Forty nine attorneys general formed a task force to study the problem of kids being solicited for sex online. Their conclusion? It’s not actually a problem. They found that kids are very rarely solicited by adults online, and the kids who are solicited are willing participants, teenagers who seek this out, who come from bad homes. The group recommends instead doing something about bullying between kids (both offline and on), finding that’s the real problem.
My BS meter has been going off pretty strongly about the whole online sexual predators thing for years now, so the fact that the group that has been pushing this hardest—attorneys general—has concluded that it’s not a problem comes as welcome news to me. I have some good friends who truly believe that this is a real problem that’s a scourge on the nation that threatens every kid, and I don’t mean any offense to them, nor do I mean to diminish the horror of the few cases that do exist…but it’s just not a problem that warrants the enormous level of response and attention that it’s received. The solution to this problem has nothing to do with the internet, and everything to do with dealing with the welfare of children in these bad home environments.
Well, there goes Chris Hansen’s career…
The overexposure of this is a great example that may be applied to other phenomena. Let’s say… the wars? Or constant misinformation?
Paid retired military officers who spout the talking points and get paid by both the media and the Pentagon?
I am not surprised one bit, and I think the titillation involved in the NBC program was the reason for it’s popularity, I would imagine.
There was an attorney somewhere in the south who committed suicide in front of two officers that had come to arrest him in this so-called ‘sting’. He may have been found guilty, but coming to his house with a TV camera?
Did they need to show it 43 times a week? No wonder I am a cynical skeptic.
I would add to the “overexposure” category anything that Nancy Grace focuses on. Murders of (mostly) women and children are terrible, of course, but from watching a “news” show like that, you’d totally get the impression that your child is CONSTANTLY in grave danger of being snatched and dismembered.
The number of parents I know who have “play dates” rather than let their children go out into the neighborhood because “it’s so much more dangerous now” is just sad.
It just seems like a slightly less bizarre version of the hysteria some years back about Satanic rings ritually abusing and murdering children. Police departments were actually having “experts” come in to train their officers about this stuff.