Traditional Attitudes and Sexual assault

[differenceblog]

McMullin et al (2007) draw what they frame as a startling conclusion from their 3 year study of undergraduate women with or without a history of sexual victimization. They found that victims displayed less positive feminine personality traits and more negative masculine personality traits than non-victims. McMullin et al state: "This is contrary

Comments

[poeticalpanther]

Absolutely, I would agree, a reporting thing rather than a causal. I don't think I have overly traditional views of gender roles; I have been sexually assaulted three times, once as a child, once a date rape, once a stranger assault. None of them were ever reported to the police

[differenceblog]

*hugs* Thank you. While your assaults weren't reported, do you think you would have responded to a confidential survey that you had been assaulted? It seems like you weren't under any illusions that these hadn't been assaults, or that they were your fault, but that you had (probably reasonable, unfortunately) predictions of how badly things could turn out for you. So it wasn't that you didn't think you had a reasonable complaint, but that you thought it would be worse to complain than not to...

is that a correct reading?

[poeticalpanther]

In the latter two cases, I'd say yes. The last one certainly; the middle one...I like to think so, but I was 21, and I think I did have some feelings of "well, if you didn't want it, why were you dressed like that?", but it had two streams, as you can imagine - one for the true me, like any other girl, and one for the endangered public me.

The first one...no, I was quite sure that one was my fault. Not least because my abuser told me it was.

It interferes yet today; knowing how strong the link is between childhood sexual abuse and adult pedophilia, I find it difficult to be with someone who even has some characteristics of being physically childlike (i.e., if I sleep with someone shorter than about 5'6", I like them to have fairly obvious secondary sexual characteristics, so it's clear to my lizardbrain that "No, Cait, you are not abusing a child").

[epi_lj]

The part of this taht I keep tripping over isn't even the point of this post at all, but simply the phrase, "3 year study of undergraduate women with or without a history of sexual victimization." I understand what's being said here, but that wording itself makes it seem like being sexually assalted is a factor of the person who was assaulted rather than the person who assaulted them. It reads to me like "with or without a history of violent behaviour," or "with or without a history of cancer," or something like that.

[differenceblog]

*nods* That is what it's like. What the study was trying to look at was how "having been assaulted" affects the way a young woman develops. A history of having been assaulted is not a factor of who they are as a person, but I do think it's worthwhile to try to determine if there's common personality threads among people wth a common experience.

Much as if you were doing a study on PTSD effects among people exposed to 9-11.