Tiffany B. Brown

a mish-mosh of stuff

Recommended: “Net Effect: No More Sexual Abuse”

Kudos to Wired sex columnist Regina Lynn for injecting some common sense into the “online sexual predators” debate.

Amid the media flurry around sex offenders and social networking, we are failing to notice a crucial landmark in our Quest to Protect the Children: Sexual abusers have undermined their own power by taking their activities online.

Their tricks and lies are no longer secret. Their threats are no longer surprising. And their existence is no longer hushed up for the sake of the community.

She’s got more to say, so go read.

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http://www.poise.cc/ Cinnamon

She quotes that less around 4% of children online are close to being abused by adults. But since rates of children who are abused before they get to 18 are not dropping, this just means that there are still lots of people in their real life, who their parents likely know, who are abusing them. I think our tendency to see rapists, pedophiles, and the like as monsters who are “somewhere out there” keeps us from looking at the fact that most people are abused by family members, friends, and close contacts who are trusted by the parents and the children. And, unfortunately, I don’t see people taking those claims any more seriously than they used to. Look at the number of priests who have been accused of being abusers and the number of parishioners who find it hard to believe that Priest X could have done that, because they’re he’s such a good person. It’s possible for good people to really heinous things when they think they can get away with it. And that is much scarier than a skeezy man with a nasty AOL handle.
http://www.poise.cc Cinnamon

She quotes that less around 4% of children online are close to being abused by adults. But since rates of children who are abused before they get to 18 are not dropping, this just means that there are still lots of people in their real life, who their parents likely know, who are abusing them. I think our tendency to see rapists, pedophiles, and the like as monsters who are “somewhere out there” keeps us from looking at the fact that most people are abused by family members, friends, and close contacts who are trusted by the parents and the children. And, unfortunately, I don’t see people taking those claims any more seriously than they used to. Look at the number of priests who have been accused of being abusers and the number of parishioners who find it hard to believe that Priest X could have done that, because they’re he’s such a good person. It’s possible for good people to really heinous things when they think they can get away with it. And that is much scarier than a skeezy man with a nasty AOL handle.