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Roger Ailes on Soledad O'Brien: 'That Girl That's Named After a Prison'

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Obdicut (Now with 2% less brain)4/13/2012 5:25:01 pm PDT

re: #191 Adam, Eve and Steve

Because there is no analogy between an average child’s and average adult’s psychology (I’m not taking borderline cases which arise from the necessarily somewhat arbitrary delimitation of the age of consent). We can derive the average harm from child abuse because of what we know about children and adults.

But that’s the same knowledge we use to show that incestuous relationships tend to be damaging as well; what we know about the way that siblings relate to each other.

But you would actually have to show that adults engaging in such relationships do it because of coercion as a matter of principle (on average). Peer-reviewed studies, etc.

But why, if you’re supposing that there’s all these invisible cases of incest that are perfectly okay, couldn’t someone say the same thing about adult-child relationships? By calling into question the psychiatric records showing that sibling incest is damaging by contending that such relationships are only examined when pathological, that seems to me to open up the exact same line of argument for relationships with children.

If you’re going to make the assumption that nothing in the record can be relied upon because there could be cases of incest that are outside the record and unreported that are positive, it’s pretty impossible to disprove that.

What I mean is that it should be demonstrated that it’s not enough to enforce child abuse laws, and that it’s necessary to crack down on each adult incestuous power-differential relationship just because it is possible that it may have been started as child abuse.

I’d say the large number of incest cases that continue into adulthood, and the large number of incest cases that are only revealed long afterwards, do demonstrate that.

So I’m asking again: what percentage of incestuous relationships began as child abuse and continued into adult coercive relationships? And what percentage started in adulthood?

If you’re rejecting the psychiatric record, there’s no way to attain those numbers.