Andrea Dunlop

And on average, they have positive findings of abuse in only about half of the cases they evaluate.

And there's no reason to believe that we're actually catching every case.

It's so striking, again, in having these conversation with people who are abolitionists.

And that's why I'm so kind of hammering that at the moment to sort of draw these arguments out from each other, because I think this conversation that this is involved in is about parents' rights and whether parents have the right to do anything they want to their children or not.

And I think that's what's essentially undergirding this argument, not, you know, this abolitionist argument where it's about what if we had, you know, what if every child had enough food and their parents had enough support?

And like, how could we, you know, these things that there's a lot of robust data that would help prevent so many situations from getting to this point.

And like, to me, child abuse pediatricians, to your point, are engaged in that conversation about prevention.

You know, mileage may vary about how to accomplish that, but that is essentially a good faith, data-backed, science-informed conversation, whereas this is not.

This is a minimization and denial of how frequent child abuse happens.

And I've noticed, Randi...

in these pieces by people like Neary and Hexenbog that I have spent way too much of my One Precious Life thinking about, they really avoid for the most part talking about child sex abuse.

And I think there's a reason.

It's because people's reaction to that is so strong that they know they will not find the same sympathy and the same mileage

If you are talking about child abuse, pediatricians diagnosing child sex abuse, because we've had our sort of cultural revelation about that.

That is like reached a cultural acceptance that, you know, Munchausen by proxy certainly has not.

And I think it's really like abusive head trauma now is in a backslide from, you know, this again, it has a broad medical consensus, but you would not know that from science.

So I think they're really being choosy about which pieces they're pushing back on for a reason.

Yeah.

Despite the preventionists' claim that this series is solely about Dr. Jensen, it's forwarding the idea encapsulated in so many other stories that the real problem isn't underreporting of child abuse, but overzealous and crusading child abuse pediatricians.

And this idea is always presented without any data or evidence that it's actually happening, other than in this series, the existence of angry parents and the report of a county controller.