Ecclesiastes 1:9

[james_davis_nicoll]

Tough problems demand tough-minded solutions! LIFE BOAT RULES! LIFE BOAT RULES!

Inexplicably not titled "I have a totally original idea nobody has ever had before and that I will not research to see if there are known pit-falls! Let's pay undesirables to get vasectomies!"

My favourite line?

While I have not crunched the numbers to support this hypothesis,

Comments

[harvey-rrit.livejournal.com]

Five out of six child-abuse survivors* in a survey in the 80s said that the primary abuser was the mother.

An awful lot of convicts are abuse survivors.

When abortion was legalized, a lot of women stopped being forced to give birth to children they never wanted.

I'd love to leap to a conclusion from this, but I'd want to see another survey, of abuse survivors under the age of 35 or so.




*I'd be disinclined to accept anyone else's word on this.

[bemused-leftist.livejournal.com]

A father who insists on an abortion, which is denied, may also resent the child and abuse zim. Or, the mother may request the abortion because the father is abusive to her and/or their other childlren.

[harvey-rrit.livejournal.com]

That could cover a lot of the remaining seventeen percent, all right.

The people I've known and spoken with have all been among the eighty-three. (Possibly an artifact of observation; for some reason people who have been through the same crap have a knack for finding each other in a crowd.)

My speculations do tie in with the fact that most convicts are male; a woman forced to have a child would be likelier to resent a male, it seems to me. (On the other hand, maybe men just commit stupider crimes than women. Whenever somebody compares stupid blunders by sex, I cringe and try to make myself less conspicuous. I've seen a lot. Not so many by women.)

[synchcola.livejournal.com]

Could you help me decide which studies I should read and which ones I shouldn't? I tried looking for it myself, but the percentage in the first study I found was unfortunately very different from 83% (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6605793, a survey of adult women in San Francisco which was specifically about sexual abuse).

[Edit: I mean, that link is not going to give the right number either, of course... Also, the tone of this post may be slightly sarcastic, but I would genuinely like to know which survey in the 80s it was.]

[harvey-rrit.livejournal.com]

*sigh*.

So would I. I was in an Upstart Crow and began reading a book, about child abuse, that I didn't have the money on me to buy at the moment. When I came back with the money I couldn't find the book. (And now even the Upstart Crow is gone.)

I do imagine a poll only of women about sexual abuse would give different results.

[synchcola.livejournal.com]

Just knowing that it's a book might help to find it, come to think of it. Was it published in the 1990s? You could check Google Books...

I looked a little more for relevant studies. This 2003 study is slightly nearer the mark ("Prevalence and psychological sequelae of self-reported childhood physical and sexual abuse in a general population sample of men and women" on sciencedirect.com (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0145213403001856) or from the website of one of the authors (http://www.johnbriere.com/CAN%20csa%20cpa.pdf)) It at least covers physical abuse, and both men and women. But it's not in the 1980s and it doesn't break the perpetrator of physical abuse down by gender.

I'm gonna abandon this search here for now so that I don't procrastinate too much. :)

[harvey-rrit.livejournal.com]

It'd be no later than 1985, when the Upstart Crow bookstore and coffee shop near us was gentrified along with its shopping center, but no earlier than 1983, when I first found the place.

And now I suddenly desperately want some Sumatra Mandheling.

Somehow this is your fault.

Or maybe Starbucks'.

I'll blame Starbucks. I don't like them.