Best Buy And the Providence Journal Team Up To Support and Promote Child Welfare Fraud!

On the surface articles like this appear to be a good thing promoting a noble cause and presenting a good time for all involved. To the untrained mind, however, (ie those of you out there who have never as much experienced the trauma of having a Child Protective Worker preform one of their state sponsored anal-probes on you or your family), you're much more likely to jump on the bandwagon and pledge your support for such a noble cause as child abuse prevention, without as much as a clue that you are just as likely to be falsely accused of child abuse as any other innocent victim of CPS.

Well let me state this as clearly and directly as I can. I have no problem with one persons or organizations efforts to raise awareness for a good cause such as the prevention of child abuse and neglect.

What I take issue with is the Child Protective Industries practice of presenting faulty data in effort to misrepresent the numbers so that the problem appears to be much worse then it actually is. So on one hand I applaud the efforts of anybody who actually wants to keep kids safe, but since the presented information promotes a lie, I am required to expose.

So here's a Child Abuse Propaganda Month article that I just came across from Rhode Island...

Wii tournament at Best Buy raises money for Prevent Child Abuse Rhode Island

WARWICK –– A bag of popcorn in his left hand and a nervous smile on his face, Caden Paiva took aim at the bull’s-eye.

The 6-year-old Cranston boy swung his right arm forward, launching the ball toward the dunk tank on the 52-inch television screen. It missed the target by inches.

Without a word, he shrugged off the errant throw, knowing that Sunday night’s Wii carnival would offer many more opportunities for fun.

“We haven’t done anything like this before,” said Steven Faison, general manager for the Bald Hill Road Best Buy that hosted the event, where children and store employees alike competed in a video game carnival to help stop child abuse.

The Wii tournament offered Paiva the chance to win gift certificates to local restaurants and spas. But its primary purpose was to help raise awareness and money for the local nonprofit organization Prevent Child Abuse Rhode Island.

“People are tired of golf tournaments and wine tastings,” said Katherine M. Begin, the nonprofit’s executive director. “I said, ‘We have to do something different.’ ”

Different indeed. A dozen contestants took turns throwing darts and balls at carnival stands that existed only on the massive television screens arranged near the front of the store, which stayed open more than two hours late to host the event. Fifteen employees volunteered their time to offer face painting, free popcorn, and to help run the games.

“We were blown away by their generosity,” Begin said of Best Buy, which also donated $1,000 to her organization.

State and federal lawmakers have designated April as “National Child Abuse Prevention Month.”

And what a long winded, buttering you up for the bullshit, type of introduction that was for a single paragraph of bullshit...

In 2009, Rhode Island officials investigated 2,075 child abuse or neglect allegations involving 2,962 children, according to the advocacy group Rhode Island Kids Count. Nearly half the victims were under 6 years old, while a third were 3 or younger.

Now, not to beat a dead horse or anything, but the numbers presented here are not representative to the actual number of victims of child abuse or neglect. What this article states is the number of child abuse allegations that were investigated, the number of children involved in such investigations, and the general ages of the children who were investigated. The article fails to state how many of these investigations were actually substantiated, where child abuse or neglect had in fact occurred. The article gives no indication whatsoever that approximately 70% of child abuse investigations in the United States are closed as unsubstantiated, enabling you, the sheep, to presume that if Rhode Island follows the same trends as the rest of the country, that the actual child abuse rates are much less then what is presented here.

Therefore Best Buy and the Providence Journal provides you with faulty data to promote Child Welfare Fraud by not so much fluffing the numbers, but instead presenting the wrong numbers as indicators of the actual rate of child abuse and neglect in the tiny state of Rhode Island.

And once again the presentations blows the issue out of proportion, by presenting a single paragraph of bullshit in what would otherwise be an article about good people having a good time and supporting a good cause.

Back at the carnival, Paiva focused on the balloons on the screen and fired a dart. Missed again.

Smiling, he shrugged again. The carnival was far from over.

Happy Child Abuse Propaganda Month.