Live data from Hacker News

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

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

211–220 of 380 posts

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

#211
post #124

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…

> So roughly 5% ( I hope this is accidental bias, or a statistical anomaly. It could be for example that this is overrepresented from the pooled community. I think it would also be important to somehow scale/categorize the level of abuse (physical vs non-physical, penetrative vs non-penetrative, etc). If it really is 5% (1 in 20 girls) then this would outrank something like COVID in terms of importance. > The compari…

100% of women who have taken the Parisian subway have been sexually harassed at least once a year. 72% while walking in Lausanne. Sexual harassment is rampant but we teach kids to not snitch or bring problems to their parents/teachers. Same in ocmpanies, so as far as I am concerned, 5% seems to be fairly low.

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

#212
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife was summoned for jury duty, and the case had to do with sexual abuse. At jury selection time they ask if a prospective juror would have difficulty being impartial because of the nature of the case. If you were uncomfortable discussing the matter, you could ask to be taken aside to discuss without the others in the room hearing it. Out of a few dozen people, seven women left the room to explain why they could…

> This isn't something that I have to personally worry about if I'm by myself, but it's something that so many women do have to worry about all the time. I can't even imagine the burden that women must carry. Not just women, but children. I was aware that I could be sexually assaulted/harrassed and what to do about it by the time I was 5, and I started getting uncomfortable comments in person around age 11. I'm also…

>I started getting uncomfortable comments in person around age 11.

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.

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

#213
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So roughly 5% ( I hope this is accidental bias, or a statistical anomaly. It could be for example that this is overrepresented from the pooled community. I think it would also be important to somehow scale/categorize the level of abuse (physical vs non-physical, penetrative vs non-penetrative, etc). If it really is 5% (1 in 20 girls) then this would outrank something like COVID in terms of importance. > The compari…

Very seriously: no, that’s not an aberration. Sexual abuse is at a massive scale and the abuse is highly normalized. America still has child brides legalized such that there are services to look up states to travel to in order to perform a child marriage by age, documentation requirements, fees, etc.

What exactly are you talking about? This sounds an awful lot like what some Roma people practice here in the bad parts of Europe

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

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems rather insensitive to ruminate on future men's loss of sex because of sexual abuse. Perhaps the men in these sexless relationships should analyze if they are capable of sustaining this relationship, considering sex is so important to them and they are not receiving it. This entire comment does not consider the women's suffering and loss in any capacity due to abuse. Maybe it is the case that a similar comple…

Dudes who leave sexless marriages are really hurting their partner financially, emotionally, and mentally, so the idea that doing this is not "considering the woman" is asinine.

I'm not naturally inclined to say good things about Focus on the Family and Christian therapists but after 20 years of suffering with this I came across a YouTube video by a Christian therapist who said point blank that if you are suffering in a sexless marriage almost certainly your partner was a victim of abuse.

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.

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

#215
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>> He just couldn't believe that a third or so of Vienna's upper crust would rape their daughters.

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.

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

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parental testing should be mandatory at birth perhaps for these issues. Or at least if someone is going to go claim child support.

If it was going to be mandatory it would be much better to do it before birth using amniotic fluid. Waiting for the child to be born and then suddenly telling one parent that it's not their biological child isn't a great idea.

That's an interesting idea, but a fair number of families don't want to do amniotic fluid testing. Paternity and maternity issues are pretty low incidence issues, but is VERY rough if it pops up with a 4 year old in the mix.

If you've got wrong dad in the picture, at birth is a good time to chase down the right father! Get him paying child support if needed. Non-bio dad could still decide to stay around if desired - but transparency / honesty on the table.

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

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know where you get that. The suffering of the woman is real. So is the suffering of the man. It only adds and doesn't subtract. I don't need to reiterate on the suffering of the woman because that is described very well in the article (which i posted!) You're being insensitive, treating me as a man the way that a black person might get treated in the 1950s south USA. Sexual pleasure is one of the great things…

You're not necessarily wrong but it just doesn't feel like the right context to share this perspective, given the subject matter of the OP. This comes off as extremely insensitive and tone deaf to me.

He is OP

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

#218
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shocking that this is getting upvotes. 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.

The whole premise of the workplace is to not treat people as humans, but as coworkers. Sex is one of the most essentially human things. "Professional" behaviour excludes sex. So "treat people as humans" is decisively not clear advice for cases like this.

The way you are expected to interact with humans in the VAST MAJORITY of situations is closer to how you are expected to interact with coworkers in a professional setting, than to a speed dating event or a crowded bar after midnight.

We're not having orgies in the street. In modern society you are expected to treat humans in the vast majority of situations without "sex" being relevant to the topic of discussion, whether it's on the street, in the grocery store, on the tram, or in the library.

Acting like this is not clear feels like an exercise in pedantic loophole seeking to justify sexual harassment. ("How are people even supposed to meet each other if I'm not allowed to to women in ?")

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

#219

[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…

I was drugged unconscious by a gay man in my early 20s, and "thankfully" I became conscious at the beginning of whatever he had planned; it took me months to even realize something had happened due to whatever drug he dosed me with fucked up my memory.

I had used MDMA recreationally years later and I knew that had helped my PTSD some, but it was only when I did a session years later in a therapeutic setting, just myself and the facilitator, was I able to fully connect to, sit with, and process what happened to me; literally the stimuli of what I would/should have felt then was able to process - as if it was stuck, once processed allowing my body to no longer think it was in that situation (so heightened stress state, heightened baseline stress reduced greatly).

MAPS.org (Multi-Disciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies) relatively recently did clinical trials with 100 treatment resistant participants, to treat veterans with MDMA-assisted psychotherapy. They had an average of 17.5 years of treatment resistant PTSD. After 1 year, 80% of the placebo group had no improvement, 20% had some. With just 2-3 sessions where MDMA was given, after just 1 year, 80% of participants no longer qualified for PTSD diagnoses - and 20% had some or none - a complete reversal. From my experience it's true - it just allows you to connect to overwhelming/overriding stress that short-circuits your system, allows it to flow and essentially melt away - though it can take talking about it to put the experience into words, to process it, to help by breathing through it, etc.

All this to say that even if you have ever done MDMA recreationally, e.g. gone out dancing with a partner or friends, I'd recommend anyone who hasn't done it in a different context, a "safer" or quieter/therapeutic environment, where you're not using music and other people to distract from yourself - then I'd recommend people look into doing it; there will slowly be legal clinics opening up, though I've not kept track of who's leading that at the moment or where the progress is. E.g. there may be more depth to the experiences that you'll be able to process with the help of MDMA causing more serotonin to release at once than it can on its own, and the only way to know is to try.

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

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems rather insensitive to ruminate on future men's loss of sex because of sexual abuse. Perhaps the men in these sexless relationships should analyze if they are capable of sustaining this relationship, considering sex is so important to them and they are not receiving it. This entire comment does not consider the women's suffering and loss in any capacity due to abuse. Maybe it is the case that a similar comple…

I disagree. If the men are doing what you suggest, and find that they aren't capable of committing to a sexless lifetime and leave, that's even more misery heaped on the victim of abuse. Pretending like one pain cancels another out is counterproductive. Pain causing pain doesn't just stop there, it's nonlinear. Also suggesting that someone is basically an abuser for mentioning the pain of the families of abused peopl…

I posted this article and it's an issue I became aware of because of my personal connection. I know it is a lot bigger than the suffering I've felt.

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.

Post reply on HN