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Apropos...

Abusing Not Only Children, but Also Science

By ABIGAIL ZUGER, M.D.
Published: January 25, 2010

Given the vested interests lurking all over the current medical landscape, it is no wonder that the scientific method is so often mauled a little in transit. Cases of data ignored or manipulated to serve an agenda are like muggings in a bad neighborhood: you hear about them all the time, but in fact relatively few are ever openly examined.

And so even readers with no personal or professional connection to the sexual abuse of children may be edified by �The Trauma Myth,� a short tale of one such particularly fraught episode.

For a graduate research project at Harvard in the mid-1990s, the psychologist Susan A. Clancy arranged to interview adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse, expecting to confirm the conventional wisdom that the more traumatic the abuse had been, the more troubled an adult the child had become.

Dr. Clancy figured she knew what she would find: �Everything I knew dictated that the abuse should be a horrible experience, that the child should be traumatized at the time it was happening � overwhelmed with fear, shock, horror.�

But many carefully documented interviews revealed nothing of the sort. Commonly, the abuse had been confusing for the child but not traumatic in the usual sense of the word. Only when the child grew old enough to understand exactly what had happened � sometimes many years later � did the fear, shock and horror begin. And only at that point did the experience become traumatic and begin its well-known destructive process.

Dr. Clancy questioned her findings, reconfirmed them and was convinced. Her audience, when she made the data public, was outraged.

First, her data flew in the face of several decades of politically correct trauma theory, feminist theory and sexual politics.

Second, Dr. Clancy found that the world had little appetite for scientific subtlety: �Unfortunately, when people heard �not traumatic when it happens,� they translated my words to mean, �It doesn�t harm victims later on.� Even worse, some assumed I was blaming victims for their abuse.�

Dr. Clancy reports that she became a pariah in lay and academic circles. She was �crucified� in the press as a �friend of pedophiles,� colleagues boycotted her talks, advisers suggested that continuing on her trajectory would rule out an academic career.

All that fuss about one little word � �trauma� � and a change in its timing. Why should it matter one way or the other?

Dr. Clancy suggests several reasons her data aroused such passion. For one thing, a whole academic and therapeutic structure rides on the old model of sexual abuse; her findings had the potential to undermine a host of expensive treatment and prevention projects.

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Dr. Clancy�s model also makes some sense of the whole sticky question of repressed memory. Most traumatic events are likely to be vividly remembered. But if instances of sexual abuse are simply among the many confusions that characterize childhood, they are perfectly forgettable: �Why should a child remember them if, at the time they happened, they were not particularly traumatic?� Only when reprocessed and fully understood do the memories leap into focus.

...science should represent truth, not wishful thinking. When good data fly in the face of beloved theory, the theory has to go.

[geldedgoat]

I'm curious why you decided not to embolden this part:

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Because it is BS and irrelevant.

Let me translate it: "Even though their experiences were not initially significant, after many years of constant bombardment with messages that they had been abused, damaged, and traumatized did they begin to come on board."

That is what Clancy found; hence, the trauma "myth."

[geldedgoat]

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[geldedgoat]

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[chellovek]

Ever since it was put about that bacaspar/Space Bar is pro-paedo this video always pops into my mind.

Around the 2:20 mark.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AmF11mZI2o&feature=fvwrel

[caniff]

[chellovek]

[Harpeau]

I think Dr. Wakefield makes some very valid arguements that have not been disproved. You dare to tell the truth and piss-off big PHARMA and its profit$, and suddenly, one finds themselves screwed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PEhN14XzyM

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[geldedgoat]

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