Posted: Jul 11, 2010 8:59 pm
I don't believe that for a minute. It's ridiculous.
There comes a point where there is such a large discrepancy between figures like this and everything one knows about people anecdotally, that you just have to be suspicious. On further examination:
In other words, studies that simply asked people whether they had been abused, came up with figures somewhere above 6% for women and 3% for men (he doesn't say where in the range 6-45 and 3-30 most of them are focused).
OTOH, when Wyatt and Russell et al took people aside for up to eight hours and basically tried to convince them that they really had been abused, and wouldn't stop until they had managed to get most of them to say/think they had, because one day their grandfather's hand had brushed against their leg while they were playing football in the garden, they came up with figures of 38 and 45%.
That's how it reads to me, anyway.
There comes a point where there is such a large discrepancy between figures like this and everything one knows about people anecdotally, that you just have to be suspicious. On further examination:
Although these two dozen studies have had somewhat differing definitions of sexual molestation and of the age criteria, their results can be made comparable (47) by eliminating noncontact abuse (such as exhibitionism) from the definition and by requiring either evidence of force or an age discrepancy of at least five years when the victim is over 12. When these adjustments are made, the studies report childhood memories of contact sexual molestation at rates ranging from 6 to 45 percent for women and from 3 to 30 percent for men.
The lower incidence figures in these studies turn out to be due to the method used in compiling them, As one moves from the lower to the higher figures, one discovers that the interview techniques begin to acknowledge the resistances of the respondents to such emotional questions. The lower figures are in response to written questionnaires or brief telephone calls, contacts that were considered intrusive by the respondent, while the higher figures, such as those of Wyatt and Russell (48) were the result of carefully structured face-to-face interviews lasting from one to eight hours.(49) Obviously it takes a good bit of trust before respondents begin to relate memories of childhood seduction to strangers. Using these two studies, then, as the most accurate we have to date, one finds that either 38 percent (Russell) or 45 percent (Wyatt) of women interviewed reported memories of familial and/or extrafamilial sexual abuse during their childhood, almost half of which was directly incestuous.
In other words, studies that simply asked people whether they had been abused, came up with figures somewhere above 6% for women and 3% for men (he doesn't say where in the range 6-45 and 3-30 most of them are focused).
OTOH, when Wyatt and Russell et al took people aside for up to eight hours and basically tried to convince them that they really had been abused, and wouldn't stop until they had managed to get most of them to say/think they had, because one day their grandfather's hand had brushed against their leg while they were playing football in the garden, they came up with figures of 38 and 45%.
That's how it reads to me, anyway.