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Comment by elefanten | Hacker News Reader

That’s quite a leap at the end.

You’re saying 0.6% of fathers sexually abuse a daughter?

As awful as it may be, that doesn't sound so far-fetched to me.

1/4 woman and 1/7 men have been "victims of severe physical violence [...] by an intimate partner in their lifetime." That's 25% for women! Very different statistic, but it does provide perspective. Is GP's 0.6% so implausible?

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Source for the above is https://ncadv.org/STATISTICS. This is just what came up in a quick Google search, but it was inline with what I recalled reading in the past.

Yeah 1 in 200 is well within the realm of abuse stats though it's still really speculative to try to assign a cause for a blip in the data. No idea what controls they used, but I can't imagine there is much for statistical significance there.

I think that was OP's point though. At these numbers, "this is much ado over almost nothing."

I agree wholeheartedly, but not so much with OP's second part trying to speculate over a cause.

That number ("1/4 woman and 1/7 men") seemed unlikely high to me.

I looked at the source that was cited on the ncadv.org page. Maybe I'm misreading it, but it doesn't seem to support that. According to table 11 it's 2.8 in 1000 men and 8.4 in 1000 women.

Yeah... what? Wow. Just really took a turn there all of a sudden.

I haven't seen any studies putting the prevalence of father-daughter incest as low as 0.6%. I believe that a quick google scholar search will lead you to guesstimate a figure about 10x higher than that (at the low end) but it depends on how the populations have been sampled, what the definition of incest is, and how surveys are worded.

But in any case, sounds like GP is saying that the difference in prevalence of incest between boys and girls could lead to a difference of 0.6% in divorce rates. Which is quite a different hypothesis.

I don't know. Does anyone know? Accurate stats are hard to come by, as this is of course underreported by the victims. We do know the number is greater than 0.0% though.

The Conversation article has a link to the original paper https://melbourneinstitute.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_... which does not even mention this possibility at all as a factor. I find this to be a curious omission.

Non-sexual physical abuse could also be a factor. The teenage years are when boys and girls start to "grow apart" in terms of height and strength, which makes teenage girls on average less able to defend against physical abuse than teenage boys. Also, our society is "more accepting" of violence against males than violence against females. Is this a factor in the divorce rate? I don't know, but the possibility should not be ignored.

Maybe not that. I am thinking something along the lines of "Have more stringent, less rational parenting techniques towards daughters" which would not necessarily be sexual.

Probably a lot more than that.

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