When good guys lie: misleading the public is no way to make the world a better place - baseless, alarmist statistics in publicizing social concerns

Washington Monthly, Jan-Feb, 1997 by Glenn Hodges

But what PFAW classifies as an incident of "attempted censorship" is a single complaint, usually from a parent, who in many cases thinks a certain book is inappropriate for his or her child's age group. Most of the books PFAW describes as threatened have had no more than a half-dozen complaints nationwide, and it's not necessarily the classics that are drawing the most ire.

In the 1994-1995 school year, according to PFAW's 1995 report, the two most frequently challenged books in US. schools were Alvin Schwam's Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, which include tales like "Wonderful Sausage," about a butcher who gets such culinary raves for his ground-up wife that he embarks on a town-wide sausage-making rampage, collecting children and, for good measure, "their kittens and puppies." But the report's 30-page introduction, which winds up being the main source for news stories, makes no mention of Schwartzs books. Meanwhile, Of Mice and Men and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings get four mentions each. It's a classic bait-and-switch. When you think of censorship, you don't imagine a university professor complaining that his first-grader is too young to read stories about murder and dismemberment.

Distorting the debate over what is or isn't suitable reading material for children certainly has its repercussions, but the most tangible consequence is probably extra checks from direct mail solicitations (PFAW's annual "censorship" report is a fundraising centerpiece). When social science research uses the same tactics, however, the consequences can be much more serious.

By the time I finished college in 1989, it was taken as a given that one out of four of my female classmates had been victims of rape or attempted rape. Thanks to a 1987 study that quickly became conventional wisdom, sexual assault was seen as a crisis of epidemic proportions. Upon closer examination of the study, which had been produced in conjunction with Ms. magazine, it was clear all was not as it had seemed. Seventy-three percent of the women who had been defined as victims of rape did not themselves think they had been raped, and 42 percent of them - to the bewilderment of the researcher, Kent State professor Mary Koss - continued having sex with the men who had "raped" them. Half of these women labeled the problem as "miscommunication." It turns out Koss had decided on a definition of rape that many people, including the victims, did not share.

An earlier study, in 1982, came to similar conclusions - that 1 in 3 women would be victims of rape or attempted rape in their lifetimes - but again, about half the women did not consider their experience rape. But when University of Washington researcher Margaret Gordon used a more straightforward definition of rape for a 1981 study, she found that only I in 50 of the 1,620 women she randomly surveyed had been raped or sexually assaulted. (When she was conducting her rape study, Gordon told the Toledo Blade, "I felt pressure to have rape be as prevalent as possible. I'm a pretty strong feminist, but ... the really avid feminists were trying to get me to say that things were worse than they really are.")