For feedback to the Cecil article “Do some cultures perform sex acts on babies to help them sleep?” of December 14, 2012.
Both deMause as well as Alice Miller (whose books include “For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence”) argue that child abuse is harmful whether or not the culture doing it is aware of that. (This includes Western cultures). They also argue that the damaging effects of abuse can pull down the level of a culture and increase its tendency to violence. As a culture improves and becomes less violent, the level of abuse goes down - perhaps why the practices mentioned in this article are mainly a feature of lower class (presumably less educated) communities.
The pervasive belief that fooling around with infants will be forgotten and therefore is harmless has no scientfic support, and is wishful thinking. Modern therapists can be called on to treat traumatized children who are extremely young, as well as adults with uninterrupted verifiable memories from earliest childhood. Most of the media controversies around the subject of abuse come either from people defending themselves against charges or from therapists that have been using unscientific theories, but that kind of self-serving propaganda still doesn’t cast much doubt on what is considered abuse in modern Western law and medicine.
Western therapists and Western abuse survivors report sexualized touching to often be invasive and traumatic. Miller and deMause are arguing this will be generally true regardless of the culture, which makes sense; small children do not have a culture in the sense adults do. I can appreciate wanting to give another culture the benefit of the doubt, but if the middle classes in these cultures don’t approve of the practice, that tells us what they really think.
What was the operationalised measure of a culture’s improvement? The proportion of members of a community that have received a secondary or tertiary education? How did Miller record prevalence of child sexual abuse in disadvantaged communities and how did they account for confounds such as malnutrition?
This belief doesn’t appear anywhere in the column.
One of the controversies on the topic I’ve heard of was from Elizabeth Loftus, who investigated “recovered memories” from therapy, was subject to a lawsuit, cleared of any wrongdoing, then published details in the Journal of Forensic Psychology. The other was related to a meta-analysis conducted by Rind et al. and critiqued by Dallam et al.
Actually, akratic behaviour isn’t related to socioeconomic status (relevance of this fact depends on your definition of “class”).
Of course abuse is always harmful, regardless of beliefs. That’s not the question: The question is just what constitutes abuse. And that can clearly vary from culture to culture.
Not if the effects are truly biological? The brain is an organ, and the effects of childhood sexual abuse are the same regardless of whether a “culture” tolerates it or not.
First you have to actually prove that there is any type of biological effect, as opposed to cultural or psychological. If you pass that hurdle, then you have to find out at what age that effect disappears.
Once you find out what that age is, then anybody at or older than that age must no longer be considered to be children, if you wish to be consistent.
[Quote=Condescending Robot] I have to prove that sexual abuse of children is traumatic before you will believe it?
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You miss the point. Obviously abuse involves trauma. If something doesn’t involve trauma it probalby isn’t abuse. But you can’t prove a conclusion by assuming it, then using your assumption as proof of your conclusion.
First you need to show that something involves abuse or trauma.
You can’t just define a thing as sexual abuse, then point out that therefore the thing must necessarily involve trauma, then conclude accordingly that you were correct to define the thing as abuse in the first place.