Re: the new economy?

[Gar Lipow <lipowg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I tend to very suspicious of this sort thing, after the McMartin fiasco
and so on. Not that there is not a great deal of child abuse, and not
that it is not horrible and worthy of being fought.  But exaggerating
the extent of it seems to be a basis for a lot of destruction of Civil
liberties.

Todays NY Times gives a description of the methodology:

>The study, to be released on Monday by researchers at  the University of Pennsylvania, relied on interviews with victims, child welfare workers and law enforcement officials in 28 cities in United States, Mexico and Canada from January 1999 through last March.

So we are not talking statistical sampling here. And law enforcement
agencies have a strong incentive to overstate incidence of any type of
crime. On this particular issue my trust in child welfare workers would
not be unlimited either -- since they played a big part in the whole "if
you are charged you must be guilty" thing that put a lot of innocent
people in jail.

Mass interviews are a good way to detect a problem that was previously
not believed to exist. They are sometimes useful in getting a better
understanding of the nature of a problem.  They are a lousy way to
determine frequency or quantity of a problem.


Jim Devine wrote:
>
> from SLATE, 9/10/01:
> >USA [TODAY] ... leads ... with a story nobody else fronts: A University of
> >Pennsylvania study out today estimating that about 325,000 U.S. children
> >17 or under are being sexually exploited--mostly as prostitutes or
> >pornographic subjects--far many more than the experts anticipated.
>
> Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxx &  http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine