'Texas Tough' Sex Crime Wave Hits the Dome

From the Austin Chronicle:

When the agent was contacted he wasn't sure where the number had come from, terming it a 'Goldilocks' figure – 'Not small and not large.' He added that it was the same figure that was used by the media to describe the number of people killed annually by Satanic cults in the 1980s, and before that … as the number of children abducted by strangers each year in the 1970s."

There you go – the numbers on Internet sex predators are recycled from our collective "stranger danger" and "satanic panic" scares, which eventually fizzled into obscurity. Dewhurst didn't cite the 50,000 number, but he did make another claim – also misleading – that one in five teenagers is sexually solicited online. The CJR article cites the Justice Department's one-in-five figure before continuing that, while 19% of teens indeed say they received online "solicitations," "half … came from other teens and none … led to a sexual assault." Furthermore, "The number of teens aggressively solicited by adults online was about 3%. A more recent study … found that the number of kids getting unwanted sexual advances on the Internet was in fact declining. In general, according to data compiled by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, more than 70% of sexual abuse of children is perpetrated by family members or family friends."

Re-read that last sentence. Despite all the continued scares – strangers, Satanists, and now, the Internet – "more than 70% of sexual abuse of children is perpetrated by family members or family friends." Therein lies the biggest fault with Dewhurst's rightward-tacking promises to get "Texas tough" on sexual predators: Knowing that the perp may be put to death for his crimes will create enormous additional pressure on families and victims to stay quiet, perpetuating the abuse.

More here.

Not to minimize the concept of strangers going after underage children for sex, which is absolutely horrible when it happens, but having lived through both the abduction scare of the 70s, when I was presumably a target, and the Satanic ritual abuse hysteria of the 80s, as have all Americans my age and older, it amazes me, somewhat, that we're in the midst of yet another unfounded panic. I say "somewhat" because 9/11 made completely clear to me that people freak out when they're scared, and clearly, parents really do fear for their children's safety. But still. Why can't we ever seem to learn our lesson? The real threat is what it has always been for most kinds of rape, people who are well known to their victims.

Obviously, television plays a big role here, almost wallowing in the deviant sexuality of it all. I was watching Dateline on NBC earlier this evening, seeing the seemingly endless stream of internet child predators lured into a suburban house for confrontation and eventual arrest, and it struck me how much time the show devoted to quoting predator online chat. There was reference after reference to oral sex and masturbation, as though the program was trying to titillate as well as scare, which is obviously their intent. Great for ratings, after all it sucked me in for a while, but horrible for offering any kind of real picture of what's really going on in terms of child molestation. But then TV's never really been all that great for shedding light on complicated problems.

Meanwhile, the dirty uncles, fucked up little brothers, and ill-chosen babysitters of the world are doing their thing, and getting away with it, while we all worry about the relatively few creepy strangers on the internet. God, this country blows me away sometimes.

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