Home Office figures for Sarah's law ? fact or fiction? | Ben Goldacre | Comment is free | The Guardian

Quote:

According to the Home Office, Sarah's law – which lets any parent find out if any adult in contact with their child has a record of violent or sexual crimes – has "already protected more than 60 children from abuse during its pilot". This fact was widely reported this week. As the Sun announced: "More than 60 sickening offences were halted by Sarah's law during its trial." The number of sickening offences prevented by an intervention is a difficult thing to calculate: nobody explained where the number came from, so for my own interest I called the Home Office. "It's not that difficult to work out is it?" This is the Home Office telling me I'm stupid. "It's the number of disclosures issued, how many were of sex offenders, and how many children would those offenders have had contact with." Fair enough. This means that telling a parent that someone in contact with their child had a history of abuse equated to preventing an act of abuse? Yes, they said: "Protecting that child means ensuring that the offender did not have a way of having contact with that child. Therefore that child is being protected." Fair enough. This assumes that any such contact is itself abusive, or would definitely result in abuse. That might be correct; I don't know. Then I asked where the number 60 had come from. I was sent to an excellent report assessing the programme, written by a team of academics. Neither the number 60 nor the word "sixty" appeared in that document. So I contacted the lead author, Prof Hazel Kemshall, who said: "You are correct that reference to 60 children is not made in the report. As I understand it the Home Office have drawn on police data sources to quote this figure and therefore I cannot assist you further. As you will see from the report we were careful to state the limits of the methodology." I contacted the Home Office again. "The figure is over 60 and it comes from the number of disclosures made where there was a conviction of a sexual offence with a minor, or violence against a minor. In total, 21 disclosures were made specifically about registered sex offenders [RSO]. A further 11 disclosures were made, for example relating to convictions for violent offending. These people had access to over 60 children." I'm not sure this is self-evident. The academics who wrote the report couldn't work out where 60 came from, and at least two pieces have appeared trying to unpick it, and arrived at different answers from me and the Home Office. Conrad Quilty-Harper, in the Telegraph, and a website called FullFact both tried – very reasonably – adding various categories of numbers from the academic report, including a figure on social worker activity in 43 extra cases, which seemed to make up the numbers. I'm not saying 60 is wrong. While what it represents was probably overstated, the number itself isn't absurd. But it's odd that just finding out where it came from involved so much mucking about, and it seems even odder to ignore the robust figures in an academic report that you've commissioned (not cheap), and instead build your press activity around one opaque figure constructed ever so slightly on the back of an envelope.

If I were a British paedophile I'd have fucked off somewhere less hysterical a long time ago. I suspect that whoever's left these days must be the low hanging fruit.

__________________
Standard disclaimer: the disgusting statements contained in this post are the views of the poster, and unless specified do not represent the views of the moderators or the site's owners.

I seem to recall, but I am too tired to check statistics, that the great majority of child abuse, sexual and otherwise, happens in the family home. From this point of view, pointing the bone at teachers, priests, strangers who befriend children in parks and the like, is a wonderful way of deflecting attention from child abusers who satisfy their lust by becoming parents or step-parents.

These "creepy people" registers are a wonderful way of convincing people that Your Government is Dealing With the Problem and Is Committed to Protecting Our Children, while doing nothing of the sort.

Yeah but 1- You can't really protect children from their family. And 2- most people are normal and thus do not fear abusing their own children but fear the strangers. The point is mooter about uncles/male relatives. It's in between.

But, again, most people, probably wrongly, assume they got a better handle on cousin Johnny and Uncle Georges than on total strangers.

In any case, step-fathers are the worst, statistically speaking but go and try to explain to people (esp. older/desperate women) in relationships they don't know much about their new partners...

__________________
Unless otherwise specified, I am posting as a regular poster. When I will act as a mod, I'll make sure you're in no doubt.

BTW, that still doesn't change a damn thing about how stupid that '60' statistics was calculated.

It's not like every contact between a paedophile/sex offender/violent person and a child would result in an assault.

Then again, the music industry is using the same calculation technique for their losses with pirated shit: They consider every music track downloaded illegally as a sale lost. While most people wouldn't buy most the tracks they download if they weren't free in the first place...

__________________
Unless otherwise specified, I am posting as a regular poster. When I will act as a mod, I'll make sure you're in no doubt.

The sad truth about humanity is that some people will believe in absolute stupidity; and if you proved to them that it is stupid they will believe it even more.

I am having real difficulty in understanding how such minds work.

Can anyone offer any evidence-based research on the matter? I have already provided some here. But this seems so pervasive in current society that I think it needs more than personal cognitive dissonance to explain.

Originally Posted by roadkill

The sad truth about humanity is that some people will believe in absolute stupidity.

How is it absolutely stupid to want to protect your kids? And go to any length to protect them?

Otherly said, most parents will happily inflict any amount of problems on others/society/sex offenders for the off-chance that it might protect their kids. This a cost-benefits analysis where costs are nearly nil (parents don't see themselves as paedophiles/sex offenders and they pay the same taxes anyhow) and the benefits potentially infinite - if it helps their own child.

I'd say that, from the pov of the parents, it's a fairly rational call. And that's why we have a representative republic rather than direct democracy - So that the administration/politicians can kill such ideas by recalculating costs/benefits at the aggregated level - Where even one or two kids lost to paedophiles a year can be an acceptable cost, depending on the benefits.

__________________
Unless otherwise specified, I am posting as a regular poster. When I will act as a mod, I'll make sure you're in no doubt.

Unless the kid grows up paranoid and with only memories of a childhood spent loked indoors under strict supervision.

__________________
Standard disclaimer: the disgusting statements contained in this post are the views of the poster, and unless specified do not represent the views of the moderators or the site's owners.

Some parents will definitely go too far in their need/desire to protect their kids, that's a given.

Where do you think the Italian mama/Jewish mother figures who are such a big hit in family comedies/dramas come from?

Look at Enzo, in "Le Grand Bleu". Have you seen that? It's probably not your generation. But Jean Reno is playing that big, tough Italian guy - who is still a bit afraid of his mama catching him overeating someone else's pasta...

__________________
Unless otherwise specified, I am posting as a regular poster. When I will act as a mod, I'll make sure you're in no doubt.