JUNK ADVOCACY SCIENCE

The ‘Village Voice’ paper has been tracking a recent effort to generate a groundswell for more funding to combat allegedly vastly-increasing numbers of female minors sex-trafficking on the Internet, using what the paper forthrightly describes as “junk science”.

I want to go over this briefly simply to give an example of how “science” is used in advanced-level ‘advocacy’ to manipulate public opinion and stampede it, thus creating the pretext for advocacy ‘pressure’ on politicians and legislators to pass more laws and – especially nowadays – provide more funding, especially when abetted by sensation-hungry media who ‘report’ without actually reading any ‘reports’ that claim to prove the sensation-du-jour.

The Women’s Funding Network has recently been going after assorted internet classified sites for allowing underage females to offer themselves for whatever of a sexual nature. In September of last year a subcommittee of the US House Judiciary Committee was treated to “vivid and chilling accounts of underage prostitution” enabled by internet classified sites, which is claimed to be “exploding at an astronomical rate”.

For the past six months, such activity, said the chief program officer of the Network, “has risen exponentially” and in “three diverse states”. The ‘Village Voice’ article notes that the claim has received major attention from a number of media outlets, print and electronic. Which helped when the chief program officer, one Deborah Richardson, embarked forthwith on a nation-wide tour to raise public support, consciousness, and funds.

As the ‘Village Voice’ article notes, the ‘study’ consisted of some unidentified persons merely looking at photographs reputedly taken from the sites, and guessing their ages. As the article puts it pithily, “there is no science” here.

Not only professional academic researchers but even police agencies are not impressed with ‘the numbers’. The methodology of the ‘study’ is flawed from the get-go.

First, the ‘study’ is not even one undertaken on their own initiative by independent professional academic scientific researchers; it is the result of a commercial venture in which the Network itself (hardly disinterested since it stands to gain a great deal of money and status) hired the researchers.

Second, the Network didn’t engage the services of professional researchers, let alone independent academically certified and accomplished researchers, but instead hired a business-consulting and PR firm in Atlanta whose most notable achievement is to report – for the national Chamber of Commerce – its discovery that businesses that belong to their local Chamber of Commerce have better sales than businesses that don’t; female-run, it had started out in 1984 as a political-consulting firm. Well, since advanced-level ‘advocacy’ is indeed a business (not to say a racket) then you can see where that might have made some sense, from a marketing point of view. And ‘political’ is precisely the interest of advanced-level advocacy.

The firm’s ‘researchers’ had no prior experience in studying prostitution, nor for that matter in conducting serious research-studies that would be subject to academic peer-review and examination in accredited scientific research journals.

In terms of methodology, a “random” group of 100 adult observers (although also claimed to be “adjusted for race and gender”) looked at photos of potential sex-providers taken from their own advertisements on the internet classifieds and guessed whether the photo’s image was of a person under the age of 18. The immediate problem being that since these sites are marketing sites, there is no guarantee that an individual wishing to market her services is actually putting up a current photo, or instead a photo from a more photogenic and appealing prior age in her life. (And this assumes – somewhat generously – that the photo in the classified is actually the photo of the person who will be providing the services.)

Nor were the observers trained in the fine art of guessing age within so close a range (16, 18, 19, a young-looking 21) from photographs.

Now to quote the ‘scientific’ conclusion of the report: "The study showed that ‘any given 'young' looking girl who is selling sex has a 38 percent likelihood of being under age 18’, reads a crucial passage in the explanation of methodology. Put another way, for every 100 'young' looking girls selling sex, 38 are under 18 years of age. We would compute this by assigning a value of .38 to each of the 100 'young' girls we encounter, then summing the values together to achieve a reliable count."

The methodology simply took the guesses of the observers and treated them as factual discoveries; since 38 of the one hundred observers found what they guess are underage advertisers, then it concludes quickly that 38 percent of the advertisers on the internet classifieds are underage (round it off to 40 percent, what the hey?).

As the ‘Village Voice’ article puts it: “This is dense gibberish posing as statistical analysis”. Readers who have looked at any of the Victimology Posts on this site will not be surprised.

The ‘study’ then did a statewide survey, using six more ‘observers’, taking that 38 percent as an established fact.

As one professional researcher points out: it’s like asserting that if 38 out of 100 observers misidentified Fords as Chevrolets, then 38 percent of the Fords out on the streets are actually Chevrolets.

Which gives you a sense of what has been going on with so much of the ‘science’ underlying (and fueling and sustaining) the SO Mania. And really, given that so much of Postmodern agitprop is about ‘perception’ rather than actuality, then that doesn’t matter. In America of the past 40 years – and certainly in the SO Mania – if an individual wants to call a Ford a Chevrolet, well who’s to say s/he’s wrong? Why ‘oppress’ the person by trying to ‘impose’ your own ‘judgment’ and thereby interfere with the person’s ‘autonomy’ and also disrespect so insensitively what the person has chosen to believe? (And if that sounds a tad philosophical, then you can see how profoundly so much Correct usage is inherently and fundamentally lethal to an accurate perception of reality. And can you say ‘Iraq War’? And ‘economic Bubble’?)*  

Expanding their Georgia-study to other states (the head of one of the feminist-friendly foundations that paid for the Georgia study is also on the board of the Women’s Funding Network) it was quickly ‘discovered’ that underage female internet prostitution had increased 64 percent in Minnesota in a matter of months.

Nor did the ‘study’ bother to ascertain if the photos were of the same individual or different individuals. The ‘study’ only considers the number of images/photos on the site, not the number of separate individuals allegedly portrayed.

The PR firm’s boss, Beth Schapiro, blurbs that hers is “the first-ever study” on this problem, although – marvelously – her own footnotes reference several of the numerous prior studies done on the matter.

Her chief ‘researcher’, one Rusty Parker, can’t recall exactly how he structured the methodology for his ‘study’. Indeed, he’s not really sure where he got the photographs. You can’t make this stuff up.

Under questioning by the ‘Village Voice’ reporter, “neither Schapiro nor Parker had any answers when asked if there was any empirical reason to believe their two critical assumptions: that online photos always represent what the prostitutes actually look like, and that the six handpicked observers conducting the state studies have exactly the same error rate as the initial test batch of 100 random citizens”. Well, it’s refreshing to see somebody actually questioning these ‘researchers’; if a little more of that had been done back in the early days of Victimology’s** most amazing claims, perhaps much wrack and ruin would have been avoided. It’s also perhaps a sign of Schapiro’s presumption that when it comes to these types of ‘issues’, no politely Correct person would be so insensitive as to ask.

To some large extent, this is another example of ‘revolutionary science’ – which, like ‘revolutionary law’ is to be judged ONLY on whether and how much it furthers the cause of the ‘revolution’ and NOT on whether what is actually claiming (or imposing) is grounded in any actual facts.

But it is also an example of what has now become lethally and corrosively ‘normal’ in major areas of American culture, society, professional practice, media, and even the uppermost reaches of politics and law: you just ‘do whatever it takes’ to ‘generate pressure’ to get what you want. (In response to which American legislators at all levels have simply adopted ‘the politics of the deal’: you’re making enough noise and pressure for me to simply ask you what you want, and let’s make the best deal we can – I’ll get a law passed (and funding set aside) and you get your cadres and ‘victims’ to vote for me.)

Rusty also doesn’t remember if he actually determined the real ages of the persons in the photographs or even of the ones putting the photos up on the classified-ads sites. Why should he? This is a Good Thing he’s doing so why mess it up with facts and insensitive (and ‘abstract’ and ‘male’) questioning, which is all so rationalistic? I think by now the country can ask Rusty and all his ilk: ‘Good’ for whom?

Schapiro herself pulls off a marvelous bit of advocacy-doublespeak and doublethink: No, she admits, these are not “exact numbers” and shouldn’t be taken as such. But then, asked why she was allowing legislators and the public to be bombarded with such not-really-real numbers, she asserts that “Well, yes, these are specific numbers" … “And yes, they are hard numbers, and they are numbers that we stand completely behind."

“This is the type of cognitive whiplash you have to endure if you follow Schapiro down the rabbit-hole”, says the ‘Village Voice’ reporter.

And, in what is perhaps one of the clearest indications of just where truth, accuracy, reality, honesty, and rational thought stand in the priorities of advanced-level advocacy, when the reporter presses for an answer as to whether her numbers are “facts or estimates” she burbles “All of the above”. Which, in cadre-klatsches over reeely good chardonnay or chai, is no doubt All You Need To Know. “I would square the circle by saying that you can look at them both ways”, she cheeribly declaims. In other words, WHATEVVVVVVVERRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.

Which – oy – is probably the way an awful lot of legislators and jurists think now too. No wonder that the world’s peoples and governments are beginning to wonder if Americans are really ‘serious’ any more. And no wonder that the Mania continues to spread its lethal whackulence like a cancer throughout the body politic, gobbling up the common-weal and even any common shared public cognitive and political maturity.

The ‘Village Voice’ reporter quotes one professional statistician who admits ruefully that “You see a lot of this nowadays” – meaning both the stunningly in-your-face irrationality and the tendency of media reporters to NOT read the studies that are claimed to ‘prove’ this or that.

The genius behind the approach is one Kaffie McCullough, who made the first approach to the Schapiro Group. Her operative insight is that “having scientific-sounding numbers makes all the difference in the world”. And again, she unwittingly puts her finger on the dark beating heart of so much current American dreck: there is (or should be) a significant difference between ‘scientific’ and ‘scientific-sounding’. Like non-military folks who snapped up the huge Hummers a decade ago so that they could have a ‘military-looking’ vehicle and imagine they too were doing their bit for the country against its enemies, there is a world of difference (and hurt) between being a soldier on the front lines of a badly (might we say ‘unscientifically’?) planned war and being a daydreaming wannabe imagining yourself to be General Patton as you tool to the local pub in your air-conditioned superduper Hummer.

One might also respectfully opine that legislators and jurists get a firmer grasp on the difference between ‘legitimate’ and ‘legitimate-sounding’ laws and court decisions. And that some enterprising reportorial souls actually make them answer questions.

The afore-mentioned Kaffie had gone to the Georgia Legislature in 2007 looking for funding to set up a regional center to follow-up on juvenile prostitution. Alas, she only got “about 20 percent of what we asked for” (in funding) because “we had no research, no nothing”. The solution, of course, was to order up some – ummmm – ‘research-sounding stuff’ forthwith.

The result? After an initial compilation (let’s not ask how) of numbers, “we got everything we asked for, plus we got a study commission”. What’s not to like? This is ‘strategizing’ and it’s all very much the rage.

Now she has hooked up with the Women’s Funding Network and plies her trade going all over the country assuring local chapters that “whatever money they spend will come back to them with hefty dividends”. Marvelous. Although I wonder if these folks are really still just partying like it’s 1999 (or 2006) in terms of looking for big bucks from the same Beltway that somehow decided that the appearance of a national economy was pretty much as good as an actual national economy.

She had stood by the Schapiro study – which is a mainstay of her presentations when she’s on the road. Apparently she had been assured that these were the same methods used to “measure endangered species”. (Among which, it must be piously hoped, the advanced-level advocate will soon be included, if you ask me.)

But in standing up for her creds as a sex-industry expert she asserts that yes, of course, the whole “industry” is “a bait-and-switch” (meaning you get a young nubile photo and then something else altogether at the front doorstep or at the bus station). And when then asked how she can credit the study’s rather loose methodology, she admits that there are some questions that might bear re-visiting. (But I’m gonna bet she’s not saying that to audiences and pols.)

The article concludes that “The basic truth is that the study exists in service of the advocacy, and if news outlets present the Schapiro Group's numbers as gospel, it certainly doesn't hurt the advocates' cause”. And, as Lenin said long ago, if it’s good for the cause, then it’s Good … and further questions will only lead to the wall or Siberia.

Reflecting on the whole process, Ms. Kaffie concludes with some advice she got from a state legislator once:  “If you all as a movement don't start having numbers, you are going to lose the money”, because “How can you justify millions of dollars when there are only hundreds of victims that you're actually serving?"

And that is a perfect capstone capsulization: you can’t get money if you don’t have victims, and lots of them. And if that means elastic definitions and shoddy (not to say phantasmagoric) science and lots of horror-stories that can’t be verified but make great media meat … well, you just have to ‘do whatever it takes’.

So, McCullough continues "We pitch it the way we think you're going to read it and pick up on it," says Kaffie McCullough, the director of Atlanta-based anti-prostitution group A Future Not a Past. "If we give it to you with all the words and the stuff that is actually accurate—I mean, I've tried to do that with our PR firm, and they say, 'They won't read that much.'"

And here McCullough lets the whole scam out of the bag: these ‘studies’ aren’t done to INFORM anybody; they are done to MOTIVATE (I would say STAMPEDE) the public. And it’s all done verrrry deliberately and with purpose-aforethought (I would say – frankly – malice aforethought). This is advanced-level advocacy in all its unlovely and unholy ‘strategizing’.

Worse, readers are not considered intelligent and careful; readers are considered as being too unreflective to actually make accuracy and truth and genuine explanation worthwhile.

In other words, they claim it’s all the public’s fault, not their own. They would, you are to infer, reeely reeely like to be honest and give you the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth – except that you aren’t really that careful or smart.

Which, conveniently, provides a great smokescreen for what is in effect their blatant dishonesty and irrationality. But then, this is an irrationality in the service of a very deliberate and rational plan: to stampede the public and lull Citizens into thinking there is an actual emergency (for which the advocacy will garner status, funding, and who knows what other secret bennies quietly granted through laws that are arranged through a ‘deal’ struck in a non-smoking smoke-filled room on Capitol Hill or in some State capital.

Once again, the job of the public is the job John Ford and just about every Western movie director assigned to the herds of cattle in the background on the ranch.

And of course they haven’t simply ‘left out’ the ‘complicated’ truthy parts; they have gone and whomped up a whole mess of garbage and junk science that only ‘sounds’ like it’s science. Which, in the advanced-level advocacy world is good enough for their purposes.

And - an added deniability factor - it's not the advocacy's fault; it's the PR firm (which the advocacy itself hired) that won't let the advocates tell the whole truth (or any part of it for that matter). Neat.

By now perhaps the country is ready to see just where this sort of thing has led Us.

My concern in regard to the SO Mania is that even as the government money runs out, pols will simply try to ‘double-down’ and make it through the next election by keeping as many ‘interests’ and ‘advocacies’ as happy as possible, no matter what the demand. Any thought of the common-weal or the integrity or even coherence of the laws and the justice system will be just a bunch more cans to be kicked down the road.

But that road is rapidly coming to an end like an unfinished superhighway that suddenly ends at the edge of a cliff or a dark wood with some big flimsy yellow-light flashing striped wooden barriers standing between your speeding car and the big-bang.

And as occurred to Lenin and his cronies in the 1920s, and to their successors in the 1980s: What do we do when the people find out what we’ve really done? “Whatcha gonna doo, whatcha gonna doo when they come for yoo, bad boys bad boys [and ladies]”, as the songster saith.

NOTES

*Not to take things off on too great a tangent, let me note that the novelist and scientific essayist Walker Percy, in his 1987 book “The Thanatos Syndrome”, had already surmised that we live in a time of extensive and probably irreversible social decay (the decline of the family and of any human sense of grounded-ness, among other things), creating a lethally negative feedback loop in which the dynamics of disordered individual selves and of a disordered society reinforce each other. In such a situation, he sarcastically surmised, the most efficient American approach to things would be to drug as many people as possible so that they would ‘feel’ happy and not take their cues from what was actually happening all around them. Something along the lines of: if you can’t put out the fire, and can’t get people out, then give them a drug that will not let them feel the heat.

Of course, that strategy could only be ‘tactical’ and short-term, you’d have to say; before long the flames’ heat would have consequences whether you felt its pain or not. But that was precisely the lack of serious thinking and outright lunacy that Percy saw as starting to overtake the country. If you can’t reverse the social (and political) decay, eradicate the human ‘self’ that can notice the decay.

And while the history of suspecting ‘the government’ of carrying on all sorts of secret shenanigans and skullduggery is long and deep, fiction has not yet caught up with the Age of Identity and Advocacy Politics where the government induces huge amounts of ill-considered corrosive social upheaval right out in the open, insisting that it’s all ‘progress’ and only ‘reform’ and can only be thought of as Good.  Thus the SO Mania.

**If the essentially decent and worthwhile original insights of worldwide ‘victimology’ have now mutated – as I believe they have – into the handy rule of thumb that if a) somebody is unhappy then b) they must be a ‘victim’ and then c) there must then be a ‘perp’ and that d) both therapizing the victims and ferreting out the perps require lots of experts and programs and invasive and draconian laws … if all that, then somehow the combined advanced-advocacies in the Beltway have created the perfect self-licking ice cream cone, one even more comprehensive than the defense industry’s unsleeping quest for new enemies to fear. A monster like this will keep on going until the government money runs out (which in its early days, not so long ago, would have seemed inconceivable). The SO community, I would say, has been up against a monstrosity new to American political and cultural experience.

DOJ CHILD-INTERNET REPORT

I have reviewed the DOJ’s Report to Congress entitled “National Strategy for Child Exploitation Prevention and Interdiction” that was released earlier this week.

The Report is 280 pages, and the text is here. It’s an Adobe file, and there is a 7 page differential between the Adobe pagination and the actual page number of the text: so page 15 in Adobe will be page 8 of the actual text and will appear as “15/8”.

I’ll mention the points that struck me in the text, and then offer a few concluding thoughts.

The Report begins with a quotation from Nelson Mandela to the effect that you can most keenly judge a country by the way it treats its children. This is instantly followed by “given the current statistics surrounding child pornography this is a country that is losing its soul”. (8/1) The second quote is taken from an Ohio Congressman, John Adams, although – curiously enough – it is cited as being from the text of a court case.

There are a lot of things over the past decade or two that have led me to think that the country is losing its soul – and Thoreau and the Puritans before him had been greatly concerned. The last decade’s wars of choice haven’t helped a lot of now-deceased kids. But the Congressman and the White House and a whole bunch of federal agencies want to go with this initiative, so it is what it is.

The Report immediately makes the point that “the sexual abuse and exploitation of children” will “rob children of their childhood, irrevocably interfering with their emotional and psychological development”. (8/1) Many will recall the incident a decade or more ago when a meta-study of already approved and accepted studies discovered (much to the researchers’ surprise) that the research actually did not support the assertion that children were permanently and hugely harmed (and I do NOT support the sexual abuse or exploitation of anybody, let’s remember). Congress instantly got so worked up that for the first time in American history it passed a Resolution condemning scientific findings and sent the dark message that any researchers who ever discovered anything else like this was going to lose funding.

Sort of like the Vatican and Gallileo.

Anyway, at this point then, you have to wonder just what “research” you can trust, since almost all of it is federally-funded directly or through an organization the researchers work for. But the Report will make some interesting statements further on so let’s keep at it.

I do note, here, however, that the Report states (shrewdly) only that a child will have his/her “emotional and psychological development” “interfered with”, which is a long way from the claims of utter and total psychic and maturational destruction that used to be tossed out.

It is, further, asserted that every child has a “right” to grow up free from “sexual abuse, trauma, and exploitation” … which is quite a tall order. First, because those terms are not well defined and so elastic; second, because it would take a government with a power surpassing Stalin’s at its height to even come close to stamping out all that; and third, because it seems not only impossible to achieve on its very face but also implies that a child with no challenges or threats will grow up ‘perfectly’ … and I don’t think that’s true at all. (Again, this is no subtle ploy on behalf of adults imposing sexual experience on minors.)

And in an echo of Martha Nussbaum’s Capabilities Approach (see previous relevant Posts) it is asserted that children have a “right” (just, as Nussbaum says, “women” do) not to have sexual experience imposed on them. I completely agree that it is criminal, sinful, and immoral to impose such experience on children; but “rights” are Constitutional things and I don’t like to see this vital and powerful concept tossed around. In the long run such unserious use of the term will weaken it for everyone.

Neatly, while the Report insists on this “right”, it also claims that “it will take our entire society” to achieve it. (8/1) No mention of the Family or Parents or Parental Authority … although such entities would be the first line of defense, and if they were able to do their job then a huge amount of repair work (and costs) would be rendered unnecessary. But the Beltway has actually been pursuing policies precisely designed to undermined those entities, and with no small success. Go figure.

Interestingly, the Report traces government history only back to President Bush’s “PROTECT Our Children Act” of 2008. Nothing further back, such as – oh, say – the Adam Walsh Act of 2006. Which may be a straw in the wind and I’ll discuss my thoughts on that later on.

In making its “Threat Assessment” (9/2) the Report’s compilers tick off all the prosecutors, police and “experts” whom they consulted, among which are listed that National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) that President Reagan raised up in 1984. And they also consulted lots of “relevant research”, but again it’s so hard to tell with this combination of ‘advocacy science’ and ‘government-directed’ science. But I’m keeping an open, though careful, mind.

The focus of this new initiative will be on Children at risk from child pornography, online enticement for sexual purposes, commercial sexual exploitation, and child sex tourism. (9/2) Again you may notice what doesn’t appear in all of this, and more on that later.

The US Marshals Service (USMS) figures more largely in this initiative than in previous initiatives. Although it is mentioned that it was the AWA (such references to AWA as the Report makes are mostly in connection with the USMS) that assigned the USMS the job of tracking down “sex offenders” in 2006. The Service claims, according to the Report, to have captured 10,000 SO “fugitives” in FY 2009, (12/5) although I find that rather high UNLESS you figure that many, many of those “fugitives” were simply persons administratively blind-sided by the AWA tier-system and thus became “fugitives” from Registration literally overnight.

Also, the Internet task force on child-crimes has apprehended or prosecuted only 17,000 since 1998 (12/5), so either the USMS is overstating matters, or it simply toted up all the ‘fish in a barrel’ that it ‘shot’ simply through the workings of the highly-dubious, much-contested, and greatly-resisted-by-States AWA tier reclassification.

Among the “broad goals” of this new initiative will be increasing education of federal, state, local, and tribal (the Tribes figure largely in this Report and in a way it reminds one of reading government documents from the Indian Wars era of the 19th century) judges in “the difficult issues involved in child sexual exploitation” . (14/7) I fully support education of everybody involved in any SO matters, especially if they are officially involved. But I hope this isn’t code and govspeak for trying to inveigle the judges into cutting jurisprudential corners in light of the ‘emergency’, which is a gambit the SO community has been seeing for many years and which in some jurisdictions has seen the erection of highly-questionable “special courts”. These entities, often seen in the Domestic Violence regime, seem to understand their role as short-cutting Constitutional protections (viewed by the courts as “obstructions”).

The Repot claims that “there has been a dramatic increase in cases of sexual exploitation of children”, including not only the four areas of concern noted above but also “sexual molestation of children since the 1990s”. (15/8) So after all of this past 20 years of massive SORNA regime, things have increased? But perhaps it is only the internet-mediated stuff, corresponding not only to the development of the Web but also all the social-networking sites that kids nowadays seem to spend a huge amount of their time on.

Figures are given: by 2006 U.S. Attorneys were handling 82.8 percent more child-pornography cases than they had in 1994; states saw a 230 percent increase in documented cases of child-enticement between 2004 and 2008. (15/8) And again I note that between 1994 and 2006 the Internet grew exponentially and the social-networking sites (and omnipresent personal communications devices in the hands of children) did the same. And if Family and Parents and Parental Authority were already in the process of being Deconstructed in 1994, before the Web and social-networking, you can imagine what has happened since then.

Even more interesting revelations: “It is no surprise then that most sexual abuse of children can be attributed to those who have a relationship of trust and authority relative to the child in addition to ready access to the child”, and that 69 percent of child-pornography cases involved abuse/exploitation by people familiar to the children”. (28/21) The Report lists “parents, other relatives, neighbors, family friends, baby-sitters, coaches, and guardians’ partners”: this would seem to indicate that the government was going to be going after a group of persons mostly overlooked in the previous incarnations of the SO regime – i.e. it's not going after the ‘stranger’ sex offender but rather adults who know kids closely, and perhaps other kids.

Indeed, the text immediately goes on to quote NCMEC figures to the effect that “only a small fraction of the victims (4 percent of the NCMEC data set) were victimized by individuals with whom the child had no relationship”. (28/21) Again, this indicates a far different ‘target population’ from anything previously seen in the SO regime’s 20 year reign. And seems to re-focus away from the now-classic ‘stranger-danger’ SO prowling around the nation like a slavering wolf or vampire.

The USMS again gets some stats in about itself: since 2006 (the year of the AWA’s passage) marshals have “apprehended approximately 40,000 fugitives wanted for sexual assaults, sex offender registrations and other sex crimes”. (53/46) In addition to the ever-necessary caution in any government agency’s self-reported figures of its ‘success’, you have to factor in here the sly conflation of ‘sex offender registration violations’ as ‘sex crimes’. The AWASORNA ‘violations’ may have been the simple administrative type automatically created overnight by the AWA, and administrative technicalities are not ‘sex crimes’ – although clearly at least some government agencies are counting them as such to keep the numbers up. I’d also wonder how many of those ‘apprehensions’ actually stood up in court, or will – as the AWA saga winds on its frakkulent yet declining path.

The NCMEC gets a section all to itself, wherein revelations are revealed: it has NCIC access and access to “other public databases” (one can only wonder) thanks to Congress; from 1984 to 1990 its “recovery rate” of missing and exploited children was 62 percent, but “since 1990 it has climbed to 97 percent”. (100/93) I have a clear recollection that it had been discovered goosing its ‘numbers’ by claiming as its own handiwork any and every child ‘missing’ even for an hour or so, lost rather than abducted, and things of that nature. Yet the Report puts it all out there as if it were gospel.

The NCMEC, by the way, got 24 million in government funding in FY 2008 – although, the Report piously reports, it is a not-for-profit. As my long-deceased granny used to say: At least Jesse James had a gun – you KNEW what was happening to you.

The Report concludes with almost 150 pages of Appendices (A through F) , and a couple of them are actually quite worthwhile.

Appendix C (starting on 167/B-7) lists Academic Research and reviews numerous studies. Impressively, the Report includes research that does not support the size of the purported emergency, although the Appendix is opened with a disclaimer that simply being included doesn’t mean that the government accepts all research findings.

In fact, the first study included here is a Harvard one that considers things overblown and public attention – over-stimulated by ‘problematic’ media coverage – to be distracted by sensationalism. Other peers and young adults (18-24) account for 90-94 percent of online encounters, and are often mere ‘solicitations’ or ‘teasing’ rather than ‘harassment’ or actual ‘enticement’. A whopping 69 percent of these do not involve a request for offline contact. (167/C-1)

From 19 percent of encounters that involved sexual solicitation in 2003, the number had decreased to 13 percent in 2006. And of those 81 percent involved recipients between 14 and 17 years of age. Only 4 to 9 percent of sexual solicitations involve persons substantially older than the recipients. (168/C-2)

In cases where the kiddo met the adult offline, most of kiddos were adolescents “who knew they were meeting adults for sexual encounters”, and consequently the adult was charged with statutory rape for nonforcible sexual relations with a minor. The adults were most often in their 20s. And thus, the Harvard study concludes, forcible sexual relations with a young child ‘ambushed’ (my term) by an adult male stranger met online “does not paint an accurate picture of the majority of sexual solicitations and internet-initiated offline sexual encounters.” (168/C-2)

Of “particular”concern, the Harvard study says, are the sexual solicitations between minors and the consequent frequency of statutory-rape rather than more sinister offline encounters. And also that it’s not so much a problem of the type of internet access but rather individual youths’ psychological profile and their willingness to engage in risky behaviors. (168/C-2)

This Study (well worth the read, and only a few pages of quotations from it are in the Report) continues that “known cases involving strangers are extremely rare”. Thus also “the threat of Internet-initiated sex crimes committed by strangers appears to be extremely exaggerated”. Nor do they often involve “prepubescent children”. (169/C-3)

“Significant deception does not appear to be common” in these encounters. (170/C-4)

I am very much impressed that a Study like this got into the Report. It tells me that the Report staff or the reviewing authorities were not all convinced that they wanted to participate in a replay of the SO Mania ‘research’ of 10 and 20 years ago.

Appendix F is a “Synthesis of Major Studies” that starts on page 215/F-1. One study found that girls were twice as likely as boys to be solicited over the internet; youth who were at least 15 years old accounted for almost 2/3s of the exposure incidents; of the ‘adults’ who accounted for 24 percent of online solicitations, most were between 18 and 25; only 4 percent were over 25. (231/F-17)

There is a 50-50 split between adolescents who are troubled and those not troubled who use the internet to arrange offline meetings. (232/F-18)

I would recommend Appendices C and F especially highly.

So then, what do I think?

First, it is clear that AWA has been for all practical purposes ignored – although what stratagems may be involved in that I can’t say for sure. But it seems that ‘sex offenders’ as they have been classically known are yesterday’s news for the government. Perhaps the weight of judicial complications and the chance that the SORNA regime actually has evolved into ‘punishment’, crossing the magic Constitutional line, has become for the government a game no longer worth the candle.

But, second, this ‘children-internet’ initiative may be something devised to distract from the government’s backing-away from the 2-decade old classical SO Mania and its regime. Yet, in best Beltway style, those already on the bandwagon will not be kicked to the curb: clearly, much government money (such as the term applies these days) will still be forth-coming.

Yet, in my view, history is never static and you can’t step into the same river twice – not even if you’re a government. Thus, although the strategy might have been to simply start-up ‘another sex-offense Mania’, such a strategy is not taking place in the same ‘world’ that the now-classic one took place in. Apparently there are persons in government, certainly in research, who don’t wish to repeat what they have seen going on all over the country for 20 years.

But ‘the children’ are a sure-fire draw and there is some legitimate cause for concern (although, as the studies I noted demonstrate, the problem is either being hugely exaggerated or wrongly-aimed, or both).

And this initiative, if it follows the stats reported in those studies, is going to have to start intruding in the lives of a large bunch of heretofore ‘normal’ people, since rarely are ‘strangers’ and actually ‘adult strangers’ involved in this sort of thing. I’m not sure how politically palatable that’s going to be for the program's political enablers.

Third, ‘sex offenders’ seem to be yesterday’s news, replaced by Internet Child Sexual Predators and Exploiters. And while there is a habitual reference by the USMS to this new type of sex-offender, there is no real effort to drum up the hysterical/maniacal response that characterized the wrecking-job done on Sex Offenders during the classical phase.

Fourth, the classical cartoon of the Stranger Sex Offender is clearly not going to be applicable to this new initiative.

Fifth, as with everything nowadays proposed, it's all subject to what I call The National Situation: there is no real money or public wealth left and it’s hardly inconceivable that the world’s governments might choose to dismiss the Dollar as the planet’s reserve currency. In which case, the government will be hard-pressed to keep its essential services going, let alone toss around ‘funding’ for some of the more baroque excresences of the Advocacy-Industrial Complex.

So I’d recommend to you the Executive Summary at the beginning of this Report, and Appendices C and F.

And I’d say that this Initiative is more than just another encouraging straw in the wind.