Elizabeth L. Jeglic<\/a>, a clinical psychologist who studies sexual violence prevention at John Jay College in New York, said she could not comment specifically on the CDC methodology, but she said sampling and response rate can affect findings. “If the question is asked about lifetime occurrence and younger girls are not being sampled (or less likely to be sampled) you will likely see a higher prevalence rate as older girls will have more years to experience sexual violence than younger girls,” she said in an email.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n Kessler notes that “other survey questions with more robust participation by schools \u2014 such as <\/b>violence in dating and violence in bullying \u2014 indicated declines, not increases.”<\/p>\n For instance, the National Crime Victimization Survey<\/a> suggests teen rates of experiencing sexual assault and rape have declined over the past three decades. And the CDC’s Adolescent Behaviors and Experiences Survey (ABES)<\/a> puts the rape victimization rate at 10.4 percent and the sexual violence victimization rate at 15.3 percent. Kessler also noticed that the 2019 to 2021 rise was not actually the first increase. The rate also went up between 2001 and 2003 (from 10.3 to 11.9), between 2009 and 2011 (from 10.5 to 11.8), and between 2015 and 2017 (from 10.3 to 11.4).<\/p>\n “The recently released report provides insight on the changes that occur from the beginning to the end of the time period (in this case, 2011 to 2021),” CDC spokesperson Paul Fulton Jr. told Kessler in a statement<\/a>. “CDC began monitoring the 10 year trends in the 2017 [Youth Risk Behavior Survey Data Summary & Trends Report] …In that report and again for 2019 (2009-2019) there were no significant increases in forced sex across those time periods.”<\/p>\n Full data from the Youth Risk Behavior Survey will not be published until April. The data we have currently come from the CDC’s “Youth Risk Behavior Survey Data Summary & Trends Report: 2011-2021<\/a>” report.<\/p>\n Sexual violence against teen girls is certainly a problem worth attention. But addressing the problem requires accurate knowledge about what’s working and what isn’t, and part of that means getting an accurate picture of whether sexual violence is increasing or decreasing and by how much. The CDC doesn’t do teens any favors by inaccurately representing the data.<\/p>\n Could lack of independence explain teen mental health problems?<\/strong> For social psychologist and pundit Jonathan Haidt (and many, many others), declines in teen mental health measures are primarily a function of social media and too much time in front of screens<\/a>. And perhaps because this theory fits so nicely into so many preexisting political narratives and plays into longstanding fears of new technology, you’ll actually be hard-pressed to find many people who will challenge it. But a group of professors writing in The Journal of Pediatrics<\/em> offer an alternative explanation<\/a>: A decline in independent activity is causing a decline in young people’s mental well-being.<\/p>\n “Our thesis is that a primary cause of the rise in mental disorders is a decline over decades in opportunities for children and teens to play, roam, and engage in other activities independent of direct oversight and control by adults,” they write.<\/p>\n Economist Emily Oster calls it “extremely hard to be fully convincing in this case,” but finds “the data they talk about interesting” and offers a summary here<\/a>. “It seems hard to argue with the conclusion that, relative to the 1980s, children have less physical freedom,” she writes. But “if we acknowledge that independence has gone down, making the link to happiness would require knowing those factors are related,” and “the evidence here is a lot more indirect”:<\/p>\n The authors link their ideas to theories about locus of control. It has been widely demonstrated that having low levels of internal<\/em> locus of control \u2014 basically, feeling that you do not have a lot of control over your own life \u2014 leads to higher levels of depression and anxiety. Feelings of internal locus of control have declined over time. The authors hypothesize that independence at younger ages, with the associated need to problem-solve, could contribute to higher levels of internal locus of control. By extension, the loss of this time may contribute to the decline in these levels. This fits, but requires us to stretch beyond the data in the link between independence and these feelings.<\/p>\n A second theoretical link is with self-determination theory<\/em>, which suggests that people are happier if they feel like they are living in accordance with their own desires, rather than being driven from the outside. The authors again hypothesize \u2014 although this isn’t something we see directly in data \u2014 that independence might play a role in increasing these feelings of self-determination.<\/p>\n A final point relates to our evolutionary background. For most of human history, and still in many societies today, children had more freedom (and more was expected of them in terms of contribution to the larger group). The common setup we have today, with the combination of scaffolding and expectation, is counter to this. So perhaps kids are not adapted to it. (I’d recommend Hunt, Gather, Parent<\/a><\/em> for a different type of perspective on this.)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n More here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Biden follows Trump playbook on TikTok.<\/strong> Like the Trump administration did previously<\/a>, “the Biden administration wants TikTok’s Chinese ownership to sell the app or face a possible ban,” reports<\/a> The New York Times<\/em>:<\/p>\n The new demand to sell the app was delivered to TikTok in recent weeks, two people with knowledge of the matter said. TikTok is owned by the Chinese internet company ByteDance.<\/p>\n The move is a significant shift in the Biden administration’s position toward TikTok<\/a>, which has been under scrutiny over fears that Beijing could request Americans’ data from the app. The White House had been trying to negotiate an agreement<\/a> with TikTok that would apply new safeguards to its data and eliminate a need for ByteDance to sell its shares in the app.<\/p>\n But the demand for a sale \u2014 coupled with the White House’s support for legislation that would allow it to ban TikTok in the United States \u2014 hardens the administration’s approach. It harks back to the position of former President Donald J. Trump, who threatened to ban TikTok<\/a> unless it was sold to an American company.<\/p>\n TikTok said it was weighing its options and was disappointed by the decision. The company said its security proposal, which involves storing Americans’ data in the United States, offered the best protection for users.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n
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<\/picture> <\/div>\nThe Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) inflated data about teen girls and sexual assault in a news release<\/a> about a new CDC report on teenage mental health. In 2021, the percentage of teen girls who reported that they had ever been “forced to have sex” was up 27 percent since 2019, the health agency said, calling it “the first increase since the CDC began monitoring this measure.”<\/p>\n