(no subject)
Apr. 29th, 2005 08:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
theweaselkingJon Stewart showed a clip of an idiot on CNN. He challenged her statement that "gays parents are 11 times more likely to molest children" as being bullshit, which it is, and he lambasted the anchors for *not* challenging the statement, but he didn't give details about *why* it's bullshit.
The Wall Street Journal, however, does.
The study, produced by an anti-gay advocacy group, shows that 34% of reported sexual assaults against foster children in Illinois between 1997 and 2002 were man-on-boy or woman-on-girl, and leaps from that to conclude that "thus, homosexual practitioners were proportionately more apt to sexually abuse foster or adoptive children."
Of course, it never addresses (because it doesn't have information on) the makeup of the houses, and whether or not *any* of these children was in a homosexual household. Where does the person on CNN's statement come from? Well, a bad study from a biased quack says (without proper support) that 34% of abuse is homosexual, and homosexuals are 3% of the population, and so she just divided.
The Wall Street Journal, however, does.
The study, produced by an anti-gay advocacy group, shows that 34% of reported sexual assaults against foster children in Illinois between 1997 and 2002 were man-on-boy or woman-on-girl, and leaps from that to conclude that "thus, homosexual practitioners were proportionately more apt to sexually abuse foster or adoptive children."
Of course, it never addresses (because it doesn't have information on) the makeup of the houses, and whether or not *any* of these children was in a homosexual household. Where does the person on CNN's statement come from? Well, a bad study from a biased quack says (without proper support) that 34% of abuse is homosexual, and homosexuals are 3% of the population, and so she just divided.
When I asked her about this discrepancy between what the study found and what she said, she replied, "I believe I didn't have that articulated as well as I should have." But she also said it seems unlikely that abuse would be homosexual in nature yet committed by an apparent heterosexual. "It just requires more explanation than what you can do in soundbites," she said.The WSJ writer continues by demolishing the bad research to begin with.
I ran Dr. Cameron's paper by some experts in psychology, sociology, statistics and child welfare, as well as a researcher who has in the past defended Dr. Cameron.Right.
Besides his lack of data about same-sex couples in Illinois, researchers pointed out Dr. Cameron's flawed assumption that the gender of pedophiles' victims correlates to adult sexual attraction; that he applied nationwide data on homosexuality to a predominantly Chicago-based population of foster homes; and that he cited many of his own studies, including two previous ones that attempted to calculate the proportion of sexual abuse that is same-sex based on small sample sizes of six and 25 cases of abuse, respectively.
"The paper is not written as a competent research paper," said Paul Velleman, associate professor of social statistics at Cornell University. "This is a pretty lightweight study," said Kenneth Land, professor of sociology at Duke University and chair of the American Statistical Association's mathematical sociology section.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-04-29 03:46 pm (UTC)