The shame of Britain's intolerance of children

I saw this on the news yesterday morning. Basically, the guy from Barnado’s says that they have conducted a survey of 2000 people that shows that about half of us think that kids are vermin and feral and dangerous; then went on to say how horrible people were. The guy interviewing him wanted to know if there were any divisive questions in the survey and Barnardo’s guy said ‘No.’

In fact, the survey appears to either have been written by morons, or deliberately worded to elicit ‘negative’ answers, presumably in an effort to create sensational headlines and thereby get more media attention and, presumably more donations from people who feel bad because ‘society’ hates children.

An example – their press release reads:

45% of public agree that people refer to children as feral because they behave this way

In their notes to editors at the bottom, they then state:

45% of people disagreed with the statement 'People refer to children as feral but I don’t think they behave this way.'

That seems pretty divisive to me. No I don’t think that kids are feral. I don’t think they act like that. And most importantly, I’ve never heard anyone refer to kids as ‘feral’. So to answer the question literally and truthfully, I would probably disagree with the statement.

If this is representative of the questions asked in the survey, I’m not only a bit worried about how the respondents interpreted the question but also about how the answers are being interpreted.

I’m worried that Barnardo’s are trying to deceive me and as a result I will not donate to them.



-- Edited by ddvmor at 07:53, 2008-11-18