On Wed, Feb 23, 2000 at 06:30:00PM -0500, Kelly Lynn Martin wrote:
> On Wed, 23 Feb 2000 18:04:42 -0500, Erin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:
> ><DIGRESSION> Harkening back to the previous thread about when women
> >get "socialized" out of their interests in computers (and other
> >'hard' sciences), I'd have to say High School is when that happened
> >to me and it had a lasting impact.
<snip>
>
> Oddly enough, this didn't happen as much at my high school; our
> computer programming classes had a good split. Notably, however, the
> instructional computing department at my high school had four people,
> three of them women.
Then I'd say you are among the more fortunate and I certainly hope that
this experience becomes more common among an increasing number of girls
and women.
> >1. Women/girls experience sexual abuse, assault, harassment, domestic
> >violence far more often and regularly than men/boys, which is
> >damaging to the core of a person's self and which takes a great deal
> >of time and personal strength to heal.
>
> As far as assault, harassment, and domestic violence goes, I don't
> think this is true. Boys get beaten as often if not more often than
> girls, in part because they're supposed to "be able to take it". I
> know a _lot_ of men who have been severely damaged by parental,
> sibling, or classmate abuse.
I probably could have been clearer if I'd used dashes instead of commas.
What I meant was sexual abuse, sexual assault, sexual harassment... and
what I meant by domestic violence was "spousal assault"...
> The evidence for sexual abuse is inconclusive, especially in light of
> recent admissions that many of the sexual abuse stories that were all
> the rage in the early 90s were in all probability invented by
> therapists, confabulated, or just plain fraudulent. I'm not saying
> that sexual abuse doesn't occur -- clearly, it does -- but I do
> believe that we have no good figures on its incidence, or on which sex
> is more likely to be a victim. Victim groups (and those who work for
> them) are, unfortunately, not good sources of information because they
> are extremely biased and have very powerful motivations to make the
> problem to be as large as possible. Again, no criticism of the value
> of those groups is intended; they serve a valuable purpose. They're
> just largely worthless as a source of unbiased factual information.
Hmmmm, did the part where I mentioned 7 years of shelter work and more of
socio-political activism somehow deregister as a valid source of "evidence"?
Let's see, I worked in one shelter in one major urban centre, where I
counselled, advocated and made referrals for something in the vicinity of
a few thousand women from all manner of circumstances that lead to their
need for shelter. I have worked with other shelters, committees and advocacy
groups, conducted research, collected and compiled information, read numerous
reports produced by government, medical, community, institutional groups and
which included ample statistical data. There are thousands of women working
in thousands of shelters (not to mention the thousands more living in them)
all over the world, carrying out this work. The accumulated experience,
information and knowledge can not be ignored or so easily refuted.
I feel neither the need to go into any of it in detail here nor the inclination
to elaborate further on my experience, but I certainly feel compelled to
express my lack of appreciation for the manner in which you (Kelly) have so
casually dismissed the "evidence for sexual abuse" as "inconclusive". By what
scientific method did you arrive at such conclusions yourself?
I'm not interested in getting into a big off-topic debate here, but I do ask
that folks have some respect for others' experience.
TIA,
Erin 8)
************
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.linuxchix.org
