They won't remember when they're older, so it's OK

[Spearmint Rhino]

The implications of the fifth-from-last paragraph of this story would be monstrous, if followed through to the logical extreme.

Earlier this month, a child expert said because of the age of the victims, they should recover and grow up "unscarred" by the ordeal they suffered at George's hands.

[Guest]

They won't remember when they're older, so it's OK

But that's nonsense. Isn't it? I'm sure it's nonsense. People may not be able to remember things that happened to them before a certain age, but I thought it had been proved that their brains most certainly are affected and these effects can be lasting and damaging in later life. This sort of thing. Or this.

[Spearmint Rhino]

They won't remember when they're older, so it's OK

Yeah. It's basically the unnamed "child expert" and the BBC News desk trying to reassure us that everything's gonna be OK... without thinking it through.

[evilC]

They won't remember when they're older, so it's OK

I also hope no child molesters try to cite that as precedent when they are in court. "Oh, it's okay though, because we got them early enough. This expert said so."!!!

(edit: Which is basically your thread title, so... errr... apologies!)

[Hofzinser]

They won't remember when they're older, so it's OK

It must also partially depend, assuming that they indeed wouldn't retain any memory of the incidents at all, on whether or not the children will be told what happened to them once they're older.

I'd think that even if they had no memory of it actually happening, the knowledge that something like that was done to them would be profoundly troubling and distressing, and would have lasting psychological effects.

[Purves Grundy]

They won't remember when they're older, so it's OK

Without knowing what was inflicted on these kids (and I don't think I want to know, either) I have a vague sense that maybe there is something of a valid point here.

I mean, I don't know what age of kid we're talking about here as I tend to shy away from stories like this afraid of the unhelpful upset it will cause me, but to what extent are these children likely to know that what's been done to them is abhorrent, aberrant and wrong?

Kids, very young ones in particular, are blank slates, pretty well free from any moral sense. As long as nothing was done with sufficient regularity for it to become normalised as part of their view of interaction with adults and the world at large then maybe there is a case to be made for viewing it (from their perspective only) as "something nasty that happened" and no more.

I'm thinking in a similar vein to that photographer who got in trouble a couple of years ago for taking photos of toddlers who'd just had their ice creams snatched from them. Terribly, demonstrably upsetting to the kids in question, but not the blue touch paper for psychosis, I'd have thought (and if anyone thinks I'm saying child abuse equates with taking an ice cream off a child, then, well, you know). I think it's by no means certain that it will have any lifelong ramifications. I mean, as far as I'm aware we aren't talking Josef Fritzl here.

I think Richard Dawkins made a vaguely similar point somewhere when he wrote about getting touched up by a schoolteacher.

[Wyatt Earp]

They won't remember when they're older, so it's OK

It's not clear from either of Lyra's abstracts whether and how hereditary factors were controlled for. Abuse victims are statistically likely to be related to, and therefore share genes with, abusers, who of course themselves form an atypical group. There's a real danger of artefact in both cases, I think, and it would be good to see how that was dealt with.

(And, just in passing, the headline for the first one is very misleading. It's not the DNA that changes--that couldn't, even in principle, have an environmental cause--it's the gene expression.)

Anyway. Main topic. My understanding of this stuff is that most people do seem to recover adequately from trauma, but some don't. If true, that would mean the unnamed "expert" and Lyra's studies could both be right: there could be a measurable statistical association between abuse and permanent damage, but still a good "likelihood" of recovery.

I don't know that we should worry about providing nonces with self-exculpatory strategies. They seem pretty good at finding those already. And they would be nonsensical anyway: suffering you recover from is still suffering.

[Spearmint Rhino]

They won't remember when they're older, so it's OK

"It never did us any harm", say daughters of sculptor Eric Gill

Also, as is now well known, the diaries give details of incest with his two eldest daughters, Betty and Petra, during the Ditchling years when they were in their teens.

Gill's own life gives admirers of his work a lot to grapple with. While the sexual experiments with his own daughters, meticulously recorded, were taking place, Gill was making his most heartrendingly beautiful images of girlhood. Petra was the model for the sculpture and related wood engraving Girl in Bath, her curtain of long hair half concealing, half displaying her newly nubile body. The way in which perverse sex can produce works of great beauty is an arresting theme in AS Byatt's latest novel, The Children's Book. Her alarming central figure, Benedict Fludd, the potter of great talent who hoards his ceramic figures of his daughters in obscene contorted poses on the shelves of the locked pantry, has clear parallels with Gill.

How did Gill's children respond to their weird upbringing? Petra told me, and repeated in later interviews, that the peculiar isolation of their upbringing on Ditchling Common made his sexual demands seem in no way out of the ordinary. Was this just what fathers did? Both she and her sister Betty appear to have absorbed the experience, making apparently good and happy marriages, bringing up large families. Their history challenges received opinion on the inevitability of damage done by child abuse.