Society and Stupid Statistics
What is it about groups these days that they have to come up with horrifying statistics at every opportunity they get? They inflate these stats so much that to some of us they are really starting to look absurd!
Recently the Solidarity Union has released ’statistics’ on child abuse and child rape. Now I think we all agree that both of these things are shocking and we as a society need to tackle the problem, but why on God’s green earth do they have to make up stats? Lets take a look at what they say:
A child is raped every 24 minutes in South Africa
A child is molested every 8 minutes in South Africa.
So what does this mean exactly? It means that in a year which has circa 525949 minutes:
 21 914.54 children are raped each year in South Africa
 65 743.62 children are molested each year in South Africa
Does this sound likely? It certainly doesn’t sound like it to me! So where do they find these stats? Who knows?!
The funny thing with stats is that they can be made to look like anything. Recently in the US someone challenged the government over their statistics on children’s deaths caused second hand smoke. I forget the number, but it was impossibly high. Well it seems that in order to get a presentable figure for the media, they included all children who died who had a parent who smoked. It didn’t matter if they got run over by a bus! This still didn’t quite give them the figure they were after, so they increased the definition of children to anyone under the age of 30! This finally gave them a wonderful statistic for the media with a headline like: 80% of all children’s deaths were caused by second hand smoke. In reality it was less than 10% !
Recently in South Africa we have had all these different organisations, yes even the government, shoving stats down our throat. They know that we never check these stats, or even ask how they arrived at that particular number. So we are living in a society where we blindly accept the bullsh!t dished out by these people - and BELIEVE it !
I really challenge everyone out there to question these stats. Ask how they arrived at those final numbers. start thinking for yourselves!
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