Tracking News Reporting of Sex Crimes Against Minors
www.whoismakingnews.com
Fact check the claim that 67.4% of child molesters are Republicans.
The claim is false. “67.4% of child molesters are Republicans” is a misrepresentation of a tiny, non-representative subset of a news-clipping project.
What the number actually is
The figure comes from whoismakingnews.com, a project run by Kristen Browde (a lawyer, TikToker, former Democratic candidate, and transgender activist). She compiles
news stories about child sexual assault cases in the U.S. starting mid-February 2023.
In the Data Studio snapshot tied to that site:
- Total recorded offenders: ~10,885
- Cases coded as “politicians”: 89
- Of those 89 with a recorded affiliation: Republican 60, Democratic 12, Unknown 15, Libertarian 2
60 ÷ 89 ≈ 67.4%. That is the entire source of the percentage. It is
not 67.4% of child molesters. It is 67.4% of a handful of public figures whose party ID happened to appear in news coverage.
Why this cannot be generalized
- Political affiliation is almost never reported for ordinary offenders. It appears when the person is an elected official, candidate, party officer, or activist. That is a biased, high-visibility slice.
- The project only includes cases that generated news stories. Browde herself estimates that only 1 in 40–50 abuse cases ever get public reporting, and coverage is uneven by locality and outlet.
- There is no systematic matching of sex-offender registries to voter files. No official U.S. dataset tracks party of child sex offenders.
- Browde’s project is explicitly framed as a rebuttal to “right-wing narratives” about drag queens and transgender people. That does not automatically make every number wrong, but it does mean the compilation and presentation are not a neutral census.
State-level per-capita charts on the same site (higher rates in some Republican-leaning states) suffer from the same problems plus ecological fallacy: reporting practices, media density, rural vs. urban coverage, and how states define/report offenses all differ. They do not measure party of individual offenders.
Bottom line
There is no credible evidence that 67.4% of child molesters are Republicans. The statistic describes 60 people out of 89 news-covered politicians in one activist’s clipping file. Child sexual abuse occurs across groups; high-profile cases exist in both parties. Treating a news-selected sliver of politicians as a portrait of all offenders is not fact-checking—it is the opposite.
Fact check the claim that 67.4% of child molesters are Republicans: https://www.whoismakingnews.com/
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