re: #321 Obdicut

No, what I mean is:

If you ‘know’ that 40% of pedophiles were sexually abused as children, that does not in any way indicate that that abuse lead to their pedophilia. It is a correlation, not a causation. There might be other co-founding factors in that childhood that contained abuse— like physical abuse, neglect, or an actual genetic tendency, since the abusers so often tend to be family members.

Unless you know which other factors also occur in the same environment as the abuse— if the pedophiles are to be believed and the abuse actually did occur— you cannot begin to say which are the key factors.

It’s one of the things that makes any definitive statement about behavior nearly impossible.

Well Hell!

There go all my Psych classes, my Stats classes and my Experimental Design classes.

Damn.

Oh well, I wasn’t using them anyway.

The study of behaviour, in one sense, is a forensic science. Abuse leaves ‘marks’ on the personality that can be tested for and analyzed. It isn’t as hopeless as you suspect.