By A Math Professor Hung Up on Me for Noticing the Numbers
….
I met him online. He was a mathematics professor at the University of Oklahoma. Early on he told me, almost casually, that he hoped I wasn’t a mathematician — he didn’t want to date another one. My father was a computer scientist; I’ve always been more creative than quantitative. Still, I know when the arithmetic stops adding up.
I reached out because I wanted to talk about child welfare, placement liability, and risk inside families. I told him I was studying environmental science but that the human factor had become impossible to ignore. My own children were adopted by a gay couple. I said gay parents often have to prove themselves twice as hard because of stigma. Then I asked the question that apparently crossed a line: in absolute numbers, where does most of the sexual abuse of children actually occur?
The population facts are straightforward. The large majority of adults and of families with children are heterosexual. It follows that the large majority of child sexual abuse cases, in raw counts, happen in or around heterosexual households. Studies of identified adult offenders repeatedly show that the overwhelming majority are men who have (or have had) heterosexual adult relationships. One well-known review of 269 cases in which an adult offender could be identified found only two involving a gay or lesbian adult — less than one percent. Most offenders were heterosexual partners of a relative of the child. Longitudinal studies of children raised by lesbian or gay parents have not shown elevated rates of sexual abuse by those parents; some report near-zero caregiver abuse.
I was not claiming orientation itself is the decisive risk factor. I was pointing out that the absolute volume of harm is concentrated where the population is concentrated, and that public conversation often seems more comfortable scrutinizing minority groups than looking hard at the majority of cases.
His response was not curiosity or even a careful rebuttal. He told me the ideas were ridiculous. He belittled the entire line of thinking. Then he hung up.
That is what stayed with me. A mathematician — someone trained to distinguish absolute numbers from rates, base rates from stereotypes — chose contempt and an abrupt end rather than engagement. Disagreement would have been fine. A data-driven counter-argument would have been better. Rudeness and a dead line are neither.
I am left with the same questions. Child welfare systems make high-stakes decisions every day. Families of every structure contain people who should not have unsupervised access to children. Reporting is incomplete. None of those statements require a simplistic scoreboard of “straight versus gay.” They only require that we be willing to look at where the harm actually concentrates without deciding in advance which observations are allowed.
Hanging up does not change the population arithmetic. Calling the observation ridiculous does not make the offender data disappear. It only shows that some conversations are still considered too uncomfortable for certain people to stay in the room — even people whose professional training should make the basic counting uncontroversial.
I never claimed he owed me agreement. I am saying that a hung-up phone is a poor substitute for argument. If the numbers are wrong, correct them. If the framing is dangerous, show why with evidence. What they should not receive is dismissal followed by silence.
That is what happened. The questions are still here. The hang-up did not make them go away.