Op-Ed: One lesson from the Weinstein case is that men like me must speak out about abuse
The American Academy of Pediatrics recently issued a statement, based on a “review,” about the state of abuse in the United States. This is what one of the leaders of that movement said:
The United States today has more abuse victims than in all of the most violent times of the past 100 years, including the Civil War, the Spanish Civil War and the Holocaust. This is a public health concern.
This is a statement based on two studies, not just one. There is more abuse today than when the statement was issued — in fact, a new study shows there was more abuse in the 1990s than in the 1950s.
But this is not just the work of Dr. Elizabeth Whelan, the Director of the National Sexual Violence Resource Center in Washington. This was her work and the work of her colleagues in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of California, Berkeley.
In her testimony before Congress, Dr. Whelan spoke about two studies. One was called the “National Family Violence Survey” and it showed that there were more than 1.5 million cases of child abuse in the U.S. in 2003.
The other study was called the “National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System” and is still being conducted. This study, like the original, was a national one that included information from children all over the U.S. The study showed that the number of children admitted to state hospitals with injuries was 2.8 percent.
The statement issued by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) was about abuse in this country. It’s important for boys — both boys in general and gay boys — to hear what abuse is and how to deal with it. It wasn’t just about gay or lesbian or transgender abuse in this country, although the two studies pointed to that. It was about abuse between a father and his son.
And that’s because I’m a gay, working for a gay organization that is working for the gay community. We understand that some of you — of whom I am one — are not ready to come and talk about gay
