“Safe and Loved” means Mom and Dad.

We launched the Greater Than campaign because we believe children’s rights should be at the center of every conversation about marriage and family.

I (Josh) can sum up the entire campaign with one simple question: Is it ever acceptable for a child to be intentionally deprived of their mother or father because an adult wants something?

Your answer to that question should determine where you stand on the Supreme Court’s 2015 Obergefell decision.

The pushback we’ve gotten was predictable:

“If you really cared about kids, you’d focus on abuse in the church. Pastors and Priests are the real problem.”

“Plenty of straight parents abuse their kids, and what about all those deadbeat dads?”

Fair enough. But I want to be clear about what we’re claiming:

Our argument is not primarily about danger. It’s about rights. A child has a natural right to their mother and father, the two people whose union created them. Intentionally severing that bond is a violation of the child’s rights, regardless of what happens next or later in their life.

In 100% of same-sex families formed through assisted reproduction, this severance is built into the process: a child cannot be created without deliberately depriving the child of either the biological mother or father through third-party sperm or eggs. Obergefell made it unconstitutional for states to prohibit this, because doing so would deny same-sex couples equal access to the parental recognition that comes with marriage.

To reiterate, it’s about rights. Those arguing about deadbeat dads, pastors, and priests are trying to make this a purely safety argument. Where are they most “safe and loved”?

We aren’t primarily making that argument. But we can.

If child safety is the standard, we should all be willing to follow the evidence wherever it leads, right? And what the unbiased federal data reveals is that the safety case confirms what the rights principle already tells us: children belong with their mother and father, and they are safest there, too.

Let’s look at sexual abuse specifically.

The question we should be asking

It is worth noting that most conversations about child sexual abuse start with the wrong premise. We talk about stranger danger. We build entire prevention campaigns around what is, in reality, the statistical minority.

Here’s what the U.S. Department of Justice actually found: 93% of child sexual abuse victims knew their perpetrator. Not a stranger. Someone they trusted. Someone with a name, a role, and a reason to be in their life.

• 59% were acquaintances—family friends, neighbors, trusted community members

• 34% were family members—parents, stepparents, siblings, relatives

• 7% were strangers

We spend the vast majority of our prevention energy on the 7%, while 93% of abuse happens at the hands of someone the child knows or trusts.

So the better question isn’t “how do I protect my child from strangers?” It’s: “Of the people in my child’s life, where does the greatest risk actually come from?”

The federal government has answered that question. Most people just haven’t read the report.

What the government found about family structure

The Fourth National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect (NIS-4) is the gold standard. Congressionally mandated. Conducted by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services using data collected in 2005-2006, the most recent comprehensive federal study of its kind. Consistent methodology across every family structure: same definitions, same time period, same researchers. No advocacy group designed it. It simply measured what was happening to children across different household types.

A note on how to read this data. Throughout this article, we measure rate: abuse cases per child exposed to a given family structure using the NIS-4’s Harm Standard (requiring demonstrable harm). Rate tells you which environment is most dangerous per child. Raw count tells you which group is largest. They are not the same thing, and confusing them is one of the most common mistakes in public conversations about child abuse. Claiming the largest group is the most dangerous because it produces the most cases is like claiming bathtubs are more dangerous than swimming pools because more toddlers drown in them. The question isn’t which body of water produces more drownings — it’s which one is more dangerous per child exposed to it. You measure risk per exposure, not total volume. That is what the NIS-4 measures.

And what it found is unambiguous: the safest measurable environment for a child is a home with their married biological parents—including, and especially, their biological father. As you’ll see in the data below, risk doesn’t just rise when dad is absent. It rises at every step a household moves away from the married-biological-parent structure, escalating most dramatically when an unrelated male enters the home in his place.

As you can see, a child living with a single parent and that parent’s unmarried partner (think mom’s boyfriend) faces twenty times the risk of sexual abuse compared to a child living with married biological parents. This isn’t from a religious organization or a conservative think tank. This is the United States government.

To be clear: “unrelated male” is not a synonym for “predator.” The vast majority of stepfathers and unmarried partners never abuse a child. But at the population level, the absence of a biological bond between a man and a child in his household is a measurable risk factor, and no responsible analysis can ignore a pattern this consistent across this many studies.

The NIS-4 doesn’t treat stepfathers and boyfriends as interchangeable, and neither should we. A married stepfather, a man with legal commitment to the family, is associated with roughly ten times the baseline risk. An unmarried boyfriend, cohabiting without that commitment, is associated with roughly twenty times the baseline risk. Both figures are dramatically elevated compared to a biological father. But the boyfriend is twice as dangerous as the stepfather.

Biology matters: both are elevated over biological fathers. Commitment matters: marriage cuts the non-biological risk roughly in half. And stability matters: cohabiting relationships are shorter and less stable on average, meaning children in those households are more likely to be exposed to a succession of unrelated males over time, compounding the risk with each transition.

Where the risk actually comes from

If a child discloses abuse, who is statistically most likely to be the perpetrator? No single dataset answers this with the precision we’d like, federal classification systems group ‘mother’s live-in boyfriend’ with ‘neighbor’ (both are ‘acquaintances’) and ‘stepfather’ with ‘biological father’ (both are ‘family’). These legal categories obscure the functional differences that matter most. Drawing on multiple data sources, five risk profiles emerge:

1. A male acquaintance:
A family friend. A neighbor. Someone who volunteered to help. Bureau of Justice Statistics data classifies 59% of all perpetrators as “acquaintances”, the single largest category by a wide margin. But that government label is broad. It groups the neighbor down the street with mom’s live-in boyfriend under the same heading. Some of the people in this 59% show up again in the categories below under more specific labels. Even so, the non-household acquaintance remains the largest single source of abuse.

2. An unrelated male in the home (stepfather or mother’s boyfriend):
Diana Russell’s 1984 study, widely considered foundational work on stepfather abuse, found that 17% of women who grew up with a stepfather—1 in 6—were sexually abused by him, compared to 2% with their biological father. An 8.5X differential. Russell’s findings remain among the most influential in the field, with subsequent research confirming the elevated risk pattern. The Assink et al. meta-analysis (2019, 72 studies) independently confirmed stepfather presence as a significant risk factor.

HHS data on male perpetrators shows that when biological fathers do maltreat children, only 7% of their cases involve sexual abuse—the rest is neglect or physical abuse. For stepfathers, that figure jumps to 20–30%. Unrelated males don’t just abuse at higher rates. They abuse sexually at higher rates.

3. A Sibling:
The category no one wants to talk about. Researcher David Finkelhor found that 13% of college students reported sibling sexual experiences, with 25% meeting criteria for exploitation defined by age disparity, force, or coercion.

Here the biology shows up again. A 2024 study in PLOS ONE surveying over 1,800 adults found that step-siblings and half-siblings reported higher rates of sexual contact than full biological siblings—with rates increasing as genetic relatedness decreased.

Sibling abuse occurs across all family structures, including intact biological families. Its inclusion here demonstrates that this article follows the data without exempting any category including the one we argue is safest overall.

4. A male authority figure (educator or pastor):
These figures fall within the “acquaintance” category above, but because it is mentioned so often, I wanted to give it special attention. The Shakeshaft Report, commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education, found that 6.7% of students in grades 8-11 experienced physical sexual misconduct by an educator, with a broader 9.6% experiencing some form of educator sexual misconduct including non-contact behavior like sexual comments.

And yes, clergy. The John Jay Report found approximately 4% of Catholic priests active between 1950 and 2002 had allegations of sexual abuse, with 10,667 reported victims. The data isn’t limited to Catholicism, the three largest insurers of Protestant churches report receiving a combined 260 claims per year involving abuse of minors by clergy, staff, (notably) volunteers, a figure experts say likely represents less than half of actual cases. Clergy abuse is real, serious, and should be confronted without flinching. But institutional abuse as a whole (schools and churches combined) accounts for a fraction of child sexual abuse in this country. Insurance claims data bears this out: 39% of all institutional child sexual abuse claims come from schools, 30% from religious institutions. But according to the same DOJ data cited throughout this article, 77% of child sexual abuse occurs in a private residence, not a school, not a church, not a locker room. The institutional conversation matters. But it is not where most children are being harmed.

5. A male relative (uncle, grandfather, cousin):
Extended male relatives account for a significant share of the BJS “family member” category. Research shows uncles are responsible for 48 times more sexual abuse than aunts, despite providing roughly one twenty-eighth the amount of childcare. But here too the biology matters. The same pattern that appears in sibling data appears in extended family: the closer the genetic relationship, the lower the risk. Stepuncles, mother’s boyfriends’ brothers, and other non-biological males who enter the extended family network through relationship transitions pose a different risk profile than blood relatives and family instability increases the number of such figures cycling through a child’s life.

Who is NOT on this list

Two categories are conspicuously absent.

Biological fathers do not appear on the top five list—by any measure.

People who claim biological fathers are the primary abusers are almost always collapsing all forms of maltreatment—neglect, physical abuse, and sexual abuse—into a single number. And succumbing to the “total volume” fallacy. Neglect is by far the largest category, accounting for roughly 74% of all child maltreatment, and it maps heavily onto poverty and absence. When you isolate sexual abuse, which is what this article measures, biological fathers are not at the top. They are at the bottom.

And even when you don’t isolate sexual abuse, the pattern holds. The NIS-4 measured physical abuse, sexual abuse, and emotional abuse separately across every family structure. Married biological parents had the lowest rate in all three categories. The biological father isn’t leading in other forms of abuse while trailing in sexual abuse. He is at the bottom across the board.

Bottom by rate: 0.5 per 1,000 children for sexual abuse—the lowest of any family structure measured by the NIS-4. Bottom by the type of harm he inflicts: according to NCANDS data, only 7% of biological fathers’ maltreatment cases involve sexual abuse, compared to 20–30% for stepfathers, adoptive fathers, and boyfriends. And here’s what the raw numbers reveal: biological fathers are present in far more households than stepfathers, boyfriends, and adoptive fathers combined—yet they produce fewer sexual abuse cases than those groups combined. If biology were irrelevant to abuse risk, biological fathers would dominate the case files. They don’t.

There is no metric by which the biological father is the primary threat to children—sexual or otherwise. Not by rate. Not by proportion of harm. Not even by raw case count. The married biological parent household is last in every category of abuse the federal government measures.

The biological father is not the threat. He is, statistically, the protection—and his presence doesn’t just lower his own risk category. The NIS-4 baseline of 0.5/1,000 measures the entire threat environment around that child when a married biological father is in the home. Every other person’s risk to that child—acquaintances, relatives, siblings—is lowest when dad is there. He makes the whole ecosystem safer.

Strangers also do not appear on this list. Despite dominating prevention messaging, strangers account for just 7% of child sexual abuse cases. For children under six, it drops to 3%.

What does the safest environment actually look like?

The data tells us where risk is lowest:

Married biological parents. The NIS-4 baseline of 0.5 per 1,000—the lowest rate measured across any family structure.

The biological father in the home. The lowest abuse rate (2%) of any male figure in a child’s life. Not the risk factor. The strongest male protective factor the data identifies.

Female caregivers for supplemental care. According to HHS data, 88% of substantiated child sexual abuse perpetrators are male.

Supervised group settings over isolated access. Research shows that 77% of abuse occurs in private residences. Abuse requires isolation. Supervision disrupts it.

Family stability—minimal transitions. Each transition introduces new risk. Cumulative risk research shows that after 3–4 risk factors are present, abuse risk increases exponentially.

What this means for the conversation we’re having

Critics will point out (correctly) that the stepfamily and cohabiting-partner data above measures post-disruption households, and that planned non-biological families formed through donor conception, surrogacy, or adoption are different. Fair distinction, but I think it actually makes the question harder to avoid, not easier.

The biological bond is either protective or it isn’t. Every dataset in this article: NIS-4, Russell, HHS perpetrator data, the Assink analysis, says it is. And we focus on sexual abuse specifically because it’s the maltreatment type least correlated with poverty. Neglect tracks economic hardship at 45X higher rates in high-poverty neighborhoods; physical abuse at 19X. Sexual abuse shows only a 4X elevation, with some studies finding no significant relationship at all. The 20X elevation in stepfather/boyfriend households can’t be explained away by socioeconomic factors. This is the cleanest signal in the data, and it points directly at biological connection.

This principle is not new or controversial. It is the very reason adoptive parents undergo background checks, home studies, interviews, references, and ongoing supervision that biological parents never face. The entire adoption screening infrastructure exists because society already acknowledges that placing a child with unrelated adults carries elevated risk and demands extraordinary safeguards. We treat that risk as self-evident in adoption then pretend it disappears in surrogacy and donor conception, where no comparable screening exists.

But adoption and third-party reproduction are not morally equivalent. In adoption, adults seek to mend a wound they did not cause a child has already lost their biological parents through tragedy or circumstance, and adoptive parents step in to provide what was taken. In surrogacy and donor conception, the adults create the wound. They pay to deliberately exclude a biological mother or father before the child is even born. The child’s loss is not an unfortunate reality the adults are responding to; it is a condition the adults engineered and purchased.

Which raises a deeper question: if biology is totally irrelevant, how can anyone make the case that two parents are the right number? Biologically speaking, the limit isn’t arbitrary. It corresponds to the two people required to create the child, and the data confirms that those two people (and their biological link) provide something no substitute arrangement matches in safety. If what really mattered were love, resources, and investment, how could the logic stop at two? Wouldn’t six unrelated adults be better? No, raising a child in that environment as we have seen above would dramatically increase abuse risk. Children are not optimization problems. They are persons with prior claims to specific people.

Finally, let’s be honest about what this data reveals about heterosexual families. The vast majority of family disruption in these studies is heterosexual in origin: divorce, abandonment, cohabitation, revolving boyfriends. These are overwhelmingly straight problems producing straight perpetrators. We believe this breakdown is wrong and unnecessarily endangers children.

But the principle doesn’t stop applying when the family is formed intentionally. In 100% of same-sex families formed through third-party reproduction, a child is placed with at least one unrelated parent by design. A biological mother or father is not lost through tragedy; they are deliberately excluded, and paid for, before the child is born. We cannot highlight a biological connection as protective when it exposes the failures of some deadbeat dads and stepfathers, then ignore it when it applies to same sex couples using surrogacy and donor conception.

The married biological parent household is the safest measurable environment for a child. The single greatest risk factor for child sexual abuse is the introduction of an unrelated male into a parenting role, with risk escalating as both biological connection and marital commitment decrease.

We are not making a safety argument and then deriving a rights claim from it. We are stating a principle (that a child has a natural right to their mother and father) and pointing out that the federal data confirms what that principle already tells us.

The safest place for a child is also the place they have a right to be.

Obergefell didn’t just mandate same-sex marriage. It made it unconstitutional for states to protect the biological parent-child bond. States can no longer say ‘children have a right to their mother and father’ because doing so would discriminate against adults who need third-party reproduction to form families. The court transformed children’s rights into adults’ rights, and as the federal data shows, it made children measurably less safe. If you answered ‘no’ to our opening question, join us in pushing to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges.

---

Them Before Us is a global movement committed to defending children’s right to their mother and father. We believe that adult desires should never come at the expense of a child’s fundamental needs.

We are not professional lobbyists or political insiders. We are ordinary people with an extraordinary conviction: children must come first in every conversation about marriage, family, and fertility. We exist to make one thing clear: when adults sacrifice for children, society thrives. When children are forced to sacrifice for adults, everyone pays the price.

Find us around the web: Facebook, X, YouTube, Instagram, Podcast, TikTok & Radio.