4 ms·

They are doing neither, and the article itself undermines its premise later when the "serious research" is being quoted. As it cites, most offender get exposed

by belorn 2y ago

They are doing neither, and the article itself undermines its premise later when the "serious research" is being quoted. As it cites, most offender get exposed during early teens, back when there were no porn algorithms. However, the rate of child sexual abuse has steadily decreased since the 1990s, down by almost 50%. If the hypothesis of the article was correct then the rate of child sexual abuse should increase, not decrease. Other research studies, have looked at the rate of pedophilia in the general population, and the conclusions seems to be a fairly static rate of around 2% (like "Prevalence, situation, and perspectives of treatment" from 2020). However since the rate of child sexual abuse has decreased, such studies mostly rely on doing survey and those has for obvious reasons a major problem of sampling and accuracy. A common theme in the research, just from a very quick look, is that the researcher themselves cite that the is a huge lack of research in this area. They can see the trend, and see the numbers, but there is little to real understanding to what is behind the numbers. We currently has as good chance to blame the Catholic Church as to blame pornhub, and articles like this one are not helping the slightest. At best it just spreading fear in order to generate engagement, and at worst they are abusing their readers by pushing propaganda in order to sway popular opinion about oppressive laws.

api 2y ago
> the rate of child sexual abuse has steadily decreased since the 1990s, down by almost 50%. That's kind of remarkable if true, because the openness of both individuals and institutions to taking reports of it seriously has increased. Before all our modern awareness of stuff like "consent" a lot of reports were dismissed, especially if the pedophile was someone trusted in the community and especially if they came from women. Boys often didn't report at all out of shame. Usually when there's an increase in awareness you see a phantom increase due to reporting, as has happened with things like rates of homosexuality or with diagnostic categories like autism and ADD/ADHD. Of course maybe there's less of it today because abusers are getting caught more often. That's possible too. Edit: this wouldn't surprise me at all given that there appears to be zero relationship between public panics about something and its actual incidence. Street crime, for example, was orders of magnitude worse in the early 1990s vs. today but people were less panicked about it. Public panics are media driven.
- throwanem 2y ago
  I'd certainly also like to see a source for the basic claim. It would be wonderful news if true.
  - jchw 2y ago
    Why don't you Google it? This is fundamental basic knowledge about CSA incidence.
    - throwanem 2y ago
      If it's so trivial, you should find the claim no harder to substantiate than to insist upon as here. I encourage the attempt. Seriously. Go show me how easy reliable data is to find on this. Prove me wrong and you'll have earned a friend for life, or at least a dinner at the nice place down the street the next time you're in town.
      - jchw 2y ago
        OK... but there really are so many results upon literally just searching it. You immediately get multiple prominent results. You'd think if people actually cared about substantiating this, they could do one (1) Google search to find out. But here you go, courtesy of lazyweb. https://files.calio.org/BIBS/declining-rates-bib4.pdf https://files.calio.org/BIBS/declining-rates-bib4.pdf https://www.stopitnow.org/sites/default/files//prevalence-rate-white-paper-d2l.pdf https://www.stopitnow.org/sites/default/files//prevalence-ra... https://www.unh.edu/ccrc/resource/decline-sexual-abuse-cases https://www.unh.edu/ccrc/resource/decline-sexual-abuse-cases (Of course the answer is that people don't care. They'd be happy to ignore the lack of sources if the conclusion being drawn agreed to them, but can't do a single fucking Google search if it doesn't.)
        throwanem 2y ago
        I'd be interested to know what search query you actually used. It's also been a while since I compared DDG and Google result quality. Maybe I'm getting poorer results than in the past. Queries on the theme of "child sexual abuse statistics US by year" don't get me anything very useful from DDG, much more advocacy around headline prevalence figures than anything relevant to incidence. (Statista does reflect a drop, but I didn't want to make an account to see their sources. Fair, my fault, I can't evaluate that well.) The bibliography is interesting and useful but not immediately evaluable, and seems mainly Canada-focused. The Stop It Now/D2L data is very clear up front that it relates to prevalence and not incidence, a distinction that matters for reasons to which we'll return in a moment. The UNH data substantiates some level of decrease since the early 90s, as does every other source, but disagrees with itself on magnitude in different places and comes out of one researcher's shop, which does not invalidate it but does mean I'd like to see someone else produce something similar before I weight their novel results too heavily. I guess maybe we have differing definitions of "reliable," but I think you and I have clashed on this subject before. I don't blame anyone for assuming that a victim of such abuse would tend to overestimate its prevalence, and I try to watch out for the tendency in myself, but what's all the anger about? The difference between prevalence and incidence matters because the former tells us how many people have been abused as children, and the latter tells us how frequently children are abused over time, which is the thing we're actually talking about. How we count multiple instances of abuse against the same person confounds everything, and intuitively I would expect prevalence by victim (ie for a given victim how frequently they themselves were abused) to follow something like a power-law distribution, but in general if we just take the headline number of "X total kids" it's hard to see how that gets us to a nuanced understanding of incidence rates that lets us talk knowledgeably about how and to what extent the shape of this problem is changing over time.
stvltvs 2y ago
We should be careful not to equivocate between pedophilia which in the technical jargon of research studies is a sexual attraction to pre-pubertal children and child sexual abuse which loosely is the act of sexually assaulting someone below the legal age of consent. They are two different things. An abuser might not be a pedophile in the technical sense, and a pedophile might not be an abuser. So rates of pedophilic attractions and use of CSAM could be rising while rates of child sexual abuse is falling. I don't know if that's the case, but we shouldn't confuse the two things.

by belorn 2y ago

api 2y ago

> the rate of child sexual abuse has steadily decreased since the 1990s, down by almost 50%. That's kind of remarkable if true, because the openness of both individuals and institutions to taking reports of it seriously has increased. Before all our modern awareness of stuff like "consent" a lot of reports were dismissed, especially if the pedophile was someone trusted in the community and especially if they came from women. Boys often didn't report at all out of shame. Usually when there's an increase in awareness you see a phantom increase due to reporting, as has happened with things like rates of homosexuality or with diagnostic categories like autism and ADD/ADHD. Of course maybe there's less of it today because abusers are getting caught more often. That's possible too. Edit: this wouldn't surprise me at all given that there appears to be zero relationship between public panics about something and its actual incidence. Street crime, for example, was orders of magnitude worse in the early 1990s vs. today but people were less panicked about it. Public panics are media driven.

throwanem 2y ago
I'd certainly also like to see a source for the basic claim. It would be wonderful news if true.
- jchw 2y ago
  Why don't you Google it? This is fundamental basic knowledge about CSA incidence.
  - throwanem 2y ago
    If it's so trivial, you should find the claim no harder to substantiate than to insist upon as here. I encourage the attempt. Seriously. Go show me how easy reliable data is to find on this. Prove me wrong and you'll have earned a friend for life, or at least a dinner at the nice place down the street the next time you're in town.
    - jchw 2y ago
      OK... but there really are so many results upon literally just searching it. You immediately get multiple prominent results. You'd think if people actually cared about substantiating this, they could do one (1) Google search to find out. But here you go, courtesy of lazyweb. https://files.calio.org/BIBS/declining-rates-bib4.pdf https://files.calio.org/BIBS/declining-rates-bib4.pdf https://www.stopitnow.org/sites/default/files//prevalence-rate-white-paper-d2l.pdf https://www.stopitnow.org/sites/default/files//prevalence-ra... https://www.unh.edu/ccrc/resource/decline-sexual-abuse-cases https://www.unh.edu/ccrc/resource/decline-sexual-abuse-cases (Of course the answer is that people don't care. They'd be happy to ignore the lack of sources if the conclusion being drawn agreed to them, but can't do a single fucking Google search if it doesn't.)
      - throwanem 2y ago
        I'd be interested to know what search query you actually used. It's also been a while since I compared DDG and Google result quality. Maybe I'm getting poorer results than in the past. Queries on the theme of "child sexual abuse statistics US by year" don't get me anything very useful from DDG, much more advocacy around headline prevalence figures than anything relevant to incidence. (Statista does reflect a drop, but I didn't want to make an account to see their sources. Fair, my fault, I can't evaluate that well.) The bibliography is interesting and useful but not immediately evaluable, and seems mainly Canada-focused. The Stop It Now/D2L data is very clear up front that it relates to prevalence and not incidence, a distinction that matters for reasons to which we'll return in a moment. The UNH data substantiates some level of decrease since the early 90s, as does every other source, but disagrees with itself on magnitude in different places and comes out of one researcher's shop, which does not invalidate it but does mean I'd like to see someone else produce something similar before I weight their novel results too heavily. I guess maybe we have differing definitions of "reliable," but I think you and I have clashed on this subject before. I don't blame anyone for assuming that a victim of such abuse would tend to overestimate its prevalence, and I try to watch out for the tendency in myself, but what's all the anger about? The difference between prevalence and incidence matters because the former tells us how many people have been abused as children, and the latter tells us how frequently children are abused over time, which is the thing we're actually talking about. How we count multiple instances of abuse against the same person confounds everything, and intuitively I would expect prevalence by victim (ie for a given victim how frequently they themselves were abused) to follow something like a power-law distribution, but in general if we just take the headline number of "X total kids" it's hard to see how that gets us to a nuanced understanding of incidence rates that lets us talk knowledgeably about how and to what extent the shape of this problem is changing over time.

stvltvs 2y ago

We should be careful not to equivocate between pedophilia which in the technical jargon of research studies is a sexual attraction to pre-pubertal children and child sexual abuse which loosely is the act of sexually assaulting someone below the legal age of consent. They are two different things. An abuser might not be a pedophile in the technical sense, and a pedophile might not be an abuser. So rates of pedophilic attractions and use of CSAM could be rising while rates of child sexual abuse is falling. I don't know if that's the case, but we shouldn't confuse the two things.