On 10/26/06, Louis Proyect <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
her assiduous cherry-picking of Jstor articles
It seems to me that you are quick to reject information that contradicts a commonly held notion that you also hold. I've recently had the same type of debate over on LBO-talk, though the topic was different there: child sexual abuse statistics and trends. This is another topic about which I know something, on account of some application on my part. You'd never learn it from the mass media, pop psychologists, law and order feminists, and other witting and unwitting members of America's law and order coalition, but rape and sexual assault for victims ages 12 and older, as well as intimate partner violence, have registered declines in the National Crime Victimization Survey. David Finkelhor and Lisa M. Jones write in "Explanations for the Decline in Child Sexual Abuse Cases" (Juvenile Justice Bulletin, January 2004, <http://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/ojjdp/199298.pdf>): <blockquote>The number of sexual abuse cases substantiated by child protective service (CPS) agencies dropped a remarkable 40 percent between 1992 and 2000, from an estimated 150,000 cases to 89,500 cases, but professional opinion is divided about why (Jones and Finkelhor, 2001; Jones, Finkelhor, and Kopiec, 2001). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Decline in the number of self-reports of sexual abuse by victims. Unfortunately, sexual abuse is not a crime category tracked by the nation's most reliable measure of self-reported crime victimization, the National Crime Victimization Survey. However, NCVS does ask about rape and sexual assault for victims ages 12 and older, and these crimes include acts counted within the broader definition of child sexual abuse. The NCVS data show that sex offenses against juveniles (ages 12–17) declined 56 percent between 1993 and 2000, with virtually all the decline occurring in offenses committed by known (family and acquaintance) perpetrators (down 72 percent, see figure 12). Cases involving known perpetrators are the type most likely to be categorized as sexual abuse. The timing and magnitude of this decline in self-reports are parallel to the trend in CPS data on sexual abuse. Another source of self-report information on sexual abuse comes from the Minnesota Student Survey (see the sidebar on page 3). The survey includes two questions about experiences with sexual abuse. For sexual abuse by both family and nonfamily perpetrators, these data show a slight rise between 1989 and 1992 and a 22-percent drop from 1992 to 2001 (see figure 13). This trend also parallels the trend in the CPS data. Decline in related social problems. If sexual abuse were truly declining, the decrease might be paralleled by drops in indicators of other related social problems. These problems could be considered precursors or outcomes of sexual abuse, or they could be affected by similar causal factors. The period in which the decline in sexual abuse occurred also saw declines in a number of other child welfare problems, including: * Crime and violent crime. * Births to teenage mothers. * Children running away. * Children living in poverty. * Teen suicide. In general, the evidence for these other declines is more reliable than the evidence for the decline in sexual abuse. The decline in crime and violent crime during the 1990s has been widely publicized. The evidence for that decline is based both on self-reports from NCVS and on police reports. NCVS shows a 46-percent decrease in violent crime from 1994 to 2000 (Rennison, 2001), and a 21-percent decrease in intimate partner assault from 1993 to 1998 (Rennison and Welchans, 2000). The decline in intimate partner assault is particularly noteworthy because of its connections to sexual abuse. Child sexual abuse is thought to be more common in families where there is intimate partner violence (Rumm et al., 2000). Like child sexual abuse, intimate partner violence has in recent years been the subject of substantial publicity, increasingly aggressive efforts at case detection, upgraded law enforcement activity, and stiffened legal sanctions. Another social problem that has declined markedly over the same period is the number of out-of-wedlock teenage pregnancies. The rate of live births to teenage mothers dropped 28 percent from a high of 39 live births per 1,000 females ages 15–17 in 1991 to 28 per 1,000 in 2000 (Moore et al., 2001). Teen pregnancy has often been an outcome of sexual abuse, both in the form of conceptions resulting from abuse (Boyer and Fine, 1992) and in conceptions resulting from the sexualized behaviors that victims sometime manifest in the wake of abuse (Butler and Burton, 1990). The number of teens who reported being currently sexually active or ever having sexual intercourse also fell during the 1990s (Terry and Manlove, 2000). (pp. 8-9)</blockquote> On LBO-talk, too, those who had already very much made up their minds that incidences of child sexual abuse were very high and continue to be so today were more or less impervious to new information that contradicted their notion. Human minds are like that. The authors of the above article say that new data have tended to be ignored or spun out of existence by officials and others. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>
