The impact of sexual abuse on female development: a longitudinal study

Not only does it help prevent things from happening that could be a problem later, it helps prevent even accusations of such, if it's well known that the person involved holds to this rule and expects others to hold them to it as well. Say what you will about Pence, love him or hate him, nobody is accusing him of sexual misconduct - and that's the point of the rule.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Graham_rule

The only way to treat this as gospel is to never be present with another woman alone.

That the tech industry is so inept with opposite gender interactions that they have adopted tactics from religious zealot evangelicals is APALLING.

Treat people as humans. Regardless of gender or sexuality.

Honestly, my suggestion would be to be open about your own experiences and the impact they've had on you. (Not necessarily abuse, but just offhand comments like 'oh, it's silly but I can't stand yelling because my dad yelled a lot' or 'I don't drink because my family's had issues with it', etc.) Be open and clear that a.) you don't judge people for being 'weird' and b.) you accept things other people need even if you don't need them.

Don't be overly emotional about it. Just accept their human needs in the same way you would if a coworker had a disability. Oh, that person needs more space between us? Alright. Not any different than a hard of hearing coworker who needs me to speak up a bit, or a visually impaired coworker who uses zoom on their computer.

My saying, "Hey, I have a bit of anxiety so I'm going to gather myself for a moment; do you think you could step back and give me some space and we could try to pitch this conversation a bit quieter?" shouldn't be much different than my needing a stepstool. I'm short. It happens.

If you treat the people around you as individuals, then people understand they can ask you for what they need.

The quick rule-of-thumb is to be courteous and respectful but also establish very firm physical boundaries, even erring towards being less friendly as opposed to more. You also need to proactively signal that you will stop interacting with them at the slightest sign of their discomfort; keeping interactions short and to the point is an obvious way to do this, even though this outwardly looks "rude" and "unfriendly"!

The clearest and most effective way of doing this is to proactively establish and propose safe boundaries for the other person's benefit. This is the underlying dynamic behind many rules-of-thumb of ordinary courtesy and politeness (often wrongly dismissed as some sort of useless, obsolete 'traditionalism'). Not everyone is so assertive and comfortable with themselves that they should be expected to verbalize their boundaries to you, or even to understand them proactively.

"Misery loves company" is indeed a common attitude, but I'm not sure it's especially healthy.

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.

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.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/11/the-unde...

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.

Automatic genetic testing also has other advantages of preventing future paternity disputes.

Honestly, this would be an interesting thing for a single state to run an experiment with and see how behaviors change.

Ending abuse for the pregnant girl is certainly their prorogative

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.

With a jury of only lets say strong white males that have never been abused or abuse adjacent, but have had several experience where they felt woman didn't give them enough respect are we that would seem a lot worse to me. Obviously this sounds like an extreme example, but the reality is that such a large part of the population has been the victim in abuse situations that you are going to disqualify into a situation similar to this.

Not true, since no abusers came back in tears and were removed from the jury.

Or do you consider abusers impartial but abuse victims biased?

I've been called for jury duty any number of times. Not once has anyone ever called me, personally, out of one room and into another - always as part of a group of selectees heading to a courtroom or voir dire or whatever. Between that and everything else, it doesn't seem like a leap at all.

Not really. In abusive relationships, the abuser often controls every aspect of the abused person's life and there are not opportunities to seek help without the abuser knowing. It's why there are sometimes signs in the bathrooms of women's health clinics informing the patient to initial their sample cup in red marker if they are being abused or have something that they wish to discuss in private. This may well have been one of her only chances to speak with someone without an abuser knowing.

She was the only one called back when the selection was complete. I've been called for jury duty several times and this has never happened while I was there.

Which I consider a larger problem. Since so much abuse is hidden, the perpetrators also can sit on juries related to sexual assault cases. Delightful.

And they should do this by weighing the evidence impartially, not emotionally.

Agreed with this, I (woman) started getting regularly cat-called on the street every time I left my house around 12-13.

I was a young looking child to boot.

At an early age, about 5 or so I was exposed to sex, with peers, male/female. Later I was raped through coercion by two older children at 10-ish, male/female. Additionally none of this was ever reported until adulthood.

As a male I've repeatedly been put in positions that I could describe as uncomfortable (though I don't, usually), pressured intimacy, catcalling, sexually forward girls/men...

Having gotten feedback from female peers in adulthood, I've gotten to wondering about the way that society tends to articulate sex and rape to women. The summary of framing that I've gotten from one of my intimates, is that at an early age women are given the impression that sex is their single lever in a relationship or socially. Sex is the only way which a woman can gain approval. Which, to me, seems like it would drastically amplify the experience of rape. There's also the puritanical considerations of virginity and slut shaming, etc... But I don't know that it's really a running theme in individual women.

And then there's the proactive modality. At the time of my rapes, I was not informed on rape or consent, and so the context wasn't that of violence, but simply commonplace arm twisting, and because it was as such I only ever saw that it could be framed as a traumatic episode much later. On the obverse, having been informed of such things as detestable, as violent, as traumatic and serious and driven to reporting it, I could imagine that it would escalate my feelings, and I suspect so would dealing with it externally with strangers and institutions and perhaps having some artificial narrative constructed by interlopers either directly or indirectly. I mean, consider having to talk to parents, police, social workers and so on it's implies a considerable escalation from the day-to-day. Especially as a child. Of course this seldom happens. I wonder if it's a sort of funeral psychology where you feel compelled to cry and mourn because that's what's implied, even if you don't feel the need.

But as a male having gone through these situations, without the framework being described, but rather having the privilege to describe it myself, it simply never evolved into a trauma. And I think this might be borne out by the statistics wherein boys/men simply do not report rape, just beyond the fact that it may happen less frequently. But having direct perspective on it, I wonder if I'm an oddball, or if trauma resulting from female rape is sort of amplified by the way women are socialized and informed.

Since you mentioned you were aware of the danger when you were as young as 5 - when and how would you suggest one could help let their daughter know about these risks without inducing some much fear and anxiety that will end up making her avoid too many positive experiences?

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/

Extremely Misleading, from the studies I've seen these high numbers are percentage of people seeking paternity tests, not from the general public as a whole. If you're seeking a paternity test you already are suspecting infidelity.

Well that's why they were his patients. Duh. OTOH he wrote a lot about his weird ideas around sex, much of it projection - he apparently was the one with erotic feeling toward his mother. The only things Freud wrote that I agree with turns out were first theorized by someone else.

Is there a baseline for what constitutes sexual assault? Or is it entirely subjective?

Here is from that report, things that constitute "sexual assault":

    "Sexual attack: Forcing or attempted forcing into any unwanted sexual activity, by threatening, holding down, or hurting in some way;
    Unwanted sexual touching: Touching against a person’s will in any sexual way, including unwanted touching or grabbing, kissing, or fondling;
    Sexual activity where unable to consent: Subjecting to a sexual activity to which a person was not able to consent, including being intoxicated, drugged, manipulated, or forced in ways other than physically;
    Sexual activity to which a person did not consent, after they consented to another form of sexual activity (for example, agreeing to protected sex and then learning it had been unprotected sex)."

Don't take this to trivialize bad experiences people have had, take it as an attack on shoddy methods that are clearly designed to stoke fires of indignation rather than shed light on a prickly topic.

>Given that last stat... I don't think you're interpreting this correctly.

With the recent popularity of genetic testing services for health and ancestry tracing, I would think this would be easy to tease out of the data. Of course not many people will expect to see as part of the report that their father is also their grandfather or uncle; I wonder how these services handle that?

My heart aches because you sound so much like my mother.

What I will say is that as her child, one thing I appreciated so much is that I never had to worry if my parents would believe me if something happened. Your kids will have you always in their corner and that makes such, such, such a difference. So much of my mother's turmoil is related to her mother not believing her + the victim-blaming. You're helping and shielding your kids just by being who you are, even if you don't want to worry them.

https://www.kidpower.org/books/safety-comics/

And I also learned a lot and had some big mindset changes from reading the giant Kidpower Book for Caring Adults, which really goes in depth and is good at breaking things down into simple practices.

https://www.kidpower.org/books/kidpower-book/

I really like the mindset of teaching kids how to be safe in a positive way (i.e. without scaring them about potential dangers) and the serious-business approach to our responsibilities as adults.

It's awful -- like getting slapped in the face repeatedly -- but it works.

They can, but that doesn't mean they do. It is dangerous to be caught caring about men or boys. Consider this recent SNL skit "man park": https://youtu.be/9XOt2Vh0T8w?t=131. I've linked to the part where a woman is saying something sympathetic to men, and then panics that she'll be caught on camera saying it. This is after showing men in a dog park. E.g. equating them to dogs.

Note that my comment was NOT triggered by the OP's study, but rather that a comment was flagged and killed stating something that I think is obviously true, but quite inconvenient for some people to read.

This is true statistically, but I think OP's point is that statistics should not be used to dismiss individual experiences. Daniel Shaver was white, for example. Cheye Calvo was a white mayor when his house was raided (speaking of power!).

Thing is, police has too much power relative to the vast majority of citizens. The delta varies drastically between different population groups, but it's "too much" for all of them.

This is Qanon-level conspiracy thinking. By and large, white folks are safer around police because their interactions are qualitatively different from the interactions Black folks have with police.

To be sure, this includes quite a bit of anti-Black racism within police forces, but even that is better described as prejudice than "white folks have undue power in the legal system". Also, to be clear, the criminal justice system does tend to screw over marginalized Black communities in countless ways - and this impacts the kinds of interactions Black folks have w/ police, but even that is a matter of bad structural/institutional design, not white folks individually having too much power.

I think this because:

Rape (and sexual assault in general) are (usually) the result of a combination of power dynamics + sex. The other main assumption I'm making is that women are mostly sexually assaulted by men, and that men are sexually assaulted by both women and men in fairly equal numbers. (I think that women are as likely to be effed up in the head as men, but a substantial amount of male victims are victimized in male-only or default situations like the military or prison, and if all the people around you are men, all the assholes and rapists are too.)

So, examining each component separately:

Sex is going to be based on what sex acts are most common, and the most common male-female configurations focused on male pleasure have pain as a possibility for the female. Forcible vaginal penetration hurts more physically than being forced to penetrate, and being forced to gag on a penis is, in my opinion, more likely to cause pain than forced cunnilingus. So the acts themselves are more likely to cause physical pain.

With regard to power dynamics, I think most females are assaulted by men and those men are going to use their physical superiority more often (because it's the power tool they use). For male victims, I would guess whether or not their experience was physically painful would depend a lot on both the sex of their assaulter and how old they were at the time. I would expect boys that are victimized as children would be more likely to report physical pain since, like with adult women victims, there is often a physical strength differential between victim and assaulter. (Or, for example, I was physically abused by a woman as a child, and she was stronger than me.) I would also expect more physical pain from men who are sexually assaulted by other men in a social space where physical prowess is important.

The flip side of this is that I think men who are sexually assaulted by women are more likely to experience social and emotional pain/turmoil. Much like men are taught to wield their muscles as weapons, women are taught to wield our social abilities, and a woman who wants to humiliate a man or assert power over him is more likely to gaslight him, convince him to gaslight himself, etc. than beat the crap out of him. You also see this when some asshole women are dismissive of men getting erections during an assault. "He's hard, he wanted it."

I'd also hate to compare the experiences and I wouldn't say one is worse than the other. I think we should understand the variables that might cause differing results so that we can support all the victims. A focus on self-defense and overcoming feeling weak isn't going to help a male victim who could have physically stopped his attacker but didn't for social reasons: They need validation of their experiences and decisions. You know?

It was/is an abusers' paradise. All numbers of criminals mask themselves in piety because it is easy to gain acceptance because the existing adherents are literally mandated to accept/forgive all new people who are "seeking the truth."

I have seen the same thing happen in numerous organizations. The Catholic church is the tip of the ice berg.

yeah exactly

> From the evidence I have gathered from primitive societies

What evidence are you referring to? Also, again "unthinkable" is different from it not happening. In fact, it makes it even more likely to be covered up, if people don't care to investigate, or otherwise want to know.

There are lots of ways to kill. Some will be investigated more than others.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pater_familias

This comes off as extremely insensitive and tone deaf to me.

Although I think the experience of ordinary men is invisible and often systematically erased (such as by people like the one you are replying to) I am not going to say that the paper omits the impact that sexual abuse has on partners because the kind of longitudinal study that paper is doing is stupendously difficult. (Read it and they'll tell you why!)

Anything that hurts one person's mental health has an extended effect on the community. If a sexual abuse victim flakes out at work because of mental health issues that hurts their employer. She might well cause suffering to her female friends. I've also seen that a woman's ability to enjoy pleasure in her own body or with other woman as a lesbian can also be impaired because of sexual abuse.

A study like that can only scratch at the surface of what a crime like that does to society as a whole.

I spoke to my wife about this one sleepless night and she said "well, are you really ready to hear about it?"

Conventional therapists do the ordinary thing they do with a high failure rate. So often I see couples who are acting really cute doing the things they were told to do in couples therapy then I come around a few months they are depressed and I can swear I can smell a dead rat somewhere in the apartment. Next time I hear they broke up.

Conventional therapists think that is par for the course. Christian therapists think that means the devil wins and they see it as a personal failure, so they try harder.

I know nothing about the person who you are replying to but I can only image she's part of a throwaway culture were it is normal to abandon people because they aren't meeting your needs at this very moment and I have no idea if she's experienced the kind of deep attachment to another person that is possible, or that a mature person can be deeply frustrated in a situation but also be 100% committed to their family. As much as I've been angry and sad, understanding this situation has only deepened my relationship and increased my commitment even though I am planning to take actions that the Christian therapists would completely disapprove of.