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Comment by wruza | Hacker News Reader

>As with alcohol, the results of hypnosis were never completely trusted; Sigmund Freud, for example, used the technique to uncover patients’ repressed memories of sexual abuse but eventually admitted that most of the recollections were fantasies. “Such widespread perversion against children is scarcely probable,” he concluded.

Memory can play funny tricks (except in court).

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This is a side note...

There's no evidence that hypnosis is reliable, true.

But "widespread perversion against children" as we now know, is not just probable, it's reality.

28% of children according to one study. No one really knows though, since it's of course one of the most underreported crimes.

https://victimsofcrime.org/media/reporting-on-child-sexual-a...

I'd like to know the exact questions asked to determine whether someone was sexually abused or not, but I have a hard time finding the studies cited in your link. As I interpret the text from your link, a teenager voluntarily sending nudes to their partner would count as sexually abused because they participated in the creation of child pornography.

Although that might be part of it, I don’t find 28% to be a surprise.

One reason is that I’ve been told the age of consent in many places was 12 as recently as the Victorian era [0], and why would it be that low if there wasn’t a lot of people who wanted that? (It might just have been politicians who wanted that, but I fear that’s merely unjustified optimism).

The other main reason is the number of women who tell me about traumatic experiences is high enough that it’s plausible all of them have been (there’s no reason for me to know about everyone’s history, so of course I believe I know someone who hasn’t told me and never will).

Of course, this percentage does mean that the “think of the children” meme ought to put all children under 24-7 surveillance so that nobody can ever touch them. Side effects haven’t slowed that meme down before, why would it now?

[0] I never cared to check, so I don’t know how many or when any given jurisdiction changed

> and why would it be that low if there wasn’t a lot of people who wanted that?

Not to detract from your other points, which I agree with, but ... according to e.g. [0], and I've found similar data in other places, life expectancy for a girl in the victorian era was ~40. So you can't judge the number 12 by today's standards.

[0] https://www.quora.com/What-was-the-life-expectancy-like-duri...

Life expectancy includes infant and child mortality and thus is commonly misunderstood. Given that you’re already alive and healthy at age 12, your personal life expectancy is going to be higher than the population mean.

Yes, the post-childhood life expectancy in Victorian England was 73. For all the money spent on medicine and public health we've barely moved it.

That gymnastic doctor managed to have hunderds victims and it was during era where existence of child abuse was acknowledged as real thing.

Also, see Lolita as a popular book.

I've long suspected that pedophilia and especially ephebophilia are far more common than anyone is willing to admit.

While the other commentators are right that it's a lot more prevalent than people believe, there was also a big scandal in the 80s when "recovered memories" turned out to be fabrications. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22830423-400-we-cant-...

And even later on it turned out, that perversion against children does happen un-exceptionally in authoritarian environment with no checks and balances and no one to investigate the claims. Which pretty much describes environment his patients were subject to.

So while alcohol is not truth serum and Sigmund Freud was not working on peer reviewed modern studies, some of perversions those people talked about might really happened. lLcohol or not, some of his patients might as well be suffering from what we call ptsd from child abuse.

In a book /Against Therapy/, Jeffrey Masson, Freud scholar, explains how Freud deluded himself into disbelieving accounts that he originally had believed. The thought of them being true simply became unbearable to him.

Freud used to talk about wish-fulfillment fantasies. Apparently he fell to his own wish-fulfillment fantasy. He wished to live in a world in which child sexual abuse was not a thing.

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