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Why do I assume male babysitters are more likely to abuse children? Crime statistics.

http://www.ncjrs.gov/html/ojjdp/jjbul2001_9_4/page2.html

When my two boys were growing up I had a teenage boy babysitter......my house was usually a wreck when I got home, but the boys had fun....I had him for years, he was very trust worthy.

Your statistics useful.

I have two daughters now fully grown. Many times we employed baby-sitters. I and my wife, just would never have employed a male. We did not even discuss this. Just never considered a male.

I put it down to just a "gut feeling". The bed rock of parental disgression.

Finally, an actual answer. First of all...

In contrast, family members (including nonparental offenders) accounted for 21.4 percent of offenders who committed crimes against all juveniles and 53.5 percent of those who committed crimes against young children. (Parental family offenders alone are 12 percent and 36 percent, respectively.)

As I pointed out, you need to keep your kids away from family members including their parents and especially that "funny" uncle. Your strategy of avoiding non-family males will not keep your kids safe.

Your article says there's a 2:1 male:female offender ratio and maybe more because they can't account for the presumably larger number of female versus male babysitters. This is also the major flaw in this study because they don't know the rate of offense. This doesn't tell you much about the potential safety of any given male babysitter.

Since they don't have actual numbers let's make a couple of representative examples. Lets say that 10 out of 100,000 male babysitters are offenders and 2 out of 1,000,000 female babysitters are offenders. OMG, a male babysitter is five times more likely to be an offender!! Looks bad for the men. Except that this means that 99.99% of males are OK and 99.9999% of females are OK. You would be unjust in assuming that any given male was a significant risk. And I think you'd be harming the socialization of your children by denying them contact with men outside the family.

To pick an extreme counter example, suppose 10 out of 10 male babysitters are offenders and the same 2 out of 1,000,000 female babysitters are offenders. The apparent 5:1 ratio between male and female offenders is unchanged. But, 0% of the males are OK and 99.9999% of the females are OK. In this case, you'd be crazy to give you child to a male babysitter.

Your problem is that you are assuming the situation is more the later example rather than the former without any evidence of such. This is a standard statistical trick where someone will claim that "A" happens more than "B" when in fact both are extremely unlikely.