Psychological Warfare
Psychological Warfare Between Therapists and Scientists :
Our society runs on the advice of mental-health professionals, who are often called upon in legal settings to determine whether a child has been molested, a prisoner up for parole is still dangerous, a defendant is lying or insane, a mother is fit to have custody of her children, and on and on. Yet while the public assumes, vaguely, that therapists must be “scientists” of some sort, many of the widely accepted claims promulgated by therapists are based on subjective clinical opinions and have been resoundingly disproved by empirical research conducted by psychological scientists.
(Via wood s lot , if I read more of which, I’d be smarter)
Maybe I'm a nitpicker (or, more to the point, eating breakfast with one), but I quoted out the statistic in the article, where the author claims that 70% of abused children do not grow up to mistreat their own kids, and we sat here squinting at each other trying to figure out how they would be able to verify that. The number of people who definitely beat their kids that we know of legally and for sure is easy to measure from the court system: how many convictions. But how do we know who doesn't? And how do we know who was abused and just keeps their mouth shut about it and goes about their life? I'm not saying the 70% figure is wrong, but at the very least, the error bars are huge. And that's supposed to be on the "scientific" side of this debate. Uff da.
Posted by Mris on March 12 2003 06:55
The author also refers to "the proliferation of day-care sex-abuse scandals, which put hundreds of nursery-school teachers in prison." To my knowledge, while the affair was awful, and lives were wrecked, and businesses went under, there was not one conviction in all the satanic sex-abuse day-care witch hunts.
I agree, when you're taking the moral high ground on accuracy, you'd damn sure pay attention to the facts.
I also wonder about the author's dismissal of: "The way that parents treat a child in the first five years (three years) (one year) (five minutes) of life is crucial to the child's later intellectual and emotional success." I wonder what study claims to disprove that, and what, precisely, it claims to disprove... some hard-line determinist straw man version that holds that any negativity and the kid's doomed?
Posted by Zed on March 12 2003 11:27