Today you claim that you don't know -- and _no one can know_ -- anything about child sexual abuse prevalence, but yesterday you asserted with great confidence that you knew that child sexual abuse of the sort that Bettina Aptheker alleges is extremely common, "just about every family has a relative who has suffered in this way":
On 10/21/06, Jesse Lemisch <utopia1 at attglobal.net> wrote:
> It has yet to be seen that there is in fact sufficient
> attention, reporting and punishment for events like those Bettina describes
> in Intimate Poilitics. From what I understand, and know directly, just about
> every family -- yes, just about every family has a relative who has suffered
> in this way.
It seems to me that you simply lack interest in child sexual abuse, aside from its appearance in Bettina Aptheker's memoir, nor do you have enough interest in the subject under discussion to investigate it and make coherent claims about it.
Feminists who have activist or scholarly interest in the problem of child sexual abuse, as well as all other professionals who are interested in it, would have to take interest in data collected by the Children's Bureau, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and so on (for theirs are the most comprehensive, nationwide data collection systems available concerning crime victimization of the sort in question), and if they see problems in them, they would rationally contest them by presenting alternative data and interpretations. It is not in the interest of feminism to claim that child sexual abuse prevalence or any other topic of activist social scientific research is unknowable, for feminists can't motivate others to change policy to achieve gender equality by saying that the problem is unknowable. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>