You wrote: "This included statistics research like 3% of clients who have sex with their therapist end up marrying the therapist. (This means 97% "get dumped".)" I have no intention of defending psychotherapists' behavior who have sex with their patients. I do intend to defend the careful use of evidence and reasoning when when making charges of wrongdoing against others. With regard to the above statistic, I wonder if not getting married is the same as "getting dumped." It would be helpful to have a definition of this inflamatory phrase inasmuch as there are a great many persons everywhere in the world who have sex with persons they do not subsequently marry. If this is a tacit assertion that it is wrong to have sex with someone unless one plans to marry the person with whom one has sex, this is a point of view that is indefensible on the grounds that it serves everyone's psychological health. You wrote: "It also included 32% of these clients had been victims of incest or other child sex abuse," Adopting your method of computing complementary percentages, we would have to conclude therefore that by far the largest majority, 68%, of these clients were not victims of incest or other child sexual abuse. Given that there are very many persons, according to some estimates, in the adult population who have been incested or otherwise sexually abused as children in SOME fashion, this 68% figure is remarkably high. You wrote: "...that 14% of these clients attempt suicide." To know if there is any importance to this piece of data, we also have to know three other things: the rate of suicide attempts among patients who do not have sex with their therapists, the rate of suicide attempts in the general population, and the rate at which persons in the general population have any interaction with therapists. Until these three other statistics are given, one really has no mathematically useful way to interpret the importance of the 14% figure. You wrote: "...yet only 12% of therapists get turned in for sexual misconduct." If it is known, therefore, that 88% (the complement of 12%) of therapists who have sex with their patients are not "turned in," then on what basis does anyone know that this 88% is having such illicit sexual contact with patients? Clearly, if the 88% figure is anything other than someone's guess, it is a figure that can be known only if the allegedly culpable therapists were in fact "turned in" to somebody is some way. If these data for the 88% of allegedly culpable thrapists came from anonymous survey data produced by patients and by former patients, it would seem desirable to have some way of being sure such survey data meet the minimum psychometric requirments of reliability and validity. Meeting these requirements seems to me to be impossible unless there has been some spectacular breakthrough in psychometric mthodology that is not yet well known. Moreover, we should note thata there are many--very many-- cases of therapists "turned in" to licensing boards for sexual misconduct with their patients who either are not guilty of such misconduct or whose guilt has not or cannot be proven. We need to know these numbers, too, if we are to make sense of all these data. These therapists whose alleged culpability has not or cannot be proven nonetheless suffer humiliation and other hardships as a result of what are essentially false accusations (until sufficient evidence proves otherwise). Some are very likely to be guilty, but some are also likely not to be guilty. Only hard evidence and careful reasoning should be used to distinguish these two categores of allegations. Playing loose with evidence is not a good idea when making harsh allegations of wrongdoing against anyone. That's why we have a legal system that was designed to convict persons in this country {USA) only when guilt can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. This is a decision strategy that may allow some guilty persons to go free, but it is also a stretegy designed to protect the rights of the innocent persons. The rights of innocent persons should also be a very great concern of all practicing psychotherapists. There are a great many persons today, including a great many outspoken psychotherapists, who are not satisfied with the high standards of evidence needed for legal conviction of wrongdoing. These are persons who are willing to adopt a decision strategy that usess evidence more loosely to both make charges and convictions against suspected wrongdoers. This strategy of using evidence more feely is one that necessitates a willingness to convict innocent persons of wrongdoing for the sake of making sure that no wrongdoer ever goes unpunished. We do not get to have a perfect system in this world. Of necessity, we must choose whether to have a system that protects the rights of the innocent from false accusation (thus making errors in letting some wrongdoers slip through) or a system that sees to it that every wrongdoer be surely punished (thus making errors in falsely convicting some innocent persons). There is no way to have a pefect system since perfecion is a minatory illusion. Our choice is to have a system biased in favor of innocents (while some wrongdoers go free) or biased against wrongdoers (while some innocents then suffer). In life, we almost never have the luxury of being able to pick either a right course of action or a wrong course of action, as Kierkegaard reminded us. Instead, our most common and most important moral choices are between one or more wrongs such that we must decide which is least wrong. So our American legal system has wisely chosen, I believe, to regard punishment of some innocents as a more serious moral mistake than the mistake of overlooking some wrongdoing (for the sake of protecting innocents). Thus America has chosen the lesser wrong of demanding that we be extremely careful and scrupulous with all of our evidence and reasoning when we use it to make charges of wrongdoing against others. We demand this carefulness because of our moral concern that no innocents be falsely accused--a moral concern that is regarded therefore as superior to the concern that every wrongdoer be punished. However, I know of no rationale that has been seriously put forth or taken seriously by legal and moral scholars holding that false accustion of innocents is a lesser moral offense than leaving some wrongs unpunished (for the sake of protecting innocents). So the strategy of being biasd to protect innocents is much more justifiable and morally accepatable. Some persons answer at this point that the protection of innocents as a superior moral concern is precisely what accounts for the moral zeal of those who are very ready to adopt liberal prosecutorial metods for the sake of protecting victims and possible victims from their possible abusers. This is a good point. But it is a point that should direct attention not to reasons why one could sacrifice a concern for SOME innocents in order to protect OTHER innocents. Instead attention should be directed toward devising a more comprehensive approach to accommodating our concern for many kinds of innocence. You wrote: "This research also included discussion of traumatized victims in a group who had common experiences of "intrusive thoughts," self blame, guilt, cognitive dysfuntion, ptsd, flashbacks, nightmares, feeling of needing to protect the To use this as evidence relevant to the supposed cause of sex with a therapist one would have to know the incidence of these symptoms in the population of patients who did not have sex with their therapists. You worte; "There is nothing like a personal story to bring the heart and feelings forward." This is ture. But what is also needed for a scientific and legal study of the truth about patients having sex with their therapists (and the truth about the effects of such sexual conduct on patients) are not personal stories but hard evidence and very careful reasoning. The heart and feelings can be very misleading as well as informative. You wrote: "The heart of the therapist must be reached. And the I would add that that another very important thing to reach is the ability of therapists to use scrupulous care when using evidence and reasoning to reach their conclusions---especially so when their conclusions consist of charges of miscoduct against anyone. One would not want others to play fast and loose with evidence and reasoning if others were bringing charges of misconduct against oneself. Thus, basic human empathy and fair play--quintessential matters of the heart and conscience--demand that we make charges of serious wrongdoing against others only so long as our evidence and reasoning are scrupulously presented with the most careful attention to reliability and cogency. .....
It has been my decades-long experience that a great many psyhotherpists do not understand the importance of the rights of innocent persons until THEY are the innocent prsons whose rights are violated by false accusation of one thing or another.
The other decision strategy--making sure every wrongdoer is punished while being willing to error by falsely convicting innocents--serves a zeal that is contrary to the "innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt" tradition of the American legal system. This strategy of making sure no wrongdoer goes unpunished also serves the decision to regard overlooking a wrongdoer as a more serious moral error than the moral error of falsely convicting an innocent person.
therapist, isolation and emptiness, emotional lability, and suicide ideation."
conscience."
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