Child protection big in UK news at the moment.
These terrible cases lead to a lot of head-shaking and hand-wringing and cries of something must be done.
Interesting comment this morning from an academic (details tbc) on BBC R4 who has conducted a review of 2 years or so of such cases:
1. while these cases are terrible, the level in the UK is compatible with other countries
2. contrary to the impression given by the media, such cases remains really, really rare
Interesting how without comparative data, our perception of this kind of thing can get distorted
And how we still - even with the numbers laid out so - find it shocking that unusual things do happen.
Either way you look at it, our grasp of probability is not very good.
"Something must be done", we say...to reduce the infrequent occurrence of really infrequent events...