Thursday, September 27, 2007

Fat/Rape connection

Okay, my mother reads my blog, so I am not going to go into a personal story on this matter. I just don't want to go there.

But, let's look at the study:
Researchers surveyed about 2,500 men and women aged 21 and found 7.5 % had had intercourse against their will before the age of 16.

While the men had no significant weight difference to other men, female victims were much more likely to have a body mass index (BMI) over 25, making them officially overweight.


I have at least a couple problems with this:
1. It seems, at least to me, that it downplays the real psychological (and possibly physical) results of rape. Hey, rape's not serious--oh WAIT! It makes you FAT! Time to take it seriously! Well, at least let's try to figure out how to make the raped women thin; rape prevention isn't really our concern.

2. They are drawing the conclusion that the association is due to overeating. This is sloppy research, because it shows that they haven't looked at the fact that being fat isn't caused by overeating.

How about, if you're raped, you're probably more likely than a non-raped person to be on a prescription antidepressant, the side effects of which almost always include WEIGHT GAIN? Now, I just pulled that out of my ass, yet it involved more logic and critical thinking than the lazy bastards who came up with "Omg, raped women are binge eating to cope with their trauma!"

I honestly think that these types of researchers are so hungry for the fat research grants that they'll run roughshod over people with real problems just to make lame associations like this, without actually coming up with something helpful. I suppose, though, that when they're all operating from the false premise of "fat = bad", it's difficult to get them to back up far enough to change the root of the problem. The more of us that are saying it, though, the more likely it'll happen.

4 comments:

Kell Brigan said...

Yes, and...
I have a post, well RANT, about this up, too, especially concerning that fact that a much greater correlation is found with disabled kids. There, the assumption is automatically that disability preceded the rape, whereas with fat kids, it's assumed that fatness occurred afterward. I'm not so sure...

Kell Brigan said...

See http://www.disturbingbrew dot blogspot dot com.

Michelle said...

From my own personal experience, I gained weight after my rape. I don't know if it was to be less "attractive" (whatever that means) or to squash down the feelings of the incident. That was over 20 years ago and I haven't dealt with it in a professional way at all. Which comes first, you know?

Unknown said...

I am scratching my head and wondering about the hypothesis here. Are they asking if women who were raped at a young age become fat later, or are young girls who are heavy more likely to be raped? No genetic or other evidence seems to be taken into account.

So what about the other 92.5 or so percent of these women who were not fat? Wow, is anyone asking about the much larger correlation between being raped as a child and thinness? If fat = bad, then is one supposed to come to the horrible conclusion that rape is good for little girls? No one in his or her right mind would support that, or pay for research to do so.

By statistics alone, these same researchers can show sex does not cause pregnancy. Ha... fat chance.