Salon.com posted a story to their site today, titled, “How to Prevent Child Sexual Abuse“, which provides empirical evidence to actually help parents prevent child sexual abuse through understanding the realities of sexual abuse and not allowing the “feel good” yet ineffective laws lure them into a false sense of security:
Here are some of the facts they share:
- Only 7 percent of children were assaulted by a stranger. The rest were assaulted by acquaintances or family.
- Only a small percent of released sex offenders will re offend sexually. 95% of sexual assaults are committed by someone unknown to police.
- About one-third of all sex crimes against children are committed by someone under the age of eighteen.
For parents who are conditioning their children to have “stranger danger”, monitoring the sex offender list when choosing whom to avoid contact with or only monitoring interaction between their child and adults, Salon.com points out that their personal sexual prevention efforts may have been misguided.
To prevent child sexual abuse, parents need to teach their kids about inappropriate behavior at the hands of everyone, INCLUDING, friends and relatives, who are the more likely perpetrators. Parents also need to not hyper-focus on the sex offender list, because there’s a 95% chance of the perpetrator being NOT on the list. Parents need to start educating their children about what is appropriate and not appropriate early on. It will not only help them from being sexually abused by another child, but help prevent them from potentially allowing their curiosity and under-developed judgment from victimizing another.
A nice fact also is how much carrying the extra 90% of unnecessary registrants cost the American taxpayers as well as the strain on law enforcement. Officers are of better service investigating crimes rather than waking some poor schmuck and his family up at 3 a.m. when he/she has to go to work @ 6 a.m. if he/she is lucky enough to have a job
This post needs to be sent to every politician in the country if you have the means to do it please proceed
The fear mongers hide from the truth about sex offender statistical facts. I am all for keeping kids safe with the truth!
Indeed…all true FACTS which are conveniently overlooked by law enforcement and politicians like Laura Books for their own agenda(s) and none of them is about children but about using misinformation and fear to manipulate the masses.
These lies actually cause more children to be abused by diverting attention from the most likely sources of abuse to strangers on a list online – really – sounds like an evil thing to do IMHO!
Not only does it hurt children with the diversion of attention by parents but is also unfair to tens of thousands of families (including children) causing even more victims who would not exist without the damn registry and to that end I have started SexOffenderTruth.com which is from my own point of view having been on the list for over 2 decades in an order to educate using facts, logic, and a little bit of needed sarcasm just to keep things in perspective.
Keep up the fight and together let’s win this in 2018!
Good post, thank you. It’s awful nice seeing information like this coming from other sites.
Think it might encourage someone from a major newspaper to do a story?
(Hint hint Mr. Heath at USA Today)
We should be reaching out to other publications and journalists asking them to cover our issues.