This relates to the Texas ban on gay couples as foster parents.
I was just over at Oliver Willis' blog yesterday, and he had a clip from the Daily Show in which some wingnut on CNN was quoting a "six-year scientific study from Illinois" that purported to show that homosexual couples as adoptive foster parents were eleven times more likely to sexually abuse children than were heterosexual parents. Eleven times, that's a lot. These homosexuals must be really deviant.
So, I decided to look a little further and see where this came from. This "eleven times" figure appears to be cobbled together from two different sources. One, a tally of Illinois abuse records that states that 34% of foster parent abuse is same-sex, i.e. the abusive parent is the same sex as the abused child (not that the parents are same-sex). The second is the figure that 3% of the population is homosexual. Put those two together, with a generous dollop of willful statistical ignorance, and you reach the conclusion that homosexual parents are eleven (34% divided by 3% equals 11) times more likely to commit sexual abuse.
Pretty straightforward? Not at all. It is the RRR's blithe willingness to lie that enables them to perpetuate their control of issues, especially in the context of the shabby job that reporters are generally doing with regard to fact checking.
Let's look at the abstract of the paper that Paul Cameron, director of the Family Research Institute, published in Psychological Reports, that the 34% figure came from:
Do those who engage in homosexuality disproportionately sexually abuse foster or adoptive children as reported by child protective services? Illinois child services reported sexual abuse for 1997 through 2002. 270 parents committed "substantiated" sexual offenses against foster or subsidized adoptive children: 67 (69%) of 97 of these mother and 148 (86%) of 173 of these father perpetrators sexually abused girls; 30 (31%) of the mothers and 25 (14%) of the father perpetrators sexually abused boys, i.e., 92 (34%) of the perpetrators homosexually abused their charges. Of these parents 15 both physically and sexually abused charges: daughters by 8 of the mothers and 4 of the fathers, sons by 3 of the mothers, i.e., same-sex perpetrators were involved in 53%. Thus, homosexual practitioners were proportionately more apt to abuse foster or adoptive children sexually.
I have no idea what the reviewers of this journal are like, but they failed to catch a rather slippery distinction here, and some statistics that raise red flags regarding scientific accuracy. First, the terminology of "homosexual practitioners" is slippery in that it fails to distinguish between the kind of consensual practice that takes place between adults, and the adult-minor behavior that is, like rape, about power rather than love. The numbers in the abstract call into question the validity of the inference, in that 69% (67 cases) of abuse by women was directed at female chidren, and 14% (25 cases) of abuse by men was directed at male children, when the incidence of homosexuality in the female population is generally considered to be less than in the male population (estimates vary wildly, but are generally around 3% for women, and 5% for men, slightly lower than Kinsey's 10% estimate). UC Davis has an interesting piece on the distinction between sexual orientation and the genders of the abuser and abused in their Facts About Homosexuality and Child Molestation page. Some choice citations:
"The research to date all points to there being no significant relationship between a homosexual lifestyle and child molestation. There appears to be practically no reportage of sexual molestation of girls by lesbian adults, and the adult male who sexually molests young boys is not likely to be homosexual" (Groth & Gary, 1982, p. 147).
"The man who offends against prepubertal or immediately postpubertal boys is typically not sexually interested in older men or in women" (McConaghy, 1998, p. 259)
The journal Psychological Reports states that it publishes "experimental, theoretical, and speculative articles in the field of general psychology; comments; special reviews." In short, Psychological Reports, a journal that encourages controversial submissions, has provided a pseudoscientific forum for people with an agenda that is contradicted by the evidence to hold forth, and then that percolates into media sound bites like "eleven times".
Paul Cameron, you are a liar.