I've been following Kristen Browde on TikTok for some time now and have found her to be so insightful and inspiring that I had to introduce you to her and the amazing advocacy work she is doing on many fronts.
In particular, I want to share with you this amazing website she's spearheaded: Who's Making News for S*x Crimes Involving Children?, a research project that aggregates and analyzes news reports published about s*xual assaults on children in the United States, and is designed to be fully verifiable.
With April being Child Abuse Awareness & Prevention month, I couldn't pass up this moment to bring to the forefront a very important question:
Who is the REAL threat?
There is a lot in our media these days about my community - the LGBTQ+ - and very specifically rhetoric around transgender people and drag queens posing a threat to children.
But I am a person who pays attention to stats and data to tell the story alongside the voices of those who are actually doing the work to fact check narratives about s*x crimes against children.
As said on the site, "The site contains a set of data and statistical analysis of that data, nothing more. The data, like the facts, don’t care about anyone’s feelings, or politics."
Without further ado:
RACHEL: Can you tell us a little bit about you!?
KRISTEN: It wasn’t the way I planned it. As I approach my 75th birthday, I’m President of the Florida Democratic Party’s LGBTQ+ Caucus, Vice President of the National Federation of Stonewall Democrats, live in downtown Miami, and, to my surprise, am followed by something like 425,000 people on TikTok. And what makes that even odder: law and politics are my second and third careers.
[In other words, y'all - she's a badass!]
RACHEL: What inspired you to start writing about/exploring this topic?
KRISTEN: For years we’ve all heard the Republicans and other right wingers screaming about transgender people being “groomers” – a danger to children. They even started a phony organization they called gays against groomers – and though I suspected this was nonsense, I wanted to see if there was any data that could verify or debunk the right wing claims. It turned out there wasn’t. So I fashioned a study and ran it for more than a year, looking at the available reports of people who were arrested, charged or convicted of sexual assaults on children.
When I started reporting the results weekly on TikTok, it immediately went viral. People tried to attack it as a biased study, but I immediately made all the source data available and allowed anyone who could add a missing bit of data or demonstrate that someone had been acquitted or the charges dropped could get data removed. Lots of additional reports came in, but no one ever demonstrated even the slightest bias: if the report was documented, I included it in the database, no matter who it involved.
RACHEL: What key insights or lessons have you learned through your experiences with this subject?
KRISTEN: That the right wing narrative is nonsense. The data showed that on a per capita basis, during the study period (February 10, 2023 through May 23, 2024) a child was
804 times more likely to be sexually assaulted by an ordained member of the clergy than by a transgender person;
380 times more likely to be sexually assaulted by a police officer than by a transgender person and
142 times more likely to be sexually assaulted by a politician than by a transgender person.
And of the politicians, more than two thirds of those arrested, charged or convicted of sexually assaulting a child were Republicans.
RACHEL: What challenges or misconceptions do you think people face when dealing with this topic, and how can they overcome them?
KRISTEN: They listen to the nonsense Donald Trump, Elon Musk and that ilk spew. They need to look at the data, and recognize that this comes from Musk’s inability to be a good parent to his oldest child who is a happy, out, transgender woman.
RACHEL: Are there any common myths or misunderstandings about this topic that you'd like to address?
KRISTEN: The whole project is an attempt to do just that. :)
RACHEL: What resources, tools, or next steps would you recommend for readers who want to dive deeper into this topic?
KRISTEN: The website is still available, along with the data. I’d hope that someone would fund deeper research into the topic – but it’s really time consuming to gather the data, and it’s an expensive – though not complicated – study.
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I am so grateful for the heart, soul, and sweat that Kristen and others have poured into this work - I think we can all appreciate the herculean effort!
If we are serious about addressing and preventing child abuse, then we must collectively and aggressively challenge the harmful narratives and highlight the true sources of risk to children and foster a more informed and compassionate conversation about child protection.
If you're ready to learn more about the steps you can take to prevent & respond to child abuse, please check out my course, The Empowered Parent.
Together we can protect our children from the real threats they face!
P.S. If you're ready to take the next step in healing from abuse and would like to explore enrolling in the Beyond Surviving program, start by applying for a Discover Your Genuine Self Session.
We might come to believe that we are unlovable because we were abused. We might come to believe that there is inherently something bad or wrong about who we are.
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