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Originally Posted by Astrocloud
By this logic -since there are 1000's more strange men than female caregivers -then statistically men are much more unlikely to be molesters. Yes, this logic is fallacious on both counts.
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No. You're comparing apples to oranges. I was comparing caregiver molestation to caregiver molestation, and my reasoning is sound.
raveneye's statistices indicated that 22% of the children in the study were molested by females, and 78% by males. This would seem to indicate that males were 3 1/2 times as likely to molest as females, at least in the population studied. The problem with this is that it looks only at the percentages of the results, and doesn't really tell us about the incidence from the other end.
Since most molestation occurs by a caregiver, we should look at them primarily. The 3 1/2 times as likely is sound only if there are equal numbers of male and female caregivers, but this is not the case. Children, particularly young children, are much more likely to be in the custody of a female caregiver than a male.
Let's take a hypothetical situation. I'll be making up the numbers here to illustrate my point. Let's take a population of 10,000, and assume that 100 of them were molested by a caregiver. Using raveneye's statistics, 78 of the molestors would have been men, and 22 women. If the care givers are equally split between males and females, the that would be 78/5000 males and 22/5000 females who molested a child. The likelihood of a male being a molestor would be 1.56%, and a female 0.44%. But there is a much higher percentage of female caregivers than male. Let's shift that split to 3/4 or caregivers being female, something much closer to reality, I think. That would give us 78/2500 males molesting and 22/7500 females, or a likelihood of 3.12% among males, and 0.29% for females, or about 10x as likely among males in this particular population.
If you want to compare the incidence of males and females who perform stranger abductions, I'm game. But lets compare apples to apples, the number of female strangers children are exposed to relative to the number of abductions, and the number of male strangers children are exposed to relative to the number of abductions. Look at a public park during the day, and you'll find the number of women around the children greatly outnumber the men, yet the number of stranger abductions comitted by men outnumbers those by women.
Let me emphasize something else here before I'm finished. I think the parent in your second example clearly overreacted. There isn't enough information in the first story to judge.
If parents are more wary of all strangers, children would be safer.