Once a victim, always a victim, right? One tragedy should be the defining moment of your life -- effectively neutralizing thousands of days of safe, quotidian plodding.
If you listened to any of the brouhaha from the American Psychological Association and America’s currently favorite moral nemesis, Dr. Laura, you’re sure to have completely missed the good news about childhood sexual abuse.
Don’t get me wrong. There isn’t anything good about childhood sexual abuse. I’ll even jump on the APA’s bandwagon and completely agree that "The sexual abuse of children is wrong and harmful to its victims."
But it turns out that eternal victimhood and dysfunctional behavior aren’t automatic lifetime sentences for sexually abused kids.
In an article published last year in the APA’s Psychological Bulletin (1) authors concluded that, "Self-reported reactions to and effects from childhood sexual abuse (CSA) indicated that negative effects were neither pervasive nor typically intense, and that men reacted much less negatively than women. The college data were completely consistent with data from national samples. Basic beliefs about CSA in the general population were not supported."
I personally considered this to be good news. The way I read it was that, despite the wretched and wrenching experience of abuse in childhood, these young adults were beavering on through life. They are functioning, productive, successful college students. In other words, they were not allowing a terrible childhood experience to cripple them forever.
This disturbed some folks, notably moral maven Laura Schlessinger, who shrilled her typical over-the-top reaction far and wide on her nationally syndicated radio program. Schlessinger, who promotes her interpretation of the Judeo-Christian ethic with the I-have-found-the-answer enthusiasm of a new convert (she is newly converted to Judaism), is big on personal responsibility, maturity and deferred gratification.
It would have been nice if she’d exercised some restraint and reason before shooting from the hip on the issue of child abuse.
A case for open data access
Marshalling her slavish listeners, Schlessinger and other family groups bombarded Congress with their bizarre conclusion that the paper was an attempt to "normalize pedophilia." She openly criticized the APA for publishing the paper and called it "bad science."
In a March interview with the Conservative News Service, APA representative Rhea Farberman stated that the APA’s 159,000 member group’s position is that "scientific literature ought to influence public policy... we ought to let the literature, the research, inform public policy so we can have good public policy."
Well, yes. That would be a refreshing change. What would be even more illuminating is open access to the raw data generated by Federally funded grants for research that is used to form public policy. As it stands now, Federal funds can and are targeted for research that supports a priori conclusions designed to bolster existing Federal policy. Probably the most egregious example of this is the U.S. EPA’s scientifically insupportable program to eradicate secondhand cigarette smoke from the face of the earth.
It would be lovely if the raw data for studies used to form costly and often unnecessary public policy were made available to independent reviewers.
If that were the case, then Schlessinger could re-analyze the data from each of the 56 studies included in the paper, and conduct her own meta-analysis.
Bad science v good science?
Schlessinger never explained why she deemed the paper on CSA "bad science." Was it methodology? Confidence intervals? Study selection bias? Incompatible variables between studies? Certainly any of these are possible, especially in a meta-analysis.
Since she voiced such strong complaints about the report’s suggestion that CSA be renamed "adult-child sex, a value-neutral term," my guess is that she saw a reason-based conclusion that did not agree with her emotion-based belief. But science is supposed to inform, not conform. And good science is often at odds with popular beliefs and conventional "wisdom."
My impression of the paper is that the analysis was sturdily conducted and that the published suggestion that re-naming CSA abuse "adult-child sex, a value-neutral term," was a scientifically reasonable one. Schlessinger clearly does not understand that science is supposed to be value-neutral.
Caving in to political pressure
Last week, on June 9, 1999, APA CEO Dr. Raymond Fowler wrote a letter(2) to Rep. Tom DeLay, a Texas Republican and one of the chief sponsors of the Child Abuse Prevention and Enforcement Act, introduced February 12, 1999. Dr. Fowler notes that "unfortunately, the findings of this meta-analysis (on childhood sexual abuse) are being misreported by some in the media. The actual findings are that for this segment of the population (college students) being a victim of childhood sexual abuse was found to be less damaging to them than generally believed."
So far, so good. This is a positive and encouraging statement that empowers the "victim." It certainly doesn’t condone CSA. Sadly, Dr. Fowler felt it necessary to accentuate the negative rather than the positive (after all, once a victim always a victim, right?). He emphasizes that students who "were victims of CSA were, on average, slightly less well-adjusted than students who were not victimized as children."
I wish he had instead restated the authors’ conclusion that "this poorer adjustment could not be attributed to CSA because family environment (FE) was consistently confounded with CSA, FE explained considerably more adjustment variance than CSA, and CSA-adjustment relations generally became non-significant when studies controlled for FE."
Is victimhood a family value?
Ultimately the study bolstered one of Schlessinger’s pet projects -- promoting a healthy family environment where parents attentively participate in the raising of their children. Instead she chose to focus on a baseless, hysterical misinterpretation of cherry-picked statements from the report.
As a parent I would always seek to protect my four children from pain and evil. As an adult, I understand that this is not always possible.
By selectively celebrating the culture of blame we deny the redemption of honest strength, disavow the power of self-determination and ultimately corrupt the grace of grief.
References:
1. "A meta-analytic examination of assumed properties of child sexual abuse using college samples," Rind B, Tromovitch P, Bauserman R Psychol Bull 1998 Jul 124:1 22-53.
2. Letter from APA CEO Fowler to U.S. Rep. Delay, http://www.apa.org/releases/childsexabuse.html.
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