As for the need for feminists to be attentive to statistics gathered regarding child sexual abuse: of course, with a tough critical eye, reflecting the reality of the phenomenon and the unreliability of these precisely stated figures. You can quantify gibberish all you want, but it's still gibberish. I see also that you are unwilling to engage with my notion that blacks reporting atrocities against them under slavery should be assumed to be falsifying in the absence of corroborating witnesses and if they base their accounts on memory. Come on, Yoshie, give it a try; I'm sure you can construct an argument to disallow black testimony on such subjects.
Yoshie, suppose I offered you some figures on how often Americans shit, and the volume of shit produced. I guess your first response would be to dismiss answers that weren't corroborated by one or more witnesses a la rape in Pakistan. Nonetheless, when someone projected estimates, you might wonder about their accuracy. I think estimates could be made, but I would be dubious about their reliability.
Jesse Lemisch
----- Original Message ----- From: "Yoshie Furuhashi" <critical.montages at gmail.com> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Sent: Sunday, October 22, 2006 5:49 PM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Child Sexual Abuse Statistics and Trends(wasApthekerallegations)
> On 10/22/06, Jesse Lemisch <utopia1 at attglobal.net> wrote:
> > > If you claim to have more reliable data than the Children's Bureau and
> > > the Bureau of Justice Statistics, however, you might present them to
> > > us and explain why your data are more reliable than theirs.
> >
> > I don't, you don't and they don't.
>
> 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/>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk