Every time I read about the history of medical research on trauma, I am exasperated by the ways male doctors completely just ignored sexual violence.

Imagine if women weren't shut out of the profession? How much progress in preventing & addressing it would we have reached?

A 13-year-old girl who started "acting up" during adolescence, freaks out when a strange man touches her, and has syphilis did not ring any alarms about sexual abuse for a University of Pennsylvania prof
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0263276412439406

his...specialty....was children.........

"Rather than gender, Burr emphasized the influence of racial issues, claiming that ‘savages’ were less likely to suffer mental disorders in childhood—"

OH MY GOD THE SENTENCE GOT WORSE.

Sexism, racism AND anti-semitism. yay.

I also can't get over this:

"In the section of his paper where he drew broader conclusions, he brusquely stated that ‘for brevity’s sake, I will omit the girls’ (although six of his eight detailed case studies involved female patients)."

SIX OUT OF EIGHT

this is a great example of male privilege. even if men personally do not feel any advantage in their day-to-day lives, they have the benefit of living in a modern world that is built on the thoughts and actions of men that still influence ALL of us today.

here's a thing about rape myths we don't often discuss.

Blaming the victim (even children!) was the norm in psychology in medicine until just a few decades ago.

unfortunately, we are technically in the infancy of understanding how to truly handle sexual violence.

Modern medicine, forensics, and law is built on over 150 years of racist, misogynist men's work who assumed sexual assault victims were liars and crazies—and *codified* it.

We...have a long way to go in dismantling that.

Hm. In 1868 "father of American gynecology" Horatio R. Storer wrote in "The Law of Rape" that a woman fighting back can't be raped.

His explanation? it's ‘impossible to sheath a sword into a vibrating scabbard’

And I thought "aspirin between the knees" was bad.

(fun fact: Storer is one of the OG pro-lifers who was virulently anti-abortion and rallied w/ white male doctors to take reproductive health care out of the hands of women.) https://timeline.com/horatio-storer-criminal-abortion-c433606491da

oh my GOD!!!!!!! On a 14-year-old survivor: doctors found "no lasting psychiatric significance, except for the fact that she ‘did not care for the opposite sex"

BECAUSE NOT WANTING MEN ANYMORE IS SO IMPORTANT

gosh. this paper is depressing and illuminating.