What Does 'Abuse' Actually Mean?

Posted: 28/10/2012 21:17

One in Four? Tip of the Iceberg

"It's the favoured statistic of fear-mongers everywhere. 1 in 4 of us will experience a mental health problem in the course of a year. 1 in 4 women will experience domestic violence at some point in their life. In the United States, according to one campaign group, 1 in 4 college women have survived rape or attempted rape. According to another group, 1 in 4 people in Ireland experience sexual abuse. And in the UK too. As the aptly-named One in Four UK has it: 'Research has consistently shown that one in four children will experience sexual abuse before the age of 18'."

"So here goes. At the end of March 2011, the latest period for which the Department for Education collects statistics, there were 42,700 children in England subject to a child protection plan. That is 42,700 children out of a mid-2010 total estimated at 11,045,400 0-17 year olds. If you do the maths that comes to 0.38658%. You may have noticed that this is rather less than 1 in 4. But what does being subject to a child protection plan, or what used to be called being on the child protection register, actually mean?"

"The cultural imagination that produces the kind of Savile-related hysteria we have been witness to over recent days and weeks is deeply ingrained. Having the facts on your side is only one part of the battle. The other is to ask why influential sections of society find it so easy to believe 1 in 4 of our children are being abused in the first place?"

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/dave-clements/child-abuse_b_2035336.html

Thursday 1 November 2012

We need a Full Stop to this scaremongering

"The NSPCC and others have leapt upon the Savile scandal to promote their claims that child abuse is rife in modern Britain. But it isn’t.

The Jimmy Savile scandal has been held up as proof that child abuse is rife in modern Britain. In every institution in the land, even at ‘Auntie’, as Savile’s old stomping ground the BBC was once affectionately known, children are apparently being preyed upon by warped adults. ‘Sadistic child abuse is rife across Britain’, newspaper headlines tell us. According to the deputy children’s commissioner for England, ‘There isn’t a town, village or hamlet where children are not being sexually exploited.’ And the least safe place, even worse than the Beeb and NHS hospitals, where Savile also allegedly groomed and molested girls, is the family home - it is there where the ‘scourge of abuse’ is most common, apparently.

Is it true? Are loads of children being abused, treated sadistically by people they should be able to trust? No, they are not. The most remarkable thing about the hysterical claims about child abuse being rife is how flimsy they are, how quickly they fall apart when one asks the most basic of sceptical questions. Indeed, the depiction of Britain as a hotbed of sadistic sexual and physical abuse of children has required industrial levels of fact manipulation by a child-protection industry that has a clear interest in exaggerating levels of abuse. The truth seems to be that - brace yourselves for this - generally people are good, and generally the family home and most institutions are safe, even happy places."

http://www.spiked-online.com/site/article/13043/