As my professors always tell me, it's sometimes just random error ("luck"), especially since you only have a n of 1 (you) that you are using for inference.
Stats are hard to come by since many people don't report their abuse. However, there is strong evidence that 50% of those abused end up leading normal, healthy lives.
There is also evidence that high self-esteem predicts practically nothing (such as job performance, school performance, healthy relationships, etc.).
I was thinking more about personal stories. My master's thesis was on sex offenders, and I thought I'd be working in a prison with them for a living, so I can get the stats, probably from my own bookcase.
I'm curious as to people own experience with others who were abused, or with their opinion as to why my stats are seemingly high.
As far as I know, none of my "real life" friends were abused, sexually or otherwise. A couple of my internet friends have been, though. The situation among the women I would consider friends is actually the opposite, nearly every one of them (or it might possibly be all of them) had a happy, boring, suburban childhood and their parents are still together.
I didn't know (or didn't remember) that you studied this in grad school.
This isn't a subject that I talk about often. I'm not aware of any of my female RL friends having been abused as children. (Although my ex-boyfriend was in a sexual relationship with his babysitter when he was 11 or 12. Not sure if you would file that under abuse or statutory rape. A different ex-boyfriend grew up in a physically/emotionally abusive household.).
Some of my female LJ friends have discussed their history of abuse. Although I'm not sure if I would know that about them if I knew them only from RL ... certain things are easier to "talk" about online, at a distance, in this journal format.
And, for me, I have trouble defining the term. It's so loaded. Is it sexual abuse if I was 7 and he was 13? What if he was only 12? If it only happened once? Does it matter how far it went? I don't know how to answer when faced with that question.
When I think of sexual abuse, I think of adults using children in a sexual way. "Adult" may differ for some people, and there's a range of ages in there that make the waters more murky, but the friends I'm thinking about specifically were abused by adult male members of the household, either fathers, or mother's husbands or boyfriends, uncles, male friends of the family. One of my friends, I think, was abused by a older teen when she was pretty young; I'm fuzzy on the details, since it's been a long time since we talked about it.
I like your Sydney icon. It makes me remember the show back when it was good. But it's like crack- even bad crack is still crack. Mmm, Garner!crack.
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Stats are hard to come by since many people don't report their abuse. However, there is strong evidence that 50% of those abused end up leading normal, healthy lives.
There is also evidence that high self-esteem predicts practically nothing (such as job performance, school performance, healthy relationships, etc.).
I can dig up the articles, if you like.
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I'm curious as to people own experience with others who were abused, or with their opinion as to why my stats are seemingly high.
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This isn't a subject that I talk about often. I'm not aware of any of my female RL friends having been abused as children. (Although my ex-boyfriend was in a sexual relationship with his babysitter when he was 11 or 12. Not sure if you would file that under abuse or statutory rape. A different ex-boyfriend grew up in a physically/emotionally abusive household.).
Some of my female LJ friends have discussed their history of abuse. Although I'm not sure if I would know that about them if I knew them only from RL ... certain things are easier to "talk" about online, at a distance, in this journal format.
And, for me, I have trouble defining the term. It's so loaded. Is it sexual abuse if I was 7 and he was 13? What if he was only 12? If it only happened once? Does it matter how far it went? I don't know how to answer when faced with that question.
Reply
I like your Sydney icon. It makes me remember the show back when it was good. But it's like crack- even bad crack is still crack. Mmm, Garner!crack.
Reply
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