From the headline you'd think the two connected
Study: Kids Fatter But Teen Pregnancies Down
Fri Jul 16, 2004 12:34 AM ET
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Violence and pregnancies among American teens have decreased in recent years but children are getting fatter, according to government figures released on Friday.
This IS the sort of stuff Dr. Cosby will ultimately wish he'd seen before speaking out.
"The teen birth rate hit a record low," said Dr. Duane Alexander, Director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development at the National Institutes of Health.
"Our youth are less likely to commit violent crimes or be victims of violent crimes," he told reporters.
And there's this:
Children born in 1979, by the time they turned 15, had an arrest rate of about 1 arrest for every 122 children born that year for crimes such as rape, assault and robbery, said Lawrence Greenfeld, the Director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics in the U.S. Department of Justice.
But for children born in 1986, the violent crime arrest rate was half that, he said.
It's possible they just ran out of people to arrest.
Here's one of the things Dr. Cosby should have known:
"These data show that while in 1993, there were about 44 incidents of serious violence experienced per 1,000 youth age 12 to 17, by 2002, the rate had dropped to about 11 per 1,000," Greenfeld said.
He said the "dramatic" reduction in violence had been "especially true of black males age 14 to 17, for whom the rate of murder is well below half what it was in 1993."
…and here's another:
Teen pregnancies hit a record low, also, said Alexander, dropping from 25 births per 1,000 girls age 15 to 17 in 2001, to 23 in 2002.
"The drop in adolescent birth rate is one of the biggest success stories," he said "This drop is a continuation of a trend that began in 1991," he added.
