Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

Therapy
memories of rape and childhood sexual abuse, with the father,
stepfather, uncle or mother's boyfriend represented as an alien.
Surely it's more comforting to believe that an alien abused you
than that it was done by someone you trusted and loved.
Therapists who take the alien abduction stories at face value deny
this, saying they would know if their patients were sexually
abused. Some estimates from opinion surveys range as high as one
in four American women and one in six American men have been
sexually abused in childhood (although these estimates are probably
too high). It would be astonishing if a significant number of
patients who present themselves to alien abduction therapists had
not been so abused, perhaps even a larger proportion than in the
general population.
Both sexual abuse therapists and alien abduction therapists
spend months, sometimes years, encouraging their subjects to
remember being abused. Their methods are similar, and their
goals are in a way the same - to recover painful memories, often
of long ago. In both cases the therapist believes the patient to be
suffering from trauma attendant to an event so terrible that it is
repressed. I find it striking that alien abduction therapists find so
few cases of sexual abuse and vice versa.
Those who have in fact been subjected to childhood sexual
abuse or incest are, for very understandable reasons, sensitive
about anything that seems to minimize or deny their experience.
They are angry, and they have every right to be. In the US, at
least one in ten women have been raped, almost two-thirds before
the age of 18. A recent survey reports that one-sixth of all rape
victims reported to police are under the age of 12. (And this is the
category of rape least likely to be reported.) One-fifth of these
girls were raped by their fathers. They have been betrayed. I want
to be very clear about this: there are many real cases of ghoulish
sexual predation by parents, or those acting in the role of parents.
Compelling physical evidence - photos, for example, or diaries, or
gonorrhoea or chlamydia in the child - have in some cases come to
light. Abuse of children has been implicated as a major probable
cause of social problems. According to one survey, 85 per cent of
all violent prison inmates were abused in childhood. Two-thirds of
all teenage mothers were raped or sexually abused as children or
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