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

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.

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.

Both your comment and the flagged comment make that claim.

It seems much more so the case that people can care about how bad actions affect both female and male victims than the hypothesis you propose.

And, in fact, straight white men can be in a position of power, and have advantages, and also be able to share stories where they are victims, and find support. These things do not have to be black and white and contradictory.

Who the victim is and how they are affected does not speak about who the transgressor is, nor does it do so in inflexible, absolute terms. So the effects of being a victim can be explored without going into a "victim mentality" as someone who does not happen to be the primary focus of this article.

The jury has to judge how a reasonable person would act in a certain situation, who is lying and who is telling the truth.

Off one end, we have victim blamind and rapists walking free, off another end, uk had "serial liar" who invented false rape allegations and sent 9 innocent people to jail.

"...information was obtained about any possible unwanted sexual experiences of the comparison females or other family members"

So interpreting it as 5 of 84 women is incorrect. It's min 5 people of 84 families. Given a mean family size of perhaps 3.5 (if by "family" they mean "nuclear family", though I bet they include anyone you know about really--Uncle Bob would count, and one report per family with reports) it's more like 5 out of 294 people, or 1.7%. And I don't think they share their exclusion criteria, which isn't a good sign. And there's a significant selection bias given how they recruited (in a newspaper, for people who have the free time and/or low wealth enough to want to do a study, and in particular on female growth and development).

I think your comment is getting attention because you're offering an idea that people like, and some anecdata to back it up. It's a classic problem of the modern world, things that people want to believe get a lot of attention, out of proportion to their actual frequency. I think you, and others here, want to believe the situation is worse than it is, or worse than the data here warrant believing, because you're going to get rewarded for acting as if the appealing idea is the case. I don't mean you are sitting there, consciously thinking that, but the rewards (here some updoots on HN) shape your behavior behind the scenes anyway. This is how we get news that paints a grotesquely distorted view of the world: people want to hear about how a crazed soccer mom murdered all her kids in the bathtub, and critically it is profitable. They don't want to hear that everything was fine in Peoria, IL last night.

I would bet a lot of money that the picture you paint with the study's numbers is substantially false. For one, your interpretation of the numbers they give is wrong. Second, the study doesn't appear well done. It's a little old, but it also has a lot of indicators that it isn't of high quality (e.g., lots of "p<0.05", but no "p<0.001"--see p curves). I haven't read it in detail and won't because my spidey senses say it's not worth it based on what I've seen skimming.