlong into a new round of moral panic – with the media leading the charge.
You may remember Wexler as the child welfare-reform activist who criticized the Journal Sentinel series last year on the process of removing and restoring children to families where authorities had found indications of abuse or neglect. A former TV and newspaper reporter, Wexler now runs the National Center for Child Protection Reform, which casts a wary eye on much of the conventional wisdom about child protection matters.
There seems little debate that much more could and should have been done to stop Sandusky’s alleged abuse of boys under his charge (while, for the record, the former coach maintains his innocence). Media coverage of the scandal has drawn plenty of criticism from a variety of vantage points. (For more, see this roundup from Richard Prince.)
At the same time, however, there’s reason to fear the scandal could prompt an overreaction. A new Wisconsin law cheered on by editorialists here could even help further such a development, Wexler warns.
In a recent opinion column for Youth Today, a news site and newspaper covering youth-services topics, Wexler took a look at a statistic widely cited in the wake of the Sandusky revelations: that 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 6 boys has experienced “sexual abuse” by the age of 18.
“It’s scary, it’s ubiquitous, it’s meant to stampede people into things like universal mandatory reporting — and it’s wrong,” Wexler says of the purported data point. He went searching for the stat’s origins and found it grew from a mid-1990s survey of thousands of adults in California.
Boiled down, he contends the 1-in-4 / 1-in-6 statistic covers a much broader range of behavior than what would be considered abuse. You should read the whole thing to follow his argument.
Wexler doesn’t deny that sexual abuse is a terrible thing. But he worries about what might grow out of sloppy media reporting of a frightening, exaggerated statistic:
[T]he best available estimates, from comprehensive reviews of multiple studies suggest that 10 to 12 percent of girls and five to six percent of boys are victims of child sexual abuse. Those numbers are plenty serious enough. It’s plenty of reason for concern and action – but not the kind of action that those pushing the hyped numbers want, like urging – or forcing – anyone and everyone to report anything and everything to child abuse hotlines. That would only deluge those hotlines with more false reports, leaving workers less time to find children in real danger.
Yet the 1-in-4 / 1-in-6 figures turn up in a lot of stories, such as this recent column in Madison’s Capital Times or this big takeout in the Gannett newspapers in Binghamton and Elmira, N.Y.
Indeed, a recent AP story points out that in the face of mounting fears, data suggest that sexual abuse of children is on the decline.
At the NCCPR blog he runs, Wexler cites this Wisconsin story as an example of the sort of overreach that panic over sexual abuse can lead to. And in his Youth Today article, he notes another recent instance:
It’s a pretty straight line from scare statistics to inanities like the case in Florida in which an assistant principal – a mandated reporter – called in a report, and sheriff’s deputies investigated, after a 12-year-old girl kissed a 12-year-old boy during gym class. The assistant principal called it “a possible sex crime.”
Another who looks askance at the resurging panic over abuse is Lenore Skenazy, author of the book Free Range Kids. Skenazy has been crusading for years to rethink our culture’s reflexive hemming of children’s lives out of misguided fears for their safety. (She’ll host a reality show on over-protective parenting next year.)
Skenazy has pointed out on her blog and in a Wall Street Journal column how widespread fear of sexual abuse has led to an overreaction that has barred virtually all men from childcare work in some places and made even the most innocent and innocuous forms of touch the object of dark suspicion.
Like Wexler, Skenazy takes the crime of child sexual abuse seriously. What she criticizes is the thoughtless panic that fear of it induces, leading society to shield children instead of giving them the tools to protect themselves—like teaching them how to recognize and speak up against inappropriate behavior.
“We don’t help kids if we’re telling them to distrust half the population,” she tells me. “If most people are good and your kid ever is in a dangerous situation, could they ever go to a principal at school or their father or their teacher and telling them what’s going on? If nobody is to be trusted you’ve left your child without anywhere to turn.”
In warning of the potential for media-driven panic, Wexler recalls the infamous McMartin Pre-School case — the bizarre, and ultimately discredited, claims of ritual abuse by operators of a California child care facility in the 1980s. Although defendants were acquitted, the case launched a flood of prosecutions against day care facilities around the country that would turn out to be questionable in retrospect, but which, in the heat of the moment, found the media often uncritically reporting the claims of accusers and prosecutors.
“The phony numbers, apparently pulled out of thin air by reporters who never actually check the source, the absurd lists of ‘warning signs’ to watch out for that could apply at some point to almost any child, and the harm this climate of fear does to children,” Wexler tells me. “We did this to kids in the 1980s, but that was so long ago most reporters writing about Penn State and its aftermath don’t remember.”
Wexler is even skeptical of a recent measure that sailed through the Wisconsin legislature, with full approval from the state’s press, including the Journal Sentinel: requiring all school employees, not just teachers, counselors and administrators, to report perceived potential child abuse to child protection authorities. As JS editorial writer Ernst-Ulrich Franzen blogged,
Requiring every school employee — aides, cafeteria workers, janitors — who sees something suspicious to report that activity accords vulnerable children a greater and necessary degree of protection.
Yet would it? I asked Wexler.
“Mandatory reporting requirements come with penalties if you don’t report,” he tells me. “That encourages lots of CYA reports, especially after a high-profile case is in the news. That only overloads the system with even more false reports so there is even less time to find the children in real danger. This is bad enough when you’re dealing with a teacher, whose instinct to protect herself at the child’s expense may be tempered by knowing and caring about the child. That’s less likely when it’s the school janitor.
“It’s not as if school janitors, secretaries, school bus drivers, etc. are prohibited from reporting now,” he continues. “They are entirely free to do so. What is not needed is pressure to file false reports to protect not the children, but themselves.
When the people at Media Trackers put out their hit job on State Sen. Lena Taylor a couple of weeks ago, the most tangible accusation appeared to be their claim that one alleged voter was a convicted felon ineligible to vote before completing his sentence. But even that doesn’t hold up, as the Journal Sentinel‘s Dan Bice reported Monday.
Two and a half cheers to him for checking that out — but note how the story calls out radio talker Charlie Sykes and WTMJ-TV reporter Charles Benson for uncritically reporting the felon-voting claim. Meanwhile, when it refers to the JS reporting the same accusation (in a story carrying Bice’s byline) it leans on a direct quote about it from Media Trackers’ Brian Sikma – soft-pedaling the newspaper’s responsibility for letting the accusation get into print at all.
Still, here’s hoping that there’s a lesson learned and that local media will treat the partisan outfit’s sensational allegations with a lot more skepticism and vetting before reporting them next time.
Update, Dec. 6, 2011: On her Facebook page, Sen. Taylor is demanding a retraction from Media Trackers. (h/t, “illusory tenant” Tom Foley.)
Knowing that the Journal Sentinel would be coming out with a big story on racial disparities in traffic stops, Milwaukee Police Chief Ed Flynn decided to take a different tack from the last time, when he refused to be interviewed during the newspaper’s investigation of officers with records of violating the law. Flynn agreed to talk to Ben Poston for the traffic stop story. But his department also posted a 47-minute video on YouTube of his presentation last week to the Police and Fire Commission on traffic stop data—almost certainly a peremptory response to Sunday’s story. And it was probably a smarter way to handle a paper that really does seem inordinately hostile to the chief.
(An amusing aside: In the previous series, the paper went to Sheriff David Clarke for comments to pile on the criticism of the police department’s handling of officers charged with violations. On the traffic stop story, he wasn’t so accommodating [PDF].)
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