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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   31957 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023

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I've actually wondered how public schools dodged the bullet of horrific pedo scandal that rightfully hit the Catholic church and the Boy Scouts.

It's probably way less common on a per-capita basis. For whatever reason, males commit ~90% of child sexual abuse. The younger the students, the more overwhelmingly female the teachers. And unlike schools, The Catholic Church and Boy Scouts have structures where the highest ranking authority figure can create significant alone time with children. The Sandusky scandal was similar.

It's probably way less common on a per-capita basis.

From what I can tell it's substantially more common. That said I don't find the uproar against the priests inappropriate--we should hold them to a higher standard.

I couldn't find the link for this claim:

The U.S. Department of Education found that 5% to7% of public school teachers engage in sexual abuse of children per year.

It seems outrageous. 1:15 teachers sexually abuse kids? And only 20% are males? The a-priori likelihood is low because of the offender rate and composition of the institutions. Unless schools hire females with a 10x offending rate, AND churches (broadly) hire males with 10-100x lower offending rate (based on this averaged with this, accounting for this. Its a-priori statistically very unlikely for male dominated or 50/50 places, to have higher offending rates than 60/40+ males spaces. But its possible.

All that said, the offender rate comports well with a good article from a solid source. But definitions make everything wonky, conflating language with acts sometimes. So I don't really know with any confidence. Bayes makes me think sex abuse is always much lower the more female dominated a place is.

Now that you mention it that does seem very high. Based on my wife's accounts of male elementary school teachers though, I wouldn't be too surprised to hear that the men alone are far more likely to offend than the average man. They sound socially maladjusted. I don't think predators generally plan ahead and deliberately become schoolteachers in order to have easier access to vulnerable children, but I do think there are a lot of very weird people who think they get along much better with kids, pass the event horizon, and develop romantic/sexual feelings for children after treating them as peers for long enough.

Based on the source you provided it sounds like the outright majority of sexual abuse happens at school.

Based on the source you provided it sounds like the outright majority of sexual abuse happens at school.

It does sound that way. And it might be that most sex abuse outside of family (most common iirc) happens in schools. However, my confidence on that proposition is proposition is quite low because of some bayesian reasoning. For example, the established prior is that men commit 80-90% child sex abuse. This is a high confidence, long standing datapoint. Because it's so heavily weighted towards males, any male dominated group should have dramatically more abuse. Like, my heart says the sources we have, but my math side says just default to maleness as a proxy.

Around the time of the Sandusky scandal I recall reading that some abusers spend years inserting themselves into professions which might have the ability to provide access, acting gregarious and helpful. Its all very frightening. The sources we have indicate waaaay to much abuse.

any male dominated group should have dramatically more abuse.

Sure, but schools are far, far larger than any other institution with even 10% as much access to children. I can't think of any profession easier to get into, more respected, and with easier access to children than teacher. Therapists probably have more access, but it's much harder to become a therapist, probably harder to dodge sexual abuse claims, and there are about 20 teachers for every therapist.

Generally all of the professions with access to children are dominated by women. So I totally get your reasoning that male-dominated professions should have more abuse, but in this case there's a strong, direct counterforce, which is that male-dominated professions also have less access to kids, almost in proportion to the extent to which they're male-dominated.

In the end I can think of some reasonable factors explaining away the gender split vs. frequency of abuse issue, and the stats pretty clearly indicate that schools are where the abuse happens, so that's what I'm inclined to believe. Totally get it if you disagree though.

The scandal is not only the abuse, but the systematic coverup.

Do American public schools, as SOP and official policy, protect the abusive teachers, silence the accusations and if the miscreants became well known, reassign them silently somewhere else so they can continue?

(wouldn't surprise me if it was the case)

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