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NZ Listener
November 16 2002
Published Nov 9, 2002
Abuser and abused
Letter to the Editor
by Dr John Read
Senior Lecturer, Clinical
Psychology
Department of Psychology, University of Auckland
Lynley Hood's only response (Letters,
November 2) to my disagreeing with her personal opinions about child abuse is
to hurl nasty adjectives such as "grotesque",
"irresponsible" and "vindictive".
However, two correspondents point out that I may have misunderstood one of
Hood's assertions. It is indeed possible that her statement about teachers
"abusing nobody but themselves" (New Writing, September 19) was meant to relate to teachers who
download pornography on school computers rather than, as I thought, to
teachers who have sex with students. If I was wrong, I apologise to Lynley
Hood.
I remain gravely concerned, nevertheless, at her citing "an explosion of
historical allegations against Catholic priests" as an example of her
imagined "witch-hunt".
False allegations of abuse occur and can be devastating.
If Hood wants "rational discussion" she should, rather than
continuing her one-sided diatribe against all professions in this field,
acknowledge the relative frequency of true and false allegations. A New Zealand
study found an average of 11 people a year claiming to have been falsely
accused. Compare this to the thousands of cases reported to the authorities
annually. In New Zealand
and elsewhere these reported cases are just a small proportion of the abuse
prevalence identified in community surveys. A New Zealand survey, published in
the Lancet and the British Journal of Psychiatry, found
that 32 percent of women had suffered some form of sexual abuse as children.
Those whose abuse involved intercourse were 17 times more likely than
non-abused women to be admitted to a psychiatric hospital and 74 times more
likely to have attempted suicide. Having spent much of my life working to
support such people, I do sometimes feel cross when the prevalence and
effects of abuse are ignored or minimised.
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