Where are the #MeToo stories of child sexual assault?

In late 2017, a succession of women publicly accused Harvey Weinstein of committing a litany of sexual crimes, crimes for which he is now serving a lengthy prison sentence. In total, accusations were levelled by as many as 80 women and dated all the way back to the 1970s.

The many women who came forward to accuse the Hollywood producer triggered a phenomenon known as an availability cascade, a feedback loop that produces and then promotes a collective belief. The cascade was known as the #MeToo movement and the collective belief it promoted was that sexual assault was rampant and sexual predators were everywhere.

An availability cascade is given its name thanks to the cognitive heuristic known as availability bias. It is the bias that leads us to be scared of the beach after learning of a shark attack or to feel afraid of flying after reading about a plane crash. While shark attacks and plane crashes are statistically rare, news reports of their occurrence make them loom large in our minds, leading us to over-estimate their prevalence.

In their classic 1999 paper on the phenomenon, Timur Kuran and Cass Sunstein explain that availability cascades occur when information spills through a population, causing a collective belief to form, which in turn causes the information to become more widely available. During an availability cascade people will come to express support for a cause or belief simply because they see other people expressing support. And this mass public support intensifies the cascade in a self-fulfilling cycle.

The #MeToo movement was the perfect availability cascade. Claims against Weinstein snowballed as more and more women came forward with accusations. The snowballing prompted women who had not been the victim of Weinstein to jump on the bandwagon by tweeting #MeToo and sharing their own stories of sexual abuse. The torrent of information was intensified by journalists and media organisations that not only published stories about sexual assault but went on the hunt for the next big scandal.

After ripping through the US, the cascade spread to Australia and journalists began to jostle with each other to find their own Weinstein revelation. It’s not hard to understand why. The journalist who broke the Weinstein scandal, Ronan Farrow, was awarded with accolades and moral approbation. Cultural, moral and financial incentives all lined up to create intense public demand for stories about sexual predators. Who could resist?

Yet the likelihood that Australian journalists were going to find their own Weinstein story was always low. Australia does not have an equivalent of the notoriously exploitative industry of Hollywood, and recidivist sexual offenders are often already known to law enforcement. In terms of criminal scandals, Weinstein was a once-in-generation bombshell.

The low prior likelihood of finding a sexual predator, however, did not stop journalists going on a fishing expedition to find one. It did not stop the Four Corners campaign against Christian Porter that resulted in the ABC being sued for defamation. (They agreed to pay $100,000 towards mediation costs but that was it, no damages – there was no admission of liability.) It did not stop Geoffrey Rush’s defamation suit against The Daily Telegraph, which led to a damages award of $2.9m for the actor. And it did not stop a suite of other spurious claims that have since had to be walked back or retracted.

It should go without saying that sexual assault is an egregious crime and journalists should report on such crimes when and where they happen. But the Australian media’s obsession with uncovering sexual assault in the corridors of power is misguided.

Women who are at the highest risk of sexual assault are those who are already vulnerable because of their social or economic circumstances – they tend not to be middle-class women in professional jobs.

Instead of camping out in Canberra looking for predators, journalists could spend their time interviewing young people living on the streets or in precarious housing arrangements. They also might consider investigating sexual assault against the most vulnerable group in our community: our children.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, in 2018 the rate of police-recorded sexual assaults against children aged zero to 14 (167.6 per 100,000) was nearly twice that of people aged 15 and older (90.2 per 100,000). Of the 144,797 victims of sexual assault recorded by police agencies between 2014 and 2019, more than half the victims recorded were under 18. For females, 40 per cent of all sexual assaults reported to the police were among 10 to 17-year-olds, while 18 per cent were among girls aged zero to nine. For males, 41 per cent of all sexual assaults reported to the police were among 10 to 17-year-olds, while 38.7 per cent were assaults against boys aged zero to nine.

The statistics are clear: the biggest risk factor for sexual assault is not female gender but childhood. Boys aged zero to 17 incur almost double the risk of sexual assault than adult women do. You would not know this, however, from the way in which Australian media covers sexual assault.

To be sure, women are more likely to be victims of sexual assault over a lifetime and offenders are almost always male. But adult women do not face a substantially high risk of predation in their day-to-day lives.

When availability cascades occur, it is the responsibility of journalists to check narratives against fact and challenge anecdotes with statistics. Not every cascade is an accurate representation of reality, and not every bandwagon needs to be joined.

‏Source amp.theaustralian.com.au