Child abuse & earnings

One of the most controversial claims Richard Dawkins makes in The God Delusion is that indoctrinating children into religion might do them more damage than sexual abuse. Well, here's some evidence, at least about sexual abuse - it is associated with higher education and earnings in later life.
Researchers estimate that Canadian women who were  first sexually abused between the ages of 7 and 12 were more likely to get degrees, and more likely to earn good money, than women who weren't abused. 
Now, one might object that there's sampling bias here. The abuse is self reported. And it's possible that women who have faced up to the fact that they were abused as children are more resilient than those who are in denial, and this resilience might be associated with higher earnings.
This objection, however, runs into the problem that women whose self-reported first experience of abuse began before the age of 6 or after 12 do no better (or worse) in education and earnings than women who weren't abused.
The mechanism here might be straightforward.  Abused women might be deterred from forming social and sexual relationships, and so divert the effort they'd put into social life into education and work.
This does not of course  mean sexual abuse is a good thing, even leaving aside the obvious reasons.  This finding is consistent with the possibility that abuse reduces women's ability to convert educational or work effort into achievement. It might just be that the extra effort they divert into work effort compensates for this inward shift in their production function.
There might be a broader message here. Not all psychological damage is consistent with poor labour market outcomes. Outwardly successful people needn't be psychologically healthy.

Comments

[Barry]

I find this post frightfully offensive and incomplete. Correlation doesn't even come close to proving cause & effect. Furthermore, you didn't in any way address the issue of how raising a child within a religious framework would be more damaging; even within the limited context of educational or career attainment.

Though anecdotal; my partner was sexually abused as a child, I on the other hand was raised with religious beliefs that placed great value on education and hard work. Both of us are experiencing success in our respective paths (academia & IT). Only one of us carries an awful burden of damage from our respective experiences; I suspect you know which one that is.

Beyond the labour market, what other costs are involved with such abuse? My partner has spent thousands (privately through our health insurance) on counselling.

I enjoy your blog and understand that it is “stumbling and mumbling,” but I would implore you to be more considered before mumbling about such a sensitive topic.

[Ilex]

Hmm. Interesting, but odd. I can see of no reason why the 7-12 age group should be a productive time to be abused, and yet the other ages groups reported no increased success in later life. I suppose you could argue that those younger than 6 are not sufficiently formed as characters for it to matter as much (I would refute that quite strongly on the basis of my personal experiences), and that the over-12 group were already reasonably self-sufficient.

The authors themselves state that 'age at which the abuse occurred was found to have a limitied impact on psychological harm' (p.4). So why shoud this be transposed to higher earnings for one group, but not others? That said, they have clearly controlled for all the relevant factors that I can think of and the sample size is fairly robust.

An interesting result but not particularly intuitive.

[Matt Munro]

Women who are abused may be more likely to avoid relationhsips and are thus better able to concentrate on education and career and become higher earners. Self diclosure is also more likely in higher social classes (the middle class have far more therapy than the working class) ergo the sample group may not representative of the female population as a whole.
On a general point about age. Long term autobiographical memory is not operational before the age of around 5 and possibly as late as 7 in some people (a phenomena known as infantile amnesia) so abuse occuring before that couldn't be reported anyway.

[dearieme]

Since "the abuse is self reported" then "Researchers estimate that Canadian women who were first sexually abused between the ages of 7 and 12 were more likely to get degrees" is simply unfounded. It should read "Researchers estimate that Canadian women who claimed that they had been sexually abused, with the first abuse occurring between the ages of 7 and 12, were more likely to get degrees". And that leaves open to question just how wide a spectrum of activity is being covered by "abuse". That question might be hard to answer in a summary, but Social "scientists" do tend often to cast their definitions to suit the case that they're trying to make.

[james c]

I really don't see what this has to do with Dawkins.

[arched eyebrow]

stumbling, mumbling and now fumbling?