14 ms·

I find this to be the most telling stat: "In a few cases (N < 5) families were dropped from the comparison group because some history of sexual abuse was ascer

I find this to be the most telling stat: "In a few cases (N < 5) families were dropped from the comparison group because some history of sexual abuse was ascertained." So roughly 5% (<5 of 84) of the control group were discovered to have themselves been abused and needed to be dropped from the study. I was once in a law lecture on medical ethics. We were discussing genetic testing of newborns and how this could detect incest/abuse. A medical doctor in the class was dead against such testing. In his experience, amongst pregnant teenagers (17 and younger) about 10% were pregnant by their own fathers/brothers. His opinion was that our society is not ready to deal with this, that such abuse is far more common than anyone is willing to admit. He actually said: You better build some more prisons before you start testing babies for this. The OP study seems in line with his numbers.

tomcam 5y ago
That whole comment was chilling AF
- sandworm101 5y ago
  Chilling but also a little reassuring. If you are a victim, knowing that a large percentage of the population has also been abused can help recovery. It says that it is very possible to be a victim and go on to a normal life. Want something very chilling? First year criminal law lecture on rape. Professor says "We have about a hundred people in this room. None of you future lawyers have criminal records. Statistically speaking, about fifteen of the fifty or so women here are victims. And probably fifteen of the men are rapists." Also see the opening sequence of the movie Copycat (1995) where Sigourney Weaver's character does a similar trick regarding serial killers.
  - erosenbe0 5y ago
    Uhh lawyers and law students can have criminal records. Commonly.
    - sandworm101 5y ago
      By criminal record she clearly mean the sort of things that would prevent you from being accepted to the bar/law school. Someone with a rape conviction as an adult wouldn't be sitting in a first year law lecture. Is is normal for law schools not to accept candidates that will not be able to become lawyers.
    - astura 5y ago
      Certain criminal convictions (like rape) prevent you from being accepted by the bar. Most people don't go to law school when they know they are ineligible to actually practice law (even if a law school actually accepted a convicted rapist). The school they were teaching at probably disqualified anyone with any criminal record from admission.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    > Chilling but also a little reassuring. If you are a victim, knowing that a large percentage of the population has also been abused can help recovery. "Misery loves company" is indeed a common attitude, but I'm not sure it's especially healthy.
    - wpietri 5y ago
      I think "misery loves company" is distinct. One of the many harms of sexual abuse is shame. Not coincidentally, shame is a tool of abusers and authoritarian power structures that protect abusers. For victims of abuse, knowing that they're not alone is a path out of shame and self-blame. It can help them put blame in the correct spot: not on what they wore or how they acted, but on the abusers and the abusers' support systems.
    - Maursault 5y ago
      "Misery loves company" is the antithesis of The Golden Rule, a formulation of which is "do not believe that it is so that you will find happiness in the misery of others," (I believe Seneca may have said this, but can't find the citation). I believe it is not the sadist notion, "misery loves company," that eases victims' pain, but instead "being in good company." I think "misery loves company" is a cynical twist of "being in good company," which is similar to left-handers learning of famous left-handers, or a depressive learning that Lincoln suffered from depression, reducing or eliminating feeling alone or isolated and disconneted.
      - tremon 5y ago
        The Dutch equivalent of "misery loves company" is "gedeelde smart is halve smart", which roughly translates to "a burden shared is a burden halved". I've never before interpreted that phrase in any other way than an acknowledgement that personal problems are easier to bear if you have someone to confide in. I certainly wouldn't interpret it as a cynical comment on codependency. But maybe I've always misinterpreted the English phrase. Is there a different English saying that's closer to the Dutch meaning?
        5y ago
  - ascar 5y ago
    While that story might be intimidating I can't help but think it's statistical nonsense and discredits the professors integrity. Starting from the assumption that general population numbers apply to a group of law students (I assume that he doesn't have statistics about rape among law students) on to the assumption that there is a 1 to 1 relationship between rape victims and rapists. I would assume there to be more victims than offenders. Just seems a rather weird move to tell your first year students a significant number of their fellows and friends are either victims or rapists just to make a point about unsolved rape.
    - sandworm101 5y ago
      >> I would assume there to be more victims than offenders. Why? Women who have been abused are often abused by more than one person. >>just to make a point about unsolved rape. She was making multiple points, several of which had nothing to do with rape. It was about criminality. Why we punish crimes the way we do. The strain on police/judicial resources. Diversionary programs. The prevalence of plea bargaining. and and and. A first year law lecture is a very nuanced thing.
      - thatcat 5y ago
        What's her point other than that our system is ineffective and incredibly wasteful?
    - chefandy 5y ago
      It sounds like the professor made it clear she was speaking in terms of population averages. So unless you can find empirical evidence that those statistics don't apply to that slice of the population, then there's absolutely no problem with what she said. She didn't say "15 of the men in this class are rapists." Law students aren't learning to be statisticians, epidemiologists, or policy wonks. Emotionally moving people to act upon a collection of documented facts— be it in trial or a contract negotiation— requires persuasive speaking and strategy. She made the breadth and consequences of rape palpable to her students not only by giving it a face, but giving it their faces. Since this poster, years later, immediately recalled that story when prompted, I reckon it was thoroughly compelling.
  - wpietri 5y ago
    There is some evidence that the proportion for the men is a bit different. According to one study, it was about 6% of men. About 2/3rds of those men committed multiple rapes, ~6 each. Details here: https://yesmeansyesblog.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/meet-the-predators/ https://yesmeansyesblog.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/meet-the-pr... Intuitively, that makes sense. If people figure out how to get away with something, some of them are going to keep doing it. E.g., if I think about the people I knew in high school, most didn't shoplift, but there were a couple who did it a whole bunch.
    - sandworm101 5y ago
      Alcohol. We can get into the definitions of consent, but suffice to say that there are a large number of rapes committed by drunk highschool kids. Many wake up, regret everything about what happened, and never allow themselves to get into such a situation again.
      - wpietri 5y ago
        The out-of-the-blue apologia for rape is always startling to me.
  - tomp 5y ago
    Are people (and law professors in particular) stupid enough to apply this "1-on-1" logic to other crimes as well (e.g. "n people victims of burglary" => "n thiefs") or only to rape?
  - klipt 5y ago
    Interesting how she assumed none of the men would be raped. Newer CDC stats (since ~2010 when they started asking men if they've ever been "made to penetrate" by a woman) show that female-on-male rape happens a lot more often than people think. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/11/the-understudied-female-sexual-predator/503492/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/11/the-unde...
    - sandworm101 5y ago
      I had that discussion with her. She was actually an open lesbian, part of the early gay marriage push in new england. At the time (early 2000s) there were some states with old laws that also made female-on-female rape physically impossible. Canada recently abolished "rape" as a distinct crime, instead placing it on the far end of a sexual assault spectrum. I think this is probably the best way forwards.
      - klipt 5y ago
        That's part of the solution, but we also need to challenge societal gender biases that assume men can't be victims. If you look at the CDC stats something like 1/3rd of people victimized in any year are men, but if you look at crimes reported to police it drops to something like 1% of victims being men. It implies men are much less likely to report being raped to the police.
    - wolverine876 5y ago
      or male-on-male rape
      - klipt 5y ago
        That too, but the CDC stats suggest that female-on-male is more prevalent than male-on-male, although they call female-on-male "made to penetrate" and only call male-on-male "rape" which confuses people into thinking the opposite.
  - avgcorrection 5y ago
    Was the aim of the lecturer to teach law or to incite a random lynching? Or to make the co-students distrust each other for no more reason than they would want to distrust any other random person? Go to a sufficiently large rock concert and the lead singer would be able to say “statistically at least one of you are a murderer!” Which might be “statistically correct” but all that would accomplish is for everyone to question his or her sanity.
  - tomcam 5y ago
    I never use the word victim for me anyway. I pretty much overachieved in most ways so I could get the fuck out of my zip code and never seen those people again
zapdrive 5y ago
10%? It's sickening if it's true. If building more prisons is what is needed to deal with this actual pandemic, then I guess we should start building prisons.
pawelmurias 5y ago
Why should locking up child abusers be controversial?
- sandworm101 5y ago
  Because a doctor's duty is to their patient, not the justice system. Breaking up the family might not be the best thing for the pregnant girl or newborn. I'm not saying they actively cover up abuse, but doctors know not to ask questions they don't want answered. Blanket genetic testing determinative to determine parentage is very dangerous knowledge.
  - spamizbad 5y ago
    Aren't doctors mandatory reporters in the United States?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - sandworm101 5y ago
      Mandatory reporters, not mandatory investigators. If they have no knowledge of the abuse they have nothing to report. If the girl says that her boyfriend is the father, the doctor isn't going to run extra tests just to prove her wrong. There is no medical advantage to the patient in such testing. Doctors are not cops.
    - suifbwish 5y ago
      Their primary directive legal or not is to uphold the oath they took to do no harm. If reporting would cause them to violate this ancient creed then it is for they to decide what they will do.
      - emodendroket 5y ago
        Sure, if they want to risk being stripped of their license, they can flout the law.
hkt 5y ago
Similar story here except with journalism: I did a course in media law where it was explained that victims of sex crimes always get lifelong anonymity. Journalists must avoid "jigsaw identification", eg giving away details that might identify the victim. This means in cases of incest it is impossible to report the incest element because it is too easy to identify the victim if you say "x raped his daughter". So it appears in the press as though attacks are random, when actually a shocking number (10% seems conservative) are in the family. As a sibling comment says, it is chilling.
- Retric 5y ago
  10% would be of all teen births not all rapes. I suspect that 10% pregnancy number would represent a much higher percentage of teen rapes.
fullstop 5y ago
My wife was summoned for jury duty, and the case had to do with sexual abuse. At jury selection time they ask if a prospective juror would have difficulty being impartial because of the nature of the case. If you were uncomfortable discussing the matter, you could ask to be taken aside to discuss without the others in the room hearing it. Out of a few dozen people, seven women left the room to explain why they could not be impartial, some of them returning in tears. They weren't gone for a short while, either, many of them took 20 or 30 minutes before returning to the court room. One of them was called back out of the room at the very end, and my wife suspects that she was actively being abused and this was an opportunity to seek help without the abuser being present. This isn't something that I have to personally worry about if I'm by myself, but it's something that so many women do have to worry about all the time. I can't even imagine the burden that women must carry.
- sandworm101 5y ago
  If they came back in tears and were removed from the jury, then the system worked. A clearly impartial potential juror was removed and a past victim was saved from a horrible experience of sitting through such testimony. But what about those who have been abused but aren't in tears? This came up very recently. One of the Ghislaine Maxwell jurors discussed his history of being abused with other jurors. The question becomes then whether anyone who has been abused can ever be impartial about abuse. To say that they cannot, imho, does victims a great disservice. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59884806 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59884806
  - deanCommie 5y ago
    I find the very premise of trying to find an "impartial" jury very strange. It makes sense at first pass, but falls apart soon after. Are these not to be a jury of my "peers". Are not all humans biased in one way or another. If being abused creates bias, why wouldn't NOT being abused also not create bias. We don't have perfect access to information. Sometimes in order to be considered impartial, jurors are basically expected to have no familiarity with basic fundamental news stories. Are people so disconnected from reality really "peers"? Ultimately, I guess, it's the best we can do.
lmkg 5y ago
Apparently something similar happened when X-Rays started becoming routine. Doctors X-raying kids saw evidence that so many of them had a history of broken bones from abuse. It took a while for the medical community as a whole to acknowledge that widespread child abuse was actually occurring, and longer to wrangle with the idea that it was something that was within their mandate as doctors to do something about. https://reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/me33bo/did_x_rays_reveal_a_hidden_epidemic_of_child_abuse/gshrz1h/ https://reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/me33bo/did_x_ray... (Yes it's reddit, but it's Ask Historians. Responses tend to be high-quality because their moderation policy embraces Sturgeon's Law.)
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  There is a similar social issue waiting to blow up regarding genetic screening. Estimates are that 10-15% of children are from infidelity
  - User23 5y ago
    I believe that's the rate for people who seek out a paternity test, which is to say are already suspicious. The overall population nonpaternity rate is about 3%[1]. As an aside, obstetricians often notice nonpaternity because of the child having an impossible blood type for the putative father. The ones I've spoken to prefer to stay silent when they notice it. [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19320216/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19320216/
    - s1artibartfast 5y ago
      Thank you for the correction.
  - onphonenow 5y ago
    Parental testing should be mandatory at birth perhaps for these issues. Or at least if someone is going to go claim child support.
    - 5y ago
NoImmatureAdHom 5y ago
"In a few cases (N < 5) families were dropped from the comparison group because some history of sexual abuse was ascertained." I think you are misinterpreting. First, they say: "...information was obtained about any possible unwanted sexual experiences of the comparison females or other family members" So interpreting it as 5 of 84 women is incorrect. It's min 5 people of 84 families. Given a mean family size of perhaps 3.5 (if by "family" they mean "nuclear family", though I bet they include anyone you know about really--Uncle Bob would count, and one report per family with reports) it's more like 5 out of 294 people, or 1.7%. And I don't think they share their exclusion criteria, which isn't a good sign. And there's a significant selection bias given how they recruited (in a newspaper, for people who have the free time and/or low wealth enough to want to do a study, and in particular on female growth and development). I think your comment is getting attention because you're offering an idea that people like, and some anecdata to back it up. It's a classic problem of the modern world, things that people want to believe get a lot of attention, out of proportion to their actual frequency. I think you, and others here, want to believe the situation is worse than it is, or worse than the data here warrant believing, because you're going to get rewarded for acting as if the appealing idea is the case. I don't mean you are sitting there, consciously thinking that, but the rewards (here some updoots on HN) shape your behavior behind the scenes anyway. This is how we get news that paints a grotesquely distorted view of the world: people want to hear about how a crazed soccer mom murdered all her kids in the bathtub, and critically it is profitable. They don't want to hear that everything was fine in Peoria, IL last night. I would bet a lot of money that the picture you paint with the study's numbers is substantially false. For one, your interpretation of the numbers they give is wrong. Second, the study doesn't appear well done. It's a little old, but it also has a lot of indicators that it isn't of high quality (e.g., lots of "p<0.05", but no "p<0.001"--see p curves). I haven't read it in detail and won't because my spidey senses say it's not worth it based on what I've seen skimming.
- woah 5y ago
  > I haven't read it in detail and won't because my spidey senses say it's not worth it based on what I've seen skimming. Wow thanks for this extremely well researched and authoritative opinion
bArray 5y ago
> So roughly 5% (<5 of 84) of the control group were discovered to have themselves been abused and needed to be dropped from the study. I hope this is accidental bias, or a statistical anomaly. It could be for example that this is overrepresented from the pooled community. I think it would also be important to somehow scale/categorize the level of abuse (physical vs non-physical, penetrative vs non-penetrative, etc). If it really is 5% (1 in 20 girls) then this would outrank something like COVID in terms of importance. > The comparison sample (n = 82) was recruited via advertisements in community newspapers and posters in welfare, daycare, and community facilities in the same neighborhoods in which the abused participants lived. Comparison families contacted study personnel and were screened for eligibility, which included having no prior contact with protective service agencies and being demographically similar to a same-aged abused participant. At the time of study entry, comparison families were not informed that the study involved sexually abused females; rather, they were told that the study was of “female growth and development.” I wonder whether this still ended up being a self-selecting group. I can imagine a scenario where a young girl has an awful experience growing up, wants to see change in the upbringing of females and becomes somewhat engaged in related activities. > He actually said: You better build some more prisons before you start testing babies for this. I don't think a lack of facilities to deal with a problem is a good reason for not addressing it. At the very least we need to understand the scale of the problem, even if the problem remains unaddressed for the time being.
- sandworm101 5y ago
  We don't have hard numbers on kids, but we have some very solid numbers from young adults. From 2020 Statistics Canada study of university students: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/85-002-x/2020001/article/00005-eng.htm https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/85-002-x/2020001/article... >> One in ten (11%) women students experienced a sexual assault in a postsecondary setting during the previous year. About one in five (19%) women who were sexually assaulted said that the assault took the form of a sexual activity to which they did not consent after they had agreed to another form of sexual activity—for example, agreeing to have protected sex and then learning it had been unprotected sex. >> Less than one in ten women (8%) and men (6%) who experienced sexual assault, and less than one in ten women (9%) and men (4%) who had experienced unwanted sexualized behaviours spoke about what happened Given that last stat, we should take whatever number we have for reported assaults' and multiply it by at least ten to cover all the unreported events.
ryan93 5y ago
paganel 5y ago
> In his experience, amongst pregnant teenagers (17 and younger) about 10% were pregnant by their own fathers/brothers. I refuse to believe that. I mean, yeah, the man had direct contact with such cases and probably had been in the field for tens of years while I'm just a computer programmer but I still refuse to believe it.
- pfortuny 5y ago
  Well, it is his expertise. Have you read “the body keeps the score”? Really enlightening.
- SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
  I know it is probably shocking and supremely disgusting to realize but it is important to validate when people are victims of abuse, because they’re already traumatized. It’s even worse when people try to pretend it doesn’t happen or refuse to believe it happens to the extent it does because it’s like being victimized a second time: not only is your body taken from you but your experiences are denied from you too.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- dkarl 5y ago
  I get what you're getting at, that we should trust the experts who have professional experience with a problem, but on the other hand, he didn't say how he arrived at that 10% number, and we don't know if his opinion is an outlier among medical doctors. And we do know, because we're witnessing it, that his statement is being amplified by non-medical professionals for the precise reason that it would be urgent and shocking if true. A lot of questionable information about Covid was amplified this way, because "a doctor" said it. Before we take the information at face value, we would expect some kind of support for his statement from other professionals. There are scientists who study the factors relating teenage pregnancy, as well as advocates for sexual abuse victims who uncover and publicize facts like these. If the information is something that has never been formally studied but is something that doctors "just know," there are tens of thousands (at least) of medical professionals who have regular contact with different populations of pregnant teenagers in the United States alone. If there's a widespread suspicion that the number might be 10% or more, that would mean a lot more than one doctor making an off-the-cuff remark in the audience of a law lecture.
wantsanagent 5y ago
Figure 2b also notes that of the original 82 comparison group individuals 13 were dropped due to revelation of abuse.
srcreigh 5y ago
Does ancestry.com have this info?

tomcam 5y ago

That whole comment was chilling AF

sandworm101 5y ago
Chilling but also a little reassuring. If you are a victim, knowing that a large percentage of the population has also been abused can help recovery. It says that it is very possible to be a victim and go on to a normal life. Want something very chilling? First year criminal law lecture on rape. Professor says "We have about a hundred people in this room. None of you future lawyers have criminal records. Statistically speaking, about fifteen of the fifty or so women here are victims. And probably fifteen of the men are rapists." Also see the opening sequence of the movie Copycat (1995) where Sigourney Weaver's character does a similar trick regarding serial killers.
- erosenbe0 5y ago
  Uhh lawyers and law students can have criminal records. Commonly.
  - sandworm101 5y ago
    By criminal record she clearly mean the sort of things that would prevent you from being accepted to the bar/law school. Someone with a rape conviction as an adult wouldn't be sitting in a first year law lecture. Is is normal for law schools not to accept candidates that will not be able to become lawyers.
  - astura 5y ago
    Certain criminal convictions (like rape) prevent you from being accepted by the bar. Most people don't go to law school when they know they are ineligible to actually practice law (even if a law school actually accepted a convicted rapist). The school they were teaching at probably disqualified anyone with any criminal record from admission.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > Chilling but also a little reassuring. If you are a victim, knowing that a large percentage of the population has also been abused can help recovery. "Misery loves company" is indeed a common attitude, but I'm not sure it's especially healthy.
  - wpietri 5y ago
    I think "misery loves company" is distinct. One of the many harms of sexual abuse is shame. Not coincidentally, shame is a tool of abusers and authoritarian power structures that protect abusers. For victims of abuse, knowing that they're not alone is a path out of shame and self-blame. It can help them put blame in the correct spot: not on what they wore or how they acted, but on the abusers and the abusers' support systems.
  - Maursault 5y ago
    "Misery loves company" is the antithesis of The Golden Rule, a formulation of which is "do not believe that it is so that you will find happiness in the misery of others," (I believe Seneca may have said this, but can't find the citation). I believe it is not the sadist notion, "misery loves company," that eases victims' pain, but instead "being in good company." I think "misery loves company" is a cynical twist of "being in good company," which is similar to left-handers learning of famous left-handers, or a depressive learning that Lincoln suffered from depression, reducing or eliminating feeling alone or isolated and disconneted.
    - tremon 5y ago
      The Dutch equivalent of "misery loves company" is "gedeelde smart is halve smart", which roughly translates to "a burden shared is a burden halved". I've never before interpreted that phrase in any other way than an acknowledgement that personal problems are easier to bear if you have someone to confide in. I certainly wouldn't interpret it as a cynical comment on codependency. But maybe I've always misinterpreted the English phrase. Is there a different English saying that's closer to the Dutch meaning?
      - 5y ago
- ascar 5y ago
  While that story might be intimidating I can't help but think it's statistical nonsense and discredits the professors integrity. Starting from the assumption that general population numbers apply to a group of law students (I assume that he doesn't have statistics about rape among law students) on to the assumption that there is a 1 to 1 relationship between rape victims and rapists. I would assume there to be more victims than offenders. Just seems a rather weird move to tell your first year students a significant number of their fellows and friends are either victims or rapists just to make a point about unsolved rape.
  - sandworm101 5y ago
    >> I would assume there to be more victims than offenders. Why? Women who have been abused are often abused by more than one person. >>just to make a point about unsolved rape. She was making multiple points, several of which had nothing to do with rape. It was about criminality. Why we punish crimes the way we do. The strain on police/judicial resources. Diversionary programs. The prevalence of plea bargaining. and and and. A first year law lecture is a very nuanced thing.
    - thatcat 5y ago
      What's her point other than that our system is ineffective and incredibly wasteful?
  - chefandy 5y ago
    It sounds like the professor made it clear she was speaking in terms of population averages. So unless you can find empirical evidence that those statistics don't apply to that slice of the population, then there's absolutely no problem with what she said. She didn't say "15 of the men in this class are rapists." Law students aren't learning to be statisticians, epidemiologists, or policy wonks. Emotionally moving people to act upon a collection of documented facts— be it in trial or a contract negotiation— requires persuasive speaking and strategy. She made the breadth and consequences of rape palpable to her students not only by giving it a face, but giving it their faces. Since this poster, years later, immediately recalled that story when prompted, I reckon it was thoroughly compelling.
- wpietri 5y ago
  There is some evidence that the proportion for the men is a bit different. According to one study, it was about 6% of men. About 2/3rds of those men committed multiple rapes, ~6 each. Details here: https://yesmeansyesblog.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/meet-the-predators/ https://yesmeansyesblog.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/meet-the-pr... Intuitively, that makes sense. If people figure out how to get away with something, some of them are going to keep doing it. E.g., if I think about the people I knew in high school, most didn't shoplift, but there were a couple who did it a whole bunch.
  - sandworm101 5y ago
    Alcohol. We can get into the definitions of consent, but suffice to say that there are a large number of rapes committed by drunk highschool kids. Many wake up, regret everything about what happened, and never allow themselves to get into such a situation again.
    - wpietri 5y ago
      The out-of-the-blue apologia for rape is always startling to me.
- tomp 5y ago
  Are people (and law professors in particular) stupid enough to apply this "1-on-1" logic to other crimes as well (e.g. "n people victims of burglary" => "n thiefs") or only to rape?
- klipt 5y ago
  Interesting how she assumed none of the men would be raped. Newer CDC stats (since ~2010 when they started asking men if they've ever been "made to penetrate" by a woman) show that female-on-male rape happens a lot more often than people think. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/11/the-understudied-female-sexual-predator/503492/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/11/the-unde...
  - sandworm101 5y ago
    I had that discussion with her. She was actually an open lesbian, part of the early gay marriage push in new england. At the time (early 2000s) there were some states with old laws that also made female-on-female rape physically impossible. Canada recently abolished "rape" as a distinct crime, instead placing it on the far end of a sexual assault spectrum. I think this is probably the best way forwards.
    - klipt 5y ago
      That's part of the solution, but we also need to challenge societal gender biases that assume men can't be victims. If you look at the CDC stats something like 1/3rd of people victimized in any year are men, but if you look at crimes reported to police it drops to something like 1% of victims being men. It implies men are much less likely to report being raped to the police.
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    or male-on-male rape
    - klipt 5y ago
      That too, but the CDC stats suggest that female-on-male is more prevalent than male-on-male, although they call female-on-male "made to penetrate" and only call male-on-male "rape" which confuses people into thinking the opposite.
- avgcorrection 5y ago
  Was the aim of the lecturer to teach law or to incite a random lynching? Or to make the co-students distrust each other for no more reason than they would want to distrust any other random person? Go to a sufficiently large rock concert and the lead singer would be able to say “statistically at least one of you are a murderer!” Which might be “statistically correct” but all that would accomplish is for everyone to question his or her sanity.
- tomcam 5y ago
  I never use the word victim for me anyway. I pretty much overachieved in most ways so I could get the fuck out of my zip code and never seen those people again

zapdrive 5y ago

10%? It's sickening if it's true. If building more prisons is what is needed to deal with this actual pandemic, then I guess we should start building prisons.

pawelmurias 5y ago

Why should locking up child abusers be controversial?

sandworm101 5y ago
Because a doctor's duty is to their patient, not the justice system. Breaking up the family might not be the best thing for the pregnant girl or newborn. I'm not saying they actively cover up abuse, but doctors know not to ask questions they don't want answered. Blanket genetic testing determinative to determine parentage is very dangerous knowledge.
- spamizbad 5y ago
  Aren't doctors mandatory reporters in the United States?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - sandworm101 5y ago
    Mandatory reporters, not mandatory investigators. If they have no knowledge of the abuse they have nothing to report. If the girl says that her boyfriend is the father, the doctor isn't going to run extra tests just to prove her wrong. There is no medical advantage to the patient in such testing. Doctors are not cops.
  - suifbwish 5y ago
    Their primary directive legal or not is to uphold the oath they took to do no harm. If reporting would cause them to violate this ancient creed then it is for they to decide what they will do.
    - emodendroket 5y ago
      Sure, if they want to risk being stripped of their license, they can flout the law.

hkt 5y ago

Similar story here except with journalism: I did a course in media law where it was explained that victims of sex crimes always get lifelong anonymity. Journalists must avoid "jigsaw identification", eg giving away details that might identify the victim. This means in cases of incest it is impossible to report the incest element because it is too easy to identify the victim if you say "x raped his daughter". So it appears in the press as though attacks are random, when actually a shocking number (10% seems conservative) are in the family. As a sibling comment says, it is chilling.

Retric 5y ago
10% would be of all teen births not all rapes. I suspect that 10% pregnancy number would represent a much higher percentage of teen rapes.

fullstop 5y ago

My wife was summoned for jury duty, and the case had to do with sexual abuse. At jury selection time they ask if a prospective juror would have difficulty being impartial because of the nature of the case. If you were uncomfortable discussing the matter, you could ask to be taken aside to discuss without the others in the room hearing it. Out of a few dozen people, seven women left the room to explain why they could not be impartial, some of them returning in tears. They weren't gone for a short while, either, many of them took 20 or 30 minutes before returning to the court room. One of them was called back out of the room at the very end, and my wife suspects that she was actively being abused and this was an opportunity to seek help without the abuser being present. This isn't something that I have to personally worry about if I'm by myself, but it's something that so many women do have to worry about all the time. I can't even imagine the burden that women must carry.

sandworm101 5y ago
If they came back in tears and were removed from the jury, then the system worked. A clearly impartial potential juror was removed and a past victim was saved from a horrible experience of sitting through such testimony. But what about those who have been abused but aren't in tears? This came up very recently. One of the Ghislaine Maxwell jurors discussed his history of being abused with other jurors. The question becomes then whether anyone who has been abused can ever be impartial about abuse. To say that they cannot, imho, does victims a great disservice. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59884806 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59884806
- deanCommie 5y ago
  I find the very premise of trying to find an "impartial" jury very strange. It makes sense at first pass, but falls apart soon after. Are these not to be a jury of my "peers". Are not all humans biased in one way or another. If being abused creates bias, why wouldn't NOT being abused also not create bias. We don't have perfect access to information. Sometimes in order to be considered impartial, jurors are basically expected to have no familiarity with basic fundamental news stories. Are people so disconnected from reality really "peers"? Ultimately, I guess, it's the best we can do.

lmkg 5y ago

Apparently something similar happened when X-Rays started becoming routine. Doctors X-raying kids saw evidence that so many of them had a history of broken bones from abuse. It took a while for the medical community as a whole to acknowledge that widespread child abuse was actually occurring, and longer to wrangle with the idea that it was something that was within their mandate as doctors to do something about. https://reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/me33bo/did_x_rays_reveal_a_hidden_epidemic_of_child_abuse/gshrz1h/ https://reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/me33bo/did_x_ray... (Yes it's reddit, but it's Ask Historians. Responses tend to be high-quality because their moderation policy embraces Sturgeon's Law.)

s1artibartfast 5y ago
There is a similar social issue waiting to blow up regarding genetic screening. Estimates are that 10-15% of children are from infidelity
- User23 5y ago
  I believe that's the rate for people who seek out a paternity test, which is to say are already suspicious. The overall population nonpaternity rate is about 3%[1]. As an aside, obstetricians often notice nonpaternity because of the child having an impossible blood type for the putative father. The ones I've spoken to prefer to stay silent when they notice it. [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19320216/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19320216/
  - s1artibartfast 5y ago
    Thank you for the correction.
- onphonenow 5y ago
  Parental testing should be mandatory at birth perhaps for these issues. Or at least if someone is going to go claim child support.
  - 5y ago

NoImmatureAdHom 5y ago

"In a few cases (N < 5) families were dropped from the comparison group because some history of sexual abuse was ascertained." I think you are misinterpreting. First, they say: "...information was obtained about any possible unwanted sexual experiences of the comparison females or other family members" So interpreting it as 5 of 84 women is incorrect. It's min 5 people of 84 families. Given a mean family size of perhaps 3.5 (if by "family" they mean "nuclear family", though I bet they include anyone you know about really--Uncle Bob would count, and one report per family with reports) it's more like 5 out of 294 people, or 1.7%. And I don't think they share their exclusion criteria, which isn't a good sign. And there's a significant selection bias given how they recruited (in a newspaper, for people who have the free time and/or low wealth enough to want to do a study, and in particular on female growth and development). I think your comment is getting attention because you're offering an idea that people like, and some anecdata to back it up. It's a classic problem of the modern world, things that people want to believe get a lot of attention, out of proportion to their actual frequency. I think you, and others here, want to believe the situation is worse than it is, or worse than the data here warrant believing, because you're going to get rewarded for acting as if the appealing idea is the case. I don't mean you are sitting there, consciously thinking that, but the rewards (here some updoots on HN) shape your behavior behind the scenes anyway. This is how we get news that paints a grotesquely distorted view of the world: people want to hear about how a crazed soccer mom murdered all her kids in the bathtub, and critically it is profitable. They don't want to hear that everything was fine in Peoria, IL last night. I would bet a lot of money that the picture you paint with the study's numbers is substantially false. For one, your interpretation of the numbers they give is wrong. Second, the study doesn't appear well done. It's a little old, but it also has a lot of indicators that it isn't of high quality (e.g., lots of "p<0.05", but no "p<0.001"--see p curves). I haven't read it in detail and won't because my spidey senses say it's not worth it based on what I've seen skimming.

woah 5y ago
> I haven't read it in detail and won't because my spidey senses say it's not worth it based on what I've seen skimming. Wow thanks for this extremely well researched and authoritative opinion

bArray 5y ago

> So roughly 5% (<5 of 84) of the control group were discovered to have themselves been abused and needed to be dropped from the study. I hope this is accidental bias, or a statistical anomaly. It could be for example that this is overrepresented from the pooled community. I think it would also be important to somehow scale/categorize the level of abuse (physical vs non-physical, penetrative vs non-penetrative, etc). If it really is 5% (1 in 20 girls) then this would outrank something like COVID in terms of importance. > The comparison sample (n = 82) was recruited via advertisements in community newspapers and posters in welfare, daycare, and community facilities in the same neighborhoods in which the abused participants lived. Comparison families contacted study personnel and were screened for eligibility, which included having no prior contact with protective service agencies and being demographically similar to a same-aged abused participant. At the time of study entry, comparison families were not informed that the study involved sexually abused females; rather, they were told that the study was of “female growth and development.” I wonder whether this still ended up being a self-selecting group. I can imagine a scenario where a young girl has an awful experience growing up, wants to see change in the upbringing of females and becomes somewhat engaged in related activities. > He actually said: You better build some more prisons before you start testing babies for this. I don't think a lack of facilities to deal with a problem is a good reason for not addressing it. At the very least we need to understand the scale of the problem, even if the problem remains unaddressed for the time being.

sandworm101 5y ago
We don't have hard numbers on kids, but we have some very solid numbers from young adults. From 2020 Statistics Canada study of university students: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/85-002-x/2020001/article/00005-eng.htm https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/85-002-x/2020001/article... >> One in ten (11%) women students experienced a sexual assault in a postsecondary setting during the previous year. About one in five (19%) women who were sexually assaulted said that the assault took the form of a sexual activity to which they did not consent after they had agreed to another form of sexual activity—for example, agreeing to have protected sex and then learning it had been unprotected sex. >> Less than one in ten women (8%) and men (6%) who experienced sexual assault, and less than one in ten women (9%) and men (4%) who had experienced unwanted sexualized behaviours spoke about what happened Given that last stat, we should take whatever number we have for reported assaults' and multiply it by at least ten to cover all the unreported events.

ryan93 5y ago

paganel 5y ago

> In his experience, amongst pregnant teenagers (17 and younger) about 10% were pregnant by their own fathers/brothers. I refuse to believe that. I mean, yeah, the man had direct contact with such cases and probably had been in the field for tens of years while I'm just a computer programmer but I still refuse to believe it.

pfortuny 5y ago
Well, it is his expertise. Have you read “the body keeps the score”? Really enlightening.
SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
I know it is probably shocking and supremely disgusting to realize but it is important to validate when people are victims of abuse, because they’re already traumatized. It’s even worse when people try to pretend it doesn’t happen or refuse to believe it happens to the extent it does because it’s like being victimized a second time: not only is your body taken from you but your experiences are denied from you too.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
dkarl 5y ago
I get what you're getting at, that we should trust the experts who have professional experience with a problem, but on the other hand, he didn't say how he arrived at that 10% number, and we don't know if his opinion is an outlier among medical doctors. And we do know, because we're witnessing it, that his statement is being amplified by non-medical professionals for the precise reason that it would be urgent and shocking if true. A lot of questionable information about Covid was amplified this way, because "a doctor" said it. Before we take the information at face value, we would expect some kind of support for his statement from other professionals. There are scientists who study the factors relating teenage pregnancy, as well as advocates for sexual abuse victims who uncover and publicize facts like these. If the information is something that has never been formally studied but is something that doctors "just know," there are tens of thousands (at least) of medical professionals who have regular contact with different populations of pregnant teenagers in the United States alone. If there's a widespread suspicion that the number might be 10% or more, that would mean a lot more than one doctor making an off-the-cuff remark in the audience of a law lecture.

wantsanagent 5y ago

Figure 2b also notes that of the original 82 comparison group individuals 13 were dropped due to revelation of abuse.

srcreigh 5y ago

Does ancestry.com have this info?