Won’t somebody think of the children?

The bottom rung of the status ladder

February 5, 2024 — April 1, 2025

cooperation
culture
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Figure 1

About moral panics and children

TODO: write about children’s special position on the status ladder and the interesting role that causes them to play in modern rhetoric, where many things are justified by “for the children” or “to protect the children,” regardless of whether an actual difference is made to children’s lives.

Lovejoy’s Law.

cf Growing up.

1 Actual danger to children

1.1 Climate change

Children will be the ones living with any climate disasters.

1.2 All the AI Stuff

Children will be the ones living with any AI disasters.

1.3 Social media and other dopamine hacking

TBD

1.4 Child sexual abuse

For all that this page is about moral panic around children, it is worth noting that there are real dangers to children in the world.

Actual estimated rates of sexual assault are shockingly high. According to Australian Institute of Health and Welfare summary of the ABS Personal Safety Survey 11% of women and 3.6% of men in 2021–22 had experienced sexual abuse perpetrated by an adult before the age of 15; I would have guessed it was much lower. The Australian Child Maltreatment Study estimates much higher rates again, although they take pains to point out that they are not directly comparable to the ABS data; ACMS looks to have a larger sample size and more detailed questions.

Who’s Making News? is a sexual predator demographic tracker which tracks the US convictions of sexual predators. Startling how strongly this correlates with religiosity. I wonder how well that generalises and what the causal mechanism would be. Also, I have methodological concerns about how the authors have controlled for base rates.

2 References

Benson. 2022. “Crying, ‘Wolf!’ The Campaign Against Critical Race Theory in American Public Schools as an Expression of Contemporary White Grievance in an Era of Fake News.” Journal of Education and Learning.
Benton, and Peterka-Benton. 2021. “Truth as a Victim: The Challenge of Anti-Trafficking Education in the Age of Q.” Anti-Trafficking Review.
Bloom, and Moskalenko. 2022. “QAnon, Women, and the American Culture Wars.” Social Research: An International Quarterly.
Finlayson, Kelly, Topinka, et al. 2022. “Digital Culture Wars: Understanding the Far Right’s Online Powerbase.” Soundings.
Hübscher, and Mering. 2022. Antisemitism on Social Media.
Langer. 2022. “Deep State, Child Sacrifices, and the ‘Plandemic’: The Historical Background of Antisemitic Tropes Within the QAnon Movement.” In Antisemitism on Social Media.
Lundskow. 2022. “Conspiracies and Restorative Violence in American Culture.” Critical Sociology.
Moran, Prochaska, Grasso, et al. 2023. “Navigating Information-Seeking in Conspiratorial Waters: Anti-Trafficking Advocacy and Education Post QAnon.” Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction.
O’Brien. 2023. “The Coming of the Storm: Moral Panics, Social Media and Regulation in the QAnon Era.” Information & Communications Technology Law.
Ramjewan, and Garlen. 2020. “Growing Out of Childhood Innocence.” Curriculum Inquiry.
Seeberg, and Goździak, eds. 2016. “Forced Victims or Willing Migrants? Contesting Assumptions About Child Trafficking.” In Contested Childhoods: Growing up in Migrancy: Migration, Governance, Identities. IMISCOE Research Series.
Watson. 2023. “Conspiracy Theories and Human Trafficking: Coercive Power, Normative Ambiguity and Epistemic Uncertainty.” Journal of Human Trafficking.