New domestic violence study: 1 in 4 women attacked by intimate partners

Oxy, you’re dead right about “statistics”! As Mark Twain famously said, “There are lies, damned lies… and statistics!”

Unfortunately, pedophilia is another topic where I would advise caution and skepticism about what some people claim. I must admit I haven’t dug into the topic in much detail (as I have with other areas like domestic violence), but some numbers I see being quoted do cause me to question whether they’re even possible.

The trouble is that there seem to be some topics that set certain people off into paroxysms of screaming hysteria and shrieking emotionalism, so much so that they take leave of ordinary common sense. Unfortunately, pedophilia can be one of them. We only have to look at the unbelievable outbreak of hysteria that happened in the 1980s over the imagined “mass molestation” of children in day care to see how a whole multitude of people—including some of those we depend on in the “justice” system!—can take leave of their senses altogether, believe things that are virtually impossible—and perpetrate the most shocking injustices as a result. Those dreadful “day care” witch hunts alone inflicted outrageous injustices on innocent people that have never been remedied to this day: innocent people who were sent to prison, had their lives wrecked, and never had one penny of compensation from those responsible for doing this to them.

In my experience this kind of irrational mentality often goes hand in hand with a total disregard of the meaning of numbers. Numbers of course are a precision tool intended to measure something in reality! But some people don’t seem to use numbers that way at all. If they’re horrified, say, or enraged about something, they seem to use numbers as a kind of emotional scream! I suppose we all do this in limited contexts by way of metaphor (“If I’ve heard that once I’ve heard it a million times” is not literally true), but some people do it in non-metaphorical contexts where they shouldn’t. They’ll start off by shouting (for instance) that there are such-and-such a number of victims of whatever “evil” it is they’re campaigning against. Then if they’re not getting the result they want, and if the “evil” is still there—which it invariably is of course, because many evils can never be eradicated altogether—their reaction is to “scream louder”—by cranking the numbers up!

That doesn’t mean a darn thing about reality, and their numbers are totally untrue. So on some occasions it pays to remember that what a “large number” is really measuring is how shrill and hysterical some “activist” is getting! The appropriate response might be to tell the “activist” to “chill out, the sky is not falling!” Unfortunately what often happens instead is that some people accept the numbers without questioning them and spread them around further. Then others believe they’re “facts” when they’re not.

The reason I brought this up in the context of pedophilia concerns that infamous predator, Charles “Jackie” Walls III. One item I came across some time ago was this story, The Scoutmaster’s Secret, by Valerie Ferrari. (Other people here might like to read that story too.) The writer mentions that Walls had “some 30 years of molesting over 50 children.” Now fifty children is a shockingly high number of lives to be damaged in this way, quite apart from the Heath Stocks affair. Also, since this happened in a small town with a population of only four and a half thousand, Walls inflicted this damage on a substantial proportion of the population. If there were 900 families, say—and I’m sure this is the kind of town where “everyone knows everyone else”—it must have seemed to anyone as if Walls had been molesting many of the kids they knew. Nevertheless, fifty children over thirty years is a perfectly credible number the way Walls was operating.

Now I’m positive I’ve also seen, in some other news article, a statement to the effect that over his career, Walls “approached” (or words to that effect) a hundred and fifty more children—or perhaps a hundred and fifty altogether. (This is annoying me because I can’t find the original source right now, but I’m sure it had “a hundred and fifty” in it.) Presumably what that meant was that Walls “made advances” of some kind to these hundred and fifty boys, but they managed to avoid being actually victimized by him. That also seems perfectly credible. Obviously Walls must have made a number of tentative but unsuccessful “approaches” in order to end up with the fifty victims quoted by Valerie Ferrari. Though the man seems to have had a diabolical “nose” not only for which boys would succumb to his advances, but which boys would keep their mouths shut and go along with the whole unsavory business, even to the extent of defending him in court!

The trouble is that I’ve also seen an allegation that Walls had fifteen hundred victims! A number as high as that would be enough to make me raise my eyebrows just on general principles. In light of the other more credible numbers I mentioned above that conflict with it, I’m all the more inclined to be skeptical about these fifteen hundred. Just by way of a reality check, there weren’t that many boys in the whole town of Lonoke, even taking into account the thirty-year period when Walls was operating. Even if I cast the net wider, there are barely enough boys of the right age range in the whole of Lonoke County! So where would Walls have gotten all these victims from? Then another way to look at it is that if he took thirty years to perpetrate all this abuse, he would have had to molest a new boy every single week to achieve this staggering total. That seems very unlikely to me.

That’s why I’d urge anyone to question numbers like this that seem to be “out of the box.” But I also wonder what else, if anything, that “fifteen hundred” number might possibly represent. Even if it’s incorrect, it might correspond to something in the real world. For instance:

I can see how it must seem to the residents of Lonoke as if this man Walls had been molesting just about every boy they knew! So I can see how, subjectively at least, they’d be inclined to accept a very high victim count for the world at large, even if it was unrealistic.

Then somebody might have taken the number of boys Walls victimized in the town of Lonoke itself and extrapolated it to a larger area (such as the county) to get this huge number, even if that wasn’t a valid thing to do.

Or somebody might have counted the number of boys Walls had simply been in contact with over the years, by way of regional Scouting activities—the pool of potential victims, in other words—and presented that erroneously as the number of actual victims. Sometimes an error of that kind can result from hysterical overreaction. That’s to say, someone out there went shrieking up the wall in horror at the thought of any child even being near this man—as if one glance from this monster could itself “contaminate” the poor child in some way, or as if he must automatically have molested every child he ever laid eyes on. Luckily that’s nowhere near true.

However, that “hundred and fifty” I mentioned earlier could also be highly significant. Did somebody take that number, the boys that Walls allegedly “made advances” to, and carelessly stick another zero on the end, making “fifteen hundred” out of it?

I wonder. Anyway I do urge caution in examining the numbers that get tossed around in fields like this. Even if Walls did “only” molest fifty boys, that’s still fifty too many!