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Re: Science and moral politics
Thank you for that Eugene. I was just putting finishing touches to my
article on The Politics of Fear, and that slotted in beautifully! Of
course, Congress is not interested in the resilience of the human spirit!
My God! What they are interested in is "tough new laws" to
protect the human spirit!
Andy
At 12:06 AM 8/11/2004 -0500, you wrote:
Several years ago, three
psychologistsBruce Rind, Robert Bauserman, and Philip Tromovitchpublished
an article on childhood sexual abuse in Psychological Bulletin,
one of academic psychologys most prestigious journals. It was what
psychologists call a meta-analysis. The three researchers collected
fifty-nine studies that had been conducted over the years on the
long-term psychological effects of childhood sexual abuse (C.S.A.), and
combined the data, in order to get the most definitive and statistically
powerful result possible.
What most studies of sexual abuse
show is that if you gauge the psychological health of young
adultstypically college studentsusing various measures of mental health
(alcohol problems, depression, anxiety, eating disorders,
obsessive-compulsive symptoms, social adjustment, sleeping problems,
suicidal thoughts and behavior, and so on), those with a history of
childhood sexual abuse will have more problems across the board than
those who werent abused. That makes intuitive sense. But Rind and his
colleagues wanted to answer that question more specifically: how
much worse off were the sexually abused? The fifty-nine studies
were run through a series of sophisticated statistical tests. Studies
from different times and places were put on the same scale. The results
were surprising. The difference between the psychological health of those
who had been abused and those who hadnt, they found, was marginal. It was
two-tenths of a standard deviation. Thats like the difference between
someone with an I.Q. of 100 and someone with an I.Q. of 97,Rind says.
Ninety-seven is statistically different from 100. But its a trivial
difference.
Then Rind and his colleagues went one
step further. A significant percentage of people who were sexually abused
as children grew up in families with a host of other problems, like
violence, neglect, and verbal abuse. So, to the extent that the sexually
abused were damaged, what caused the damagethe sexual abuse, or the
violence and neglect that so often accompanied the abuse? The data
suggested that it was the latter, and, if you account for such factors,
that two-tenths of a standard deviation shrinks even more. The real gap
is probably smaller than 100 and 97,Rind says. It might be 98, or maybe
its 99.The studies analyzed by Rind and his colleagues show that some
victims of sexual abuse dont even regard themselves, in retrospect, as
victims. Among the male college students surveyed, for instance, Rind and
his colleagues found that 37 percent viewed their C.S.A. experiences as
positive at the time they occurred,while forty-two per cent viewed them
as positive when reflecting back on them.
The Rind article was published in the
summer of 1998, and almost immediately it was denounced by conservative
groups and lambasted in the media. Laura Schlessingera popular radio
talk-show host known as Dr. Lauracalled it junk science.In Washington,
Representative Matt Salmon called it the Emancipation Proclamation for
pedophiles,while Representative Tom DeLay accused it of normalizing
pedophilia.They held a press conference at which they demanded that the
American Psychological Association censure the paper. In July of 1999, a
year after its publication, both the House and the Senate overwhelmingly
passed resolutions condemning the analysis. Few articles in the history
of academic psychology have created such a stir.
But why? Its not as if the authors
said that C.S.A. was a good thing. They just suggested that it didnt
cause as many problems as wed thoughtand the question of whether C.S.A.
is morally wrong doesnt hinge on its long-term consequences. Nor did the
study say that sexual abuse was harmless. On average, the
researchers concluded, the long-term damage is small. But that average is
made up of cases where the damage is hard to find (like C.S.A. involving
adolescent boys) and cases where the damage is quite significant (like
father-daughter incest). Rind was trying to help psychologists focus on
what was truly harmful. And, when it came to the effects of things like
physical abuse and neglect, he and his colleagues sounded the alarm. What
happens in physical abuse is that it doesnt happen once,Rind says. It
happens time and time again. And, when it comes to neglect, the research
shows that is the most noxious factor of allworse than physical abuse.
Why? Because its not practiced for one week. Its a persistent thing. Its
a permanent feature of the parent-child relationship. These are the kinds
of things that cause problems in adulthood.
All Rind and his colleagues were
saying is that sexual abuse is often something that people eventually can
get over, and one of the reasons that the Rind study was so unacceptable
is that we no longer think that traumatic experiences are things we can
get over. We believe that the child who is molested by an uncle or a
priest, on two or three furtive occasions, has to be permanently scarred
by the experiencejust as the soldier who accidentally kills his best
friend must do more than sit down on the beach and decide that sometimes
things just happen.
In a recent history of the Rind
controversy, the psychologist Scott Lilienfeld pointed out that when we
find out that something we thought was very dangerous actually isnt that
dangerous after all we usually regard what weve learned as good news. To
him, the controversy was a paradox, and he is quite right. This
attachment we have to John Wade over Tom Rath is not merely a preference
for one kind of war narrative over another. It is a shift in perception
so profound that the United States Congress could be presented with
evidence of the unexpected strength and resilience of the human spirit
and reject it without a single dissenting vote.
&..
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Eugene Matusov, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Education
School of Education
University of Delaware
Newark, DE 19716, USA
http://ematusov.soe.udel.edu
Office: 1-302-831-1266
Fax: 1-302-831-4110
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