Parenting & Family Quote by Mark Kennedy

Statistics are doing double duty here: they’re presented as neutral facts, but they function as a lever. “Some scary statistics” cues the reader to feel alarm before the number even lands, priming policy consent through fear. The phrase “one in five” is rhetorically efficient because it sounds both precise and enormous: it conjures a classroom where a fifth of the kids are presumed targeted. That mental image is the point. It collapses distance, making an abstract problem feel immediate enough to justify intervention.

Kennedy’s wording also quietly widens the net. “Sexual solicitation or approach” is broad, and “via the Internet” turns a medium into a culprit. The subtext is less about individual predators than about a technology that feels ungoverned, borderless, hard for parents to police. In the late-90s-to-2000s political ecosystem that shaped these talking points, “the Internet” often served as shorthand for cultural drift: kids outpacing adult oversight, private companies moving faster than law, public anxiety looking for a target. It’s a classic move in child-safety politics: attach the strongest moral stake (protecting minors) to a complex issue, and the debate shifts from “What should we do?” to “Why aren’t we doing something right now?”

The intent, then, isn’t merely to inform; it’s to authorize. It prepares the ground for surveillance tools, school assemblies, platform regulation, harsher sentencing, or funding boosts. The statistic supplies legitimacy, while “scary” supplies urgency. Together, they build a policy mood: act first, refine definitions later.