Just who is "educating" Lauren Book?

Even during this COVID-19 crisis, Lauren Book is still promoting her organization, and with April typically being child abuse awareness month (which is pointless amidst a global crisis), there are plenty of opportunities for people to get educated. FloriDUH is paying State Senator Lauren Book millions to educate the public on sexual abuse, but has anyone actually educated Lauren Book?

Recently, Lauren Book's latest publicity stunt, walking on a treadmill for 42 hours for the dubious claim of 42 million abuse victims. But where did she pull that stat from? It is interesting Lauren Book's organization, Lauren's Kids, does NOT post original sources for her dubious claims. Instead, like so many victim advocacy groups, each organization cites other advocacy groups rather than any actual research.

Lauren Book's statistical claims are many. These claims are:

#1 - Lauren's Claim: "There are more than 42 million survivors of sexual abuse in America. (National Association of Adult Survivors of Child Abuse)":

It is hard to track down the origins of this stat, but the oldest reference I can find is a book written in 1987 entitled BY SILENCE BETRAYED The Sexual Abuse of Children in America by John Crewdson, a Chicago Tribune reporter. The LA Times noted that Crewdson relied heavily on a single 1985 LA Times poll that found 24% of the 1145 men and 1481 women claimed to have been sexually abused. Crewdson then assumed that 38 million Americans had experienced sexual abuse as a child.

Part of the problem is the survey had a 24% refusal rate, so it is likely many did not take the survey because it was irrelevant to them. It must also be noted that this survey also asked opinions on the McMartin trial and it was still a time where people associated homosexuals with pedophilia.

The site Lauren's Kids cites is a fellow child victim advocacy website which did NOT offer a reference at all.

#2, another of Lauren's favorites:
1 in 3 girls are sexually abused before the age of 18. (The Advocacy Center)
1 in 5 boys are sexually abused before the age of 18. (The Advocacy Center)

The source for this stat is NOT The Advocacy Center. The origin of this stat is from a handful of stats from feminist groups circa the 1970s/1980s. In the 1988 book "The Right to Innocence" by Beverly Engel, she attributed the stat to a survey of cases from one Hank Giaretto, who promoted his own advocacy center he founded in 1971 until his death in 2003. But similar claims could be found before then: Elizabeth E Cobey of Parents United told a congressional subcommittee in 1977 she saw stats that 25% of American women were molested as children. These surveys were conducted primarily by feminist groups with relatively small numbers.

This is a good time to discuss validity versus reliability. Something is reliable if it gives the same results. Something is valid when something gives the right result. Let's say you rig up a device that shoots a gun at a target. If it hits the bullseye all 5 times, it is both valid and reliable. If it shoots in the same spot five times but hits 5 inches from the bullseye, it is reliable but invalid.

Many of the tests used to make estimates on the prevalence of sexual abuse suffer from the same issues with validity. Back in the 1980s, repressed memory was taught by numerous victim advocates, and that stuff taught back then is believed by the current generation of advocates. It goes like this -- if your life sucks in any way, such as being depressed, trouble meeting a good man, or trouble at work, then you were probably abused, even if you don't remember it. Repressed memory has long since been debunked (think about all the terrible experiences you've ever had and you'll discover it is very hard to forget) but we never forget even bad advice we were taught, like stranger danger.

This is a major problem among victim advocates but they like to repress such facts. 

#3: Lauren's Claim: 1 in 5 children are solicited sexually while on the Internet before the age of 18. (National Children’s Alliance: Nationwide Child Abuse Statistics) --

Surprise! Lauren's Kids fails to cite the original resource. Instead, she promotes another victim advocacy group that took down the page she cited. 1 in 5” stat: came from a 2008 Youth Internet Safety Survey (YISS); 19% received a broad  term "sexual solicitation," which included anything from sexual spam to someone asking if a person “got  lucky” on a date. Only one in 33 experienced an "aggressive sexual solicitation," or a request to contact offline. Of those who actually solicited a teen online, 24% came from adults, 48% came from other juveniles, and 24% from unknown people. One cannot assume all solicitations came from "online predators" implied by Lauren's Kids.

#4: Lauren's Claim - 30% of sexual abuse is never reported. (Child Sex Abuse Prevention and Protection Center) --

Any discussion about sex offense inevitably lead to claims of widespread underreporting. It is the classic appeal to ignorance; we simply can't disprove claims of widespread underreporting so we can't easily debunk such claims. By the same token, claims of widespread underreporting cannot be proven, either. There is already a lengthy discussion about underreporting online; to summarize the article for the sake of this article, the National Crime Victimization Surveys are the largest surveys on this topic, but even they rely on incredibly small numbers (less than a hundred unreported cases) and broad definitions of what constitutes sexual assault, which can lead to wide variations in results. One year, it is 30%, the next year, it is 90%, depending on the resource. These underreporting surveys rely on self-reports from common citizens, which means no investigation was made to determine if an event or fear of an event qualifies as abuse in the eyes of the law.

#5: Lauren's claim: Nearly 70% of all reported sexual assaults (including assaults on adults) occur to children age 17 and under. (Children’s Advocacy Center)

-- This stat is actually verified by legitimate studies but is a pretty useless stat simply intended to incite fear. On average, there are only about 100,000 to 200,000 sexual assault reports in America annually in a nation of roughly 330 Million people. But this stat is like a stat saying 10% of manufactured cars are colored red.


#6: Lauren's claim: 90% of child sexual abuse victims know the perpetrator in some way. (U.S. Department of Justice)

-- This one is true but is also a valid argument for the uselessness of sex offense registries, since they were designed with Stranger Danger in mind.

#7: Lauren's claim: Approximately 20% of the victims of sexual abuse are under age eight. (Broward County)2

This is a stat from just one county, so it is not necessarily indicative of the entire state of Florida. This is another "10% of cars are red" stat. It is an emotionally charged stat but is not useful for anything else.

#8: Lauren's Claim: 95% of sexual abuse is preventable through education. (Child Molestation Research and Prevention Institute)

-- I agree (albeit knowing the 95% is an arbitrary number created merely as a talking point) but the education has to be FACTUAL, not based on the tired myths propagated by Lauren Book. Lauren's kids is the equivalent to Jim Bakker's Silver Solution for COVID-19. There are far better programs out there.

Also, I wonder what 5% cannot be prevented by educating the public and how this conclusion was made.

#9: Lauren's Claim; 38% of the sexual abusers of boys are female. (Broward County)

-- Again, a single county stat.It is good to point out not everyone accused of sexual offenses are men. Wll, good for Lauren Book, but even a blind squirrel finds a nut every now and then.

#10 Lauren's Claim: There is worse lasting emotional damage when a child’s sexual abuse started before the age of six, and lasted for several years. Among child and teen victims of sexual abuse there is a 42 percent increased chance of suicidal thoughts during adolescence. (American Counseling Association)

-- The article she links to DOES NOT make this claim. This report is merely a brief of POTENTIAL, not ACTUAL, impacts of abuse, and warns not everyone will have reported problems that Book claims will happen. On this I say this a blatant lie by Lauren Book.

#11: Lauren's Claim: “More than 90% of individuals with a developmental delay or disability will be sexually assaulted at least once in their lifetime.” (Valenti-Heim, D.m Schwartz L.)

-- This report is not available online but is from a very obscure book from 1995; despite a few sources quoting this (and by a few I mean less than a dozen), there is no way to verify the outlandish claims made here. Judging by the lack of citation, I'm willing to bet Lauren Book does not actually know where this stat came from. If I was in search of a stat, I'd provide the actual reference.

#12: Lauren's claim: “There are nearly half a million registered sex offenders in the U.S. – 80,000 to 100,000 of them are missing.” (The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children) --

This myth came from a 2003 poorly devised telephone survey conducted by another dubious victim advocate cult, Parents For Megan's Law. Legitimate studies have found this number is not even a tenth of PFML's false claim. A lengthy discussion on this persistent claim can be found at oncefallen.com.

#13 Lauren's Kids claims: “A typical pedophile will commit 117 sexual crimes in a lifetime.” (National Sex Offenders Registry)

-- Lauren's Kids cites this dubious stat to a private registry company that sells advertising space on their websites and was conjured from a blatant misread of a single quote by Gene Abel in a book. This stat was posted on Yellodyno, another advocacy site. Interestingly enough, the original citation cannot be found anywhere. It was attributed to Gene Abel (1985) “The Evaluation of Child Molesters: Final Report to the Center on Antisocial and Violent Behavior.” Rockville, MD: National Institute of Mental Health. No one has a copy of the original study! But, as written in“The Stop Child Molestation Book: What Ordinary People Can Do In Their Everyday Lives To Save 3 Million Children” by Nora Harlow and Gene G. Abel, “On average, a pedophile molests 11.7 children compared to a non-pedophile molester, who molests, on average, 2.9 children… On average, a molester with pedophilia commits 70.8 molestation acts. On average, a molester without pedophilia commits 6.5 acts.” Somewhere along the way, the stat was misread!

To borrow WaPo's Pinocchio scale, Lauren's statistical claims are a solid THREE Pinocchios and barely a fact from four. If a person lies as frequentrly as Donald Trump how can we trust her "education" curriculum to provide factual information?