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Sunday
News
December 28, 1997
Abuse claims based on shonky research
by R Mann (Remuera)
Dr John Read
(Sunday News November 30) suggests journalists should highlight what he is
pleased to call "the research showing 32 percent of New Zealand women
are sexually abused as children". The so-called research supposed to
support this conclusion is notoriously shonky. One of its authors now says
there may have been exaggeration. No respectable scientific research has come
anywhere near justifying the slogan which Read promotes. Yet he is able to
continue, secure in the belief that the politically correct media will not do
any decent investigative journalism on this.
Sunday
News
January 4, 1998
Denial of sexual abuse does not help anyone
by Dr John Read
Senior lecturer, Psychology Department, University
of Auckland
R Mann (Sunday News, December 28) suggests the survey showing 32 percent of
New Zealand females are sexually abused as children is "shonky".
Perhaps he would like to explain this term to the Lancet and the British
Journal of Psychiatry which published this internationally-renowned New Zealand
study. Such depressing figures are indeed hard to take in. But denial of
either the frequency or effects of abuse is not helpful.
My own review of 15 international studies, published in Professional
Psychology in October, showed the majority of psychiatric inpatients have
been abused, sexually or physically, as children. This raises the question of
whether child abuse may contribute to even the most severe mental disturbance
such as schizophrenia, until now thought to be primarily biological or
genetic in origin. Those wishing to trivialise abuse will simply not be
believed.
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