Eep. That's all I have. EEP.

She added that the woman who encouraged the victim to contact police "has always been a busybody."

That's so sad. And infuriating.

The alleged victim's mother told the newspaper she was unaware of the abuse, despite living in the same house.

"We lived in a big house, so I wouldn't have known," she said.

Your friend's aunt was a bit oblivious. What's your friend like?

I first proposed in the mid 90s that incest and rape in general are far more prevalent among humans than current research methods can measure. i further believe that the underlying cause of the low figures is that activists are too involved in conducting the studies or influencing the conduct of studies via PC pressure, and for some reason they are having an irrationally negative impact. To get more accurate figures, this bias must be removed from staying research methods, and the researchers themselves screened, much like selecting a jury, to remove any who have a personal confllct of interest.

Speaking as someone who's doing rape crisis intervention work right now, everything in this article is entirely too typical of these situations.

"The house is too big to monitor"
"The person is a busybody"
"Their business is their business"

A ton of rationalization and distancing. 85% of people who get raped or assaulted or done so by someone they know, and 96% of the people doing the assaults are straight, white, middle-class men.

Ardiril - too bad you can't volunteer for a local agency around this work. It would be interesting to see what effect it would have on your views.

yikes! you better quickly come to my house now!!!

Yeah, what a sad situation, and nobody thought it needed intervention. All 4 kids have birth defects, and 1 died. The poor woman had a lot to contend with. I wonder who the mom thought was getting her pregnant?

LT, I believe those victims who are not counted come from households with conservative views toward child rearing, those in which the father held the ultimate power, including invoking silence. Now as adults those victims have maintained those conservative views and any hint of a liberal attitude toward divesting those repressed secrets has the opposite effect.

I will admit my views come from anecdotal evidence, that being so many women I have known from conservative families, once drunk or high enough, who told of sexual assaults perpetrated either upon themselves or siblings, female or male. Worse still, I think it possible that the incidence of child abuse and thus incest is proportional to the fervency of a household's child rearing habits and the severity of its punishments in relation to infractions. These victims, now adults, are still too damn scared of Daddy and convinced that they have sinned before God that the only way to the truth is to lower their resistance through disinhibiting drugs or a non-victimized counselor raised in an otherwise strict but safe family who continues to hold those views.

In the field of women's studies specializing in sexual abuse, from PhDs to counselors, how many are fundamentalist, anti-choice, spanking theists?

I may be completely wrong about this. I have no evidence except personal experience and what I have read in the news. This is a situation I think is possible only because I have not seen, heard or read anything definitive that says it is not possible. I do know however that we humans, in our vast numbers, can quite often not see the truth that lies bare before our eyes or conversely, can collectively disavow a truth because it lowers our inflated perception of ourselves as civilized.

My friend is super sharp. There is plenty more I could say about the case, having discussed it extensively with her - and before it came out in the media too - but I don't want to say anything online that was told in confidence to me.

It's all pretty sad though.