Pedophobia

The Anti-Child Bias of Children's Advocacy Groups

The report was based on a study released the same day by a "children's advocacy group" called Fight Crime: Invest in Kids.

The study excluded summers and weekends; only school days were counted.

A co-author of the study claimed that the high rate of crime during after-school hours was due to a lack of supervised activities. In his words, "They're bored, they're idle. They have too much time on their hands."

The same co-author also said that since the number of teenagers in America is expected to increase 17 percent by 2005, the problem with after-school crime will only get worse.

I have little doubt that these claims were made with sincerity, but sincerity does not equal truth. To determine the reliability (or even the relevance) of this information, it is important that we not take it at face value.

In the first place, what exactly is a "children's advocacy group?" Is it a group of children making their needs known? Not likely; the aforementioned co-author is a dean at a major university.

Assuming for the moment that this advocacy group actually does represent some segment of America's children, how well are they doing their job? Can it be said that they are "advocating" children when their emphasis seems to be on promoting non-parental control on children's activities?

If an "African Americans' advocacy group" were to say that black people commit crime because they "have too much time on their hands," or that the problem would only get worse as the black population grows, such a group would be crucified (and rightly so) by the news media and by prominent politicians. So why do we tolerate claims of this nature about children?

The dubious nature of the term "advocacy group," along with the groups apparent hostility toward the very people they claim to represent, should be enough to cast doubt upon their claims; but the research itself is also fundamentally flawed.

Why did the study only include school days? If violent crime rates are high all day long on weekends and during the summer, it would make their case much stronger. If, on the other hand, violent crime rates are lower during those times, we would have to come to a conclusion very different from that which was promoted by the researchers.

It is almost as if the study were rigged to give the figures that the researchers wanted. I certainly hope that is not the case, but is that not what the evidence suggests? Clearly, violent juvenile crime on school days will occur when there is the least supervision and when the children are awake--we can figure that out without a study. By limiting the study to school days, all uncertainty about the outcome was eliminated.

Excluding weekends and summers from the study also makes it impossible to speculate on causes of juvenile crime other than lack of supervision. If this group is truly interested in fighting crime, then they have done their own cause a great disservice.
 

Two sources of additional information on how school attendance affects the crime rate are an article by Karl Bunday, author of the School Is Dead; Learn in Freedom! web site; and a book by Zach Montgomery entitled Poison Drops in the Federal Senate.

For more than a century, opponents of classroom-style schooling have held the view that schools contribute to higher crime rates by creating an unhealthy social environment that brings out the worst in people; and statistics compiled during the early days of public schooling tend to support this claim. When today's studies only count school days, how can we be sure that the schools themselves do not contribute to the surge in violent crime in the late-afternoon hours?

It seems clear to me that so-called "child advocacy groups" such as Fight Crime: Invest in Kids have an agenda that is anti-child. Their goal is to find and/or promote new and more effective ways to keep children under the thumb of institutional oppression.

Theirs is a not-so-new brand of bigotry and discrimination--you might call it pedophobia. They have an irrational fear of and animosity toward children. By their rhetoric they blame the children for virtually all social ills, and this becomes the justification for keeping all children under tight control.

-Kaleb Axon, ASFAR Contributor