tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9124539381685751273.post426688550908642120..comments2023-06-19T04:35:06.263-07:00Comments on Skeptic's Play: Sexual assault without traumamillerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05990852054891771988noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9124539381685751273.post-11043494035402493492013-09-23T14:50:33.292-07:002013-09-23T14:50:33.292-07:00My understanding of what Susan Clancy claimed was ...My understanding of what Susan Clancy claimed was that most victims were not traumatized at the time, but many were traumatized when they looked back upon their experience later in life. So when Dawkins was neither traumatized at the time, nor traumatized later in life, I do not know how typical his experience is.<br /><br />Dawkins says that he spoke with his classmates about it, and concluded that no one else experienced lasting harm. But I wonder if he was mistaken because he assumed that anyone who was harmed would have been traumatized at the time. (Based on his apology, he also seems to think that the level of trauma is mostly determined by whether the child sexual abuse was brief or frequent.)<br /><br />When I looked through blog comments on this particular kerfuffle, people seemed to be saying different things about it. Some insinuated that Richard Dawkins might have been more traumatized than he cared to admit, while others were fine with Dawkins' description of his own experience, but criticized the way he erased other people's experiences. I think the former group is motivated by confirmation bias, and the latter group is motivated by the principle that we should listen to victims' own accounts.millerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05990852054891771988noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9124539381685751273.post-10007760026824826032013-09-23T13:54:05.621-07:002013-09-23T13:54:05.621-07:00I don't think that there's any evidence th...I don't think that there's any evidence that Dawkins' response was in any way unusual. In the book, <i>The Trauma Myth</i>, by Susan Clancy, she did some research on people who had been molested as children and was quite surprised to discover that <i>for the large majority</i> it was not traumatizing at the time (and those tended to be the cases where physical force was used, iirc).<br /><br />Upon further research, she learned that the using "trauma" as the primary lens for understanding all adult/child sexual contact was a political move made by (some) feminists in the 1970s. Not only did they do this without research to support it, it was done in open defiance of most of the research out there (which was generally rejected on moral--not empirical--grounds).<br /><br />I think that what we see with Dawkins case is that some people are ideologically committed to suppressing data and silencing people talking about their own experiences if their understandings of their experiences are inconvenient for one's politics.<br /><br />It seems altogether inconsistent with the rhetoric (often from the very same people) about the importance of listening to and believing survivors' accounts.ACHhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06643809450938135601noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9124539381685751273.post-83283942279825404352013-09-12T14:09:45.747-07:002013-09-12T14:09:45.747-07:00Update: Richard Dawkins apologized.Update: Richard Dawkins <a href="http://www.richarddawkins.net/foundation_articles/2013/9/11/child-abuse-a-misunderstanding#" rel="nofollow">apologized</a>.millerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05990852054891771988noreply@blogger.com