Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 380 posts

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

#161

Post by SamoyedFurFluff »

willchang wrote: post #62
ejiwgnalsocn wrote: post #44

[trigger warning] I'm a woman. I was physically and sexually abused by my father as a child. The impact it's had on me is painful to describe. I was working as a software engineer in the tech industry and was constantly experiencing PTSD symptoms being surrounded by men -- though by no fault of their own, it was totally because of what my father did to me. It's been a frustrating journey. The sexual abuse happened to…

As a man, is there anything I can do or avoid doing in the workplace to make it easier for coworkers like you? Let's assume I don't know and don't suspect anything specific about my coworkers. I just want to know if there's anything that would be pretty easy to implement, that would make a difference.

Ensure that there is more than one woman around in your company. Ensure your workplace policies are friendly and flexible for people who need mental health days, address family time, get pregnant, need sanitary equipment, parent children or other dependents, etc. Ensure all the women at your company have opportunities to work with and have women co workers, or women friendly gatherings like lunches, and be open to feedback to change policy accordingly once you have enough women coming together during their talks that they can suggest changes collectively.

Being the sole woman in a company of men when means your superiors are men, your peers are men, and the only recourse you may have if any of them act inappropriately towards you is to report it to another man.

Edit: respect boundaries and consistently remind that if they have a boundary they are free to enforce and you will respect that. Boundaries come in the form of more than “please don’t x”. They are also “I prefer x” or “can we y”.

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

#162

Post by sandworm101 »

drevil-v2 wrote: post #145
sandworm101 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't have hard numbers on kids, but we have some very solid numbers from young adults. From 2020 Statistics Canada study of university students: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/85-002-x/2020001/article... >> One in ten (11%) women students experienced a sexual assault in a postsecondary setting during the previous year. About one in five (19%) women who were sexually assaulted said that the assault took the f…

>> One in ten (11%) women students experienced a sexual assault in a postsecondary setting during the previous year. About one in five (19%) women who were sexually assaulted said that the assault took the form of a sexual activity to which they did not consent after they had agreed to another form of sexual activity—for example, agreeing to have protected sex and then learning it had been unprotected sex. Is there a…

As this is from Statistics Canada, they would be using the government definitions, which include rape on the sexual assault spectrum.

https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/rp-pr/cj-jp/victim/rr14_01/p10...

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

#163

Post by Sebb767 »

deanCommie wrote: post #93
sandworm101 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they came back in tears and were removed from the jury, then the system worked. A clearly impartial potential juror was removed and a past victim was saved from a horrible experience of sitting through such testimony. But what about those who have been abused but aren't in tears? This came up very recently. One of the Ghislaine Maxwell jurors discussed his history of being abused with other jurors. The question be…

I find the very premise of trying to find an "impartial" jury very strange. It makes sense at first pass, but falls apart soon after. 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…

If you're accused but innocent and provide a good case for your innocence, but a juror provides a crying testimony that no one believed them in the jury room, leading to you being sentenced, you'd probably think differently.

Sure, we can't get a perfectly impartial jury. But someone with a past trauma probably won't be able to judge the case for its merits.

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

#164

Post by KarlKemp »

lmkg wrote: post #83
sandworm101 wrote: post #28

I find this to be the most telling stat: "In a few cases (N So roughly 5% (<5 of 84) of the control group were discovered to have themselves been abused and needed to be dropped from the study. I was once in a law lecture on medical ethics. We were discussing genetic testing of newborns and how this could detect incest/abuse. A medical doctor in the class was dead against such testing. In his experience, amongst preg…

Apparently something similar happened when X-Rays started becoming routine. Doctors X-raying kids saw evidence that so many of them had a history of broken bones from abuse. It took a while for the medical community as a whole to acknowledge that widespread child abuse was actually occurring, and longer to wrangle with the idea that it was something that was within their mandate as doctors to do something about. http…

Good if they actually went where the data led them.

Sigmund Freud famously changed his mind at some point: he had so many young female patients with stories of sexual abuse that he decided it must be a rather common fetish among young girls to make up these stories. He just couldn't believe that a third or so of Vienna's upper crust would rape their daughters.

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

#165

Post by blunte »

zaroth wrote: post #89
blunte wrote: post #43

Am I misunderstanding this, or is there a word missing from a key sentence in the abstract? "There was also a pattern of considerable within group variability." How does this get published with an obvious mistake in the abstract?

Read it this way; There was also a pattern of considerable within-group variability.

Thank you. Now I finally get it. That hyphen makes a big difference.

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

#166

Post by wffurr »

baggygenes wrote: post #127

Fascinating and important study, but I have a hard time understanding how they missed a blatant spelling error in the abstract...

This is the author’s manuscript. The published, edited version does not have that particular error: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/development-and-psyc...

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

#168

Post by Mezzie »

zozbot234 wrote: post #96
bittercynic wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fellow man, here, but I think I have something of value to add: Learning to be open and friendly, and developing a sense for when someone doesn't want to talk to me has been an important part of growing up. I try to identify signals that a person wants to end their interaction with me, and respect their wishes immediately and in a friendly way.

Being "open and friendly" is no good when someone literally has shell shock(!) (aka PTSD) from interacting with people like you. You'll need to behave in such a way as to demonstrate to them that they can intuitively and securely trust you not to be an immediate physical threat, nor to pose any in the foreseeable future. The quick rule-of-thumb is to be courteous and respectful but also establish very firm physical b…

Developmentally caused PTSD and shell-shock/war/later event PTSD have some differences.

For instance, those of us with developmentally-caused trauma often view every person as a threat, because we were abused by our caregivers. (In my case, my mother.) This is because we need our abusers to survive, so we're used to abuse being a necessary part of life and something that can happen at any time/during mundane interactions. We don't feel like anyone is safe. The only person my nervous system trusts is my baby sister. Trying to get me to recognize you as safe isn't going to work, because nobody is safe to me.

I realize that not everybody is a danger and my feelings are the result of my failing the parental lottery and not a commentary on every person I meet, which means it's my responsibility/job to retrain/calibrate my 'who is safe' sensors. It just takes practice and some patience sometimes.

People refusing to interact with me because they have different genitals than me isn't going to help, especially when most of my hobbies are male-dominated. It just conveys 'Ha, you're not a proper girl, so you don't deserve friends. Go learn to like clothes and boys if you want to hang out with people'.

Now, if you've been burned in the past by people using their mental illnesses to blame you for not understanding social cues, or had that used against you in the past, and you don't feel comfortable in mixed-sex interactions, that's fine, but that's a need of YOURS, not the women.

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

#169

Post by nobodyofnote »

LNSY wrote: post #52
tomcam wrote: post #33

Can testify it does a number on male development too

same. My abuse was very early, which it tends to be for men. My abusers weren't removed from my life until I was six, and even then were brought back over and over again. I am 40. I became a successful software developer. Then I finally couldn't ignore what happened to me. It was a brutal 3 years of therapy and trying to find my way out of the emotional pain I felt. I am just now getting my career on track, but I am…

Thank you very much for sharing this. Me too. Like yours, mine occurred early. Like you, I was exposed to my abuser many times afterward.

As a boy, I carried my shame in silence, and learned early to dislike and avoid extended family gatherings, masking my avoidance in a blanket of "family sucks/is boring" cynicism.

As an early teen entering puberty, I grew increasingly disturbed about had happened. I tried to force the feelings away, almost ritually, but grew increasingly mired in confusion about what was wrong with me. Why did I (despite the fact that I was but 5-6 years old at the time) not take action? Did this mean I enjoyed being abused? Did this mean it wasn't abuse? Did the fact that I didn't stop the abuser mean I was not heterosexual? I began bombarding myself with pornography, almost as a salve against the uncertainty and doubt about who I was.

It wasn't until nearly 40 - and in the context of therapy to try to prevent the most important relationships of my life from falling further apart - that I had even considered the fact that I'd survived abuse. I felt ashamed to even think about accepting that statement, as I knew many others had suffered so much more serious forms of long-term abuse.

Only now have I come to marginally accept that decades of suffering internalized shame, fear, pain and mistrust deserve to be called survival.

I now have children who I love with all my heart. I cannot fathom inflicting such suffering upon them - or anyone else, for that matter. I will never be able to entrust them to the care of close family or friends. It's a constant internal struggle when they ask about sleepovers with friends. Such trivial things as "going over to someone's house" trigger immense uncertainty and fear, which I do my best to not burden my children with. I don't know if I will ever truly be able to shed the thick cloak of cynicism - largely a defense mechanism - that has and continues to impede my ability to relate meaningfully to the world and the people around me.

I hope I can - and I hope that awareness grows, so that other people aren't exposed to a similar experience.

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

#170

Post by sandworm101 »

kazinator wrote: post #152
kmonsen wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you remove any jurors with history of abuse, do you not remove all the people that have life experience that could be relevant? 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…

I think the whole concept of random citizens being pulled in for jury duty is idiotic. Jurors should be professionals who are trained in being jurors: who, for one thing, thoroughly understand topics in critical reasoning such as fallacies, and cognitive biases. They should be properly paid, and so are not sitting there on a Saturday morning, socking it to the defendant out of spite for being dragged out of their reg…

That system exists. They are called bench trials. No defendant is forced us submit to a jury. The defendant doesn't want a jury because he thinks that it will "sock it to him" on a Saturday. He wants a jury because he thinks that his fellow citizens will see that the government is improperly accusing him of a crime. The defendant has the right to a trial by people who are not part of the same government that has accused him. The fact that the jurors don't want to be there, that they have lives away from the court, is exactly what the defendant wants.
Post reply on HN