'safer with their dads'

[Dinner]

I take it you are not very close to your sister? It sounds like she is a troubled soul. Unfortunately, women tend to pattern their lives upon their mother's life (boys do the same with their dad) so unless she gets counciling she will most likely continue the cycle of abuse and her daughters will also grow up to be victimized by a-holes and let their children be abused.

It's sad but it's also human nature which is working against us. The human mind says "well, mom did this and she survived to reproduce" which is true but doesn't take into account the psychological harm.

[Dinner]

Also sexual preditors have the highest recitivism rate of all criminals so this new boyfriend your sister has picked up will most likely be big trouble for her children. I've been told the best thing a woman who's been abused can do is to date a guy who she's really not that attracted to. The logic is she's attracted to ass holes and abusive losers while "good guys" seem like geeks to her because her view point is so screwed up. Thus the guy who she doesn't like and whom she thinks is geeky is actually more likely to not be an abuser then the guy whom she would normally date.

[Jon Miller]

I am not very close to my sister it is true

I talked to her about twice a year and knew that she had troubles picking dudes and living a good life

I had thought (until this summer) that the worse she would do is have a messy house and the like (terrible, but not something I could do about)

than I here from my sister and mother about her new boyfriend..

she did go to counseling in the 90s after she came to us, from my observations I don't see it as doing anything

Jon Miller

[Alexander's Horse]

I'm not surprised by these findings - its the new boyfriend who is the problem.

There is this deep primitive urge to push out the offspring of other men aparently.

[MrFun]

The horse rider in your avatar is wearing a gas mask to protect himself, and yet, in the event of a gas attack, the horse itself, having no such protection, will keel over.

[Alexander's Horse]

Elementary.

The Horse F@rted, that's why the lancer has his mask on.

[Skanky Burns]

Has anyone mentioned "pony" and "one trick" in the same sentence yet?

[MrFun]

Originally posted by Alexander's Horse
Elementary.

The Horse F@rted, that's why the lancer has his mask on.

ah -- ok

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

A quick query on the statistics.

If 4% of overall levels of reported child abuse occurs in father-only families, what percentage of families are father-only?

[Dinner]

No doubt very small.

[JohnT]

Originally posted by Lazarus and the Gimp
A quick query on the statistics.

If 4% of overall levels of reported child abuse occurs in father-only families, what percentage of families are father-only?

The Census bureau is your friend...

Household Relationship and Living Arrangements of Children Under 18 Years/1/, by Age, Sex, Race, Hispanic Origin/2/, and Metropolitan Residence: March 2002 Warning: MS Excel file. If you prefer PDF or CSV, go to this page, scroll down to Table C2 and select your poison.

In the US there are 72,321,000 children under the age of 18. Their household composition (all races) is as follows (numbers in millions, figures in parenthesis are percentages, might not total 100 due to rounding):

Total: 72,321 (100)

Two Parents: 49,666 (69)
Mother Only: 16,473 (23)
Father Only: 3,297 (4.5)
Neither Parent: 2,885 (4)

Now, I might be reading this wrong and using some faulty logic here, but it seems that children of father-only households have an "average" chance of being abused (4% of kids live in father-only, 4% of abused kids come from father-only) while the children of mother-only households have an approximately 2X greater chance of being abused (23% live in mother-only households, 44% (iirc from page 1) of abused kids come from mother only households).

How the numbers match in other countries, I don't know.

[JohnT]

If you are interested in how the number of children in the various household types got to be in those households, go to here and check it out.

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

Originally posted by JohnT

Now, I might be reading this wrong and using some faulty logic here, but it seems that children of father-only households have an "average" chance of being abused (4% of kids live in father-only, 4% of abused kids come from father-only) while the children of mother-only households have an approximately 2X greater chance of being abused (23% live in mother-only households, 44% (iirc from page 1) of abused kids come from mother only households).

At first glance that looks about right, but then I start wondering if they use the same definitions across both surveys. Few things irk me more than a story that doesn't even attempt to place figures in context.

Statistics, kids. They're worse than drugs.

[Ben Kenobi]

while the children of mother-only households have an approximately 2X greater chance of being abused

That would be considered statistically significant. This would make a much more interesting article than the quoted statistic.

[chequita guevara]

One other statistic we might want to know. What is the percentage of children in each of these types of families. For example, if single parent (female) households have twice as many children than the average (which I doubt), then the statistic means nothing.