The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [120]
But no good news shall go unchallenged. In the coming years, scary teen sex stories continued to surface, and in 2008 much was made of the findings from a survey commissioned by Liz Claiborne Inc. “‘Horrors’ Found in Tween, Teen Dating,” blared a CBS Early Show story. “Forty percent of the youngest tweens, those between the ages of eleven and twelve, report that their friends are victims of verbal abuse in relationships,” the network alerted. “Nearly three-in-four tweens (72 percent) say boyfriend/girlfriend relationships usually begin at age fourteen or younger.”
Had newswriters taken a moment to examine the survey results, as sociologist Mike Males did, they could have learned that this survey also contained reassuring news for nervous parents. Only 1 percent of eleven- and twelve-year-olds, and 7 percent of thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds, said they had done more than kiss. Just 2 percent had ever felt their safety was threatened by a partner or had experienced violence. “How did Claiborne turn 2 percent into 37 percent or even 72 percent?” Males asked in a commentary. “By rigging the survey with crude statistical shenanigans, including: (a) asking young teens if they imagined ‘persons your age’ might be having sex or being abused by partners, and (b) defining terms ludicrously broadly. Note that what ‘friends’ (undefined) are doing could result from one case known to many other students, or gossip, or rumors, or speculations from media reports like the ones Claiborne pushed.”24
What was the purpose, as Males put it, of making “America’s fifth graders sound like a mob of brutal sluts?” Perhaps it was to inflate the relevance of Claiborne’s loveisrespect.org, their National Teen Dating Abuse Helpline website, the latest addition to the company’s Love Is Not Abuse campaign, a PR effort launched in 1991 to revitalize the aging brand.25
In 2008, the year Claiborne’s survey grabbed headlines, the media went wilder still over a fable about a supposed “pregnancy pact” at Gloucester High School in Massachusetts. The episode further illustrates a strategy I described in chapter 6 for keeping a scare alive when low-income youths fail to accommodate fear hawkers by decreasing their rates of involvement: claim the problem has moved beyond the inner cities and is tainting middle and upper class teens. In chapter 6 my focus was on drug use, but in the mid- and late-’00s, when teen pregnancy rates had been declining since 1990 and were at their lowest rates since the 1970s, the strategy got put to use to keep fear alive about pregnant teens.26
The Gloucester fairy tale was told first by Time magazine, which reported that “nearly half” of a group of seventeen girls at Gloucester High School in Massachusetts, none older than sixteen, “confessed to making a pact to get pregnant and raise their babies together. Then the story got worse: ‘We found out one of the fathers is a twenty-four-year-old homeless guy,’ the principal says, shaking his head.” Numerous media outlets quickly repeated the story, calling it “shocking” (CBS) and “disturbing” (CNN), wondering “shall we go to the mall—or get pregnant” (Salon.com headline) and “what happened to shame” (Fox News), and denouncing Gloucester High for its “proteen birth” agenda (Fox News).
“The pact is so secretive,” CNN said, “we couldn’t even find out the girls’ names,” a difficulty that may have resulted from there being no such pact, as reporters who dug an inch deeper learned from other officials at the school and in the town, as well as from one of the pregnant students. The notion of a pact arose from stories about a group of girls who had promised to help one another care for their children, she suggested. It was only after they’d learned they were pregnant, the