Yes, but they are well-known for setting the definition of abuse very low:
> including things like being flashed, for example; and including any
> instance of abuse with systematic abuse
Actually, to be clear, I was citing figures collated by the NSPCC but produced by several academic studies:
http://www.nspcc.org.uk/Inform/research/Briefings/prevalenceTable1_wdf49715.pdf
But the NSPCC are not really 'well-known' for these alleged failings. It's not actually true.
> Also the higher figures of (not necesssarily sexual) abuse include some
> very subjective findings, like emotional abuse, which might include not
> being sufficiently supportive and so on. There is a whole industry
> dedicated to manufacturing scare stories about working class family life.
This stuff about 'working class family life' is a red herring. The issue is 'family life' as such, from the upper bourgeois to the lumpenprole. And at any rate, I grew up among enough working class families not to have any romantic illusions about it. In my estate alone, I personally knew quite a few kids whose regime of physical punishment and emotional torment was seriously wrecking their lives.
Secondly, the perception of oppression (racist, sexist, etc) is often highly subjective: it necessarily is. That doesn't mean we're entitled to take a dismissive attitude toward it.
> Judith Reisman is not alone in finding fault in Kinsey's research,
Most of the others are following her lead, and share her agenda.
> and it
> is an ad homnem argument to say that her views discount her findings.
I didn't say that her views 'discount her findings'. They are an important context to explain her activity, and they do account for some of her findings, including her totally unjustified claim that Kinsey was a paedophile. This is a reactionary with an agenda to defeat the gay rights movement, a person who endorses far right trash like 'The Pink Swastika'. This is an important factor in assessing her contribution.
> She
> drew attention to a real problem: around half of Kinsey's random sample
> were in fact prisoners.
Aside from the fact that using prisoners doesn't in itself constitute systematic falsification, the Kinsey Institute has already dealt with this problem by removing that sample. The figures were hardly altered.
> This I think is a canard. I know many parents who think that smacking is
> always wrong, but none that have never smacked. (A mother told me at a
> birthday party the other day that she did not believe in violence agaist
> children: it was a shame her son did not share that taboo, since he was
> battering my daughter at the time.) But most parents I know think that it
> can be right to smack their children. And these are good people who love
> their children.
Your anecdotal experience may be interesting, but it is just that, and it isn't particularly persuasive (was it supposed to be?). First of all, the insistence on the inherent *right* to beat children is a proprietorial right that was once applied to women. (And no doubt you would argue that these were good husbands who loved their wives.) It is not a view that we can just take for granted. Clearly it points to a system of idea that derive the way the nuclear family, and the status of women and children with respect to fathers and husbands, evolved in the modern era. And I would have thought that the purpose of critical theory is to understand and challenge that, not write it off with bluff assurances. Secondly, there may be a nice plurality of parents who only want to smack the back of their kids' legs if they try to run across a crowded motorway lane. But not everyone is as nice as Frank Furedi and James Heartfield. There are, on the balance of evidence, plenty of others who want the right to regularly beat their children, terrorise them, humiliate them. Domestic violence accounts for 16% of all crime in the UK - are you really sure that none of that involves violence against children? That husbands who willingly kick the hell out of their wives never stoop to beating the kids up?
Many representatives of the intrusive state-sector vilify parents'
> attitudes as "proprietorial". But the facts are that children are - as
> long as they are not raised by the state - the special responsibility of
> parents. Those parents are properly resistant to being lectured by outside
> agencies who take no responsibility for the outcome.
I'm quite afraid you can't be all that familiar with the 'instrusive state-sector' if that's what you think. The over-riding priority of the social services is always to keep families intact, and to keep children with their parents. This is not always appropriate, and the family is not sacrosanct. But successive governments have been cutting social services budgets, and the system is underfunded and under-staff. This hardly implies that a great statist jackboot is coming down on the necks of salt-of-the-earth working class mums and dads. Secondly, there is a simple logical slip going on in your argument. Responsibility does not entail property. I might have responsibilities toward my parents, but I don't own them, and I would be embarrassed to claim a right to beat them if they misbehaved. Admittedly, there are those who don't want any lectures from any sanctimonious state busybodies - whether their violence 'tough love', sadism, or just alcohol-fuelled rage, they have their reasons, and they assume that their reasons are all that count. But we aren't obliged to agree with them. Thirdly, parents are not the only ones who have responsibilities here. Society as a whole is implicated in this: a fucked up child becomes a fucked up adult.
All of this points to my earlier warning against the danger that contrarianism in such matters has a tendency to minimise serious problems.