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Jeffery Epstein was picking up local white girls in Florida. I don't think any of them would have qualified as middle class, but several of them lived with at least one gainfully employed parent. Virginia Guiffre (the girl in the famous Prince Andrew picture) was working at Mar-a-Lago when Ghislaine Maxwell recruited her, which makes her at least respectable working class.
OTOH, it does look like he was picking on girls who were screwed up in various ways. For example, Virgina Guiffre had already been sexually abused by two men (one in her mother's house, one while living as a runaway) before moving in with her father, and was trying to become a masseuse.
The Roman Catholic Man-Boy Love Association targetted some kids from normie families who were sufficiently functional to be regular churchgoers. (Although the majority of the victims were children in Church-run children's homes, it was buggering the altar boys which gave the scandal legs). In the UK, the sexual abuse extended to pupils at Ampleforth, which was the most expensive and socially prestigious private school in the north of England. The other smaller religious sex abuse scandals tend to follow the same pattern.
The Penn State sex abuse scandal and similar scandals in youth sports (which is as lousy with sex abusers as the RCMBLA) involved student-athletes as victims, who tend to be middle-class, or at least respectable working class.
So although the "Taken" fantasy is almost entirely a media creation, it definitely isn't the case that normie middle-class white American kids are safe from sex abuse. It's just that it tends to involve corrupt authority figures, not stereotypical predators.
WARNING FOR PARENTS - THIS IS IMPORTANT - YOUR KID IS NOT PROTECTED FROM SEXUAL ABUSE BY CORRUPT AUTHORITY FIGURES BY YOUR MONEY, POWER OR COMMUNITY STANDING UNLESS YOU ACTUALLY DO THE WORK OF PROTECTING THEM. This starts by giving them the tools to talk to you about dodgy shit, and making sure they feel safe doing so.
I thought Sandusky was recruiting victims from Second Mile the charity he founded for at risk youth.
Having checked, you are right. From the UK I had always assumed that Penn State was another "coach sexually abuses athletes" scandal similar to the US gymnastics scandal or the (boys) youth soccer and (girls) swimming scandals going on in the UK at the time.
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Was the Penn State sex abuse scandal real? I remember reading a very convincing takedown which suggested that it was not. But of course it's been memory holed.
Does anyone have a link?
Yes, it was very real. There are a certain segment of Penn State football fans who refuse to believe anything negative about the program, and while this is usually limited to making excuses for Joe Paterno, a few have gone off the deep end and claimed that the abuse never happened. There is some question as to what exactly Mike McQueary witnessed that led to the coverup that got higher-ups indicted, but without that there are still enough known victims that it's clear Sandusky was an abuser. The allegations that kicked off the grand jury investigation were recent and unrelated to those that were reported on the most.
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The vast majority of sexual abuse is, of course, committed within the family and community, so I certainly wouldn't suggest that 'middle class white kids' are 'immune' from it. But when it comes to the group-based sexual trafficking of children by strangers (ie. the Hollywood/Operation Underground angle) then yes, it's almost never the 'Taken' demographic. The same thing was true in Rotherham and the other UK grooming gang scandals; in those cases many of the victims were indeed white British, but they were from broken homes, most had been in the care/foster system, had drug issues, previous sexual abuse, were children of single mothers etc etc.
Yes, the pattern being that in the church cases, the abused boys were most typically, as you say, from children's homes and/or from broken families in the community (and this is very evident too in eg. the Boston Catholic child abuse scandal as portrayed in Spotlight etc).
Whether poor Hispanics from oft-broken families in West Palm Beach (who made up a substantial proportion of Epstein's younger victims) are or aren't huwhite is the kind of question I leave for dissident rightists on Twitter, but the main point is that, again, the 'narrative' of child sex trafficking as affecting nice middle class kids in nice areas lured off the street by a predator in a white van offering ice cream is wrong. And even in Epstein's case, it's alleged that many of his non-American victims were trafficked from Eastern Europe or were poor Eastern European models in New York whom he promised Victoria's Secret contracts via Wexner etc; the courts are just less able to pursue those cases in the US and the victims less likely to speak out.
It's also more broadly true that middle class people are much more likely to speak out than working class ones. So judging the distribution of risk from media accounts is extremely likely to present a skewed picture of the relative likelihood of victimization by class.
I would say kids raised by their married biological parents are pretty safe from family-based sex abuse, and in the current year being raised by married biological parents is strongly correlated with being middle-class.
But my impression is that sex abuse (of children and young adults) by corrupt authority figures is enough of a problem that saying the "vast majority" of sex abuse happens in the family and community is misleading. I have no idea whether the ratio of "family and friends abuse" to "corrupt authority figure abuse" is 1:3 or 3:1, and I don't think anyone else is keeping count either. As a parent, I would like to know.
Part of the problem talking about this in places other than the Motte is that the media narrative about this kind of thing tends to be heavily vibes-driven, so trying to draw this kind of distinction, or even to try and draw a distinction between abuse of pre-pubescent children vs abuse of young adults, gets your head bitten off by enraged mothers. And of course, if you reduce Pizzagate to vibes, there is zero doubt that Hilary Clinton really did help cover up sexual abuse of young adults by powerful politicians - her husband was impeached over it. If it turns out that the takeaway pizza Monica brought to Bill before blowing him came from Comet Ping Pong Pizza, a lot of people would say that this makes Pizzagate "true", even though none of the lurid accounts of sex abuse of pre-pubescent children being talked about by Qanon types actually happened.
Unless you are really willing to commit to modern Twitter age gap discourse, there is really a huge difference between 22-year-old Monica Lewinsky and prepubescent sex slave children.
I agree with you. The whole point I was trying to make was that in a vibes-based discourse trying to make the distinction between different types of sexual misconduct is likely to get you in trouble for minimising/excusing one end of the comparison, but it is actually important if you want to understand what is going on.
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