Marvin Schick writes in The Jewish Week:
While reading and reviewing two years ago a dreadful book on chassidic life, I came across a footnote citing a remarkably high incidence of sexual abuse among Orthodox Jewish women. The source was a May 7, 2004 article in the Forward reporting on a paper presented shortly before at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association. I was jolted and intrigued by the assertion that more than 25% of married Orthodox women participating in the survey said that they had experienced such abuse. The statistic was at once startling and I thought questionable. I contacted the two principal researchers and requested a copy of the paper, only to be told that it was not available and would not be available for perhaps two years.
I did not know at the time that in the same period, a companion – or perhaps the same – paper had been given at the annual meeting of the Orthodox Forum, a Modern Orthodox group, and that it had been sharply challenged, the upshot being that in what I have been told is a rarity for the group, the paper, entitled “Sexual Life of Observant Jewish Women,” was not accepted for publication in the book that includes the 2004 Orthodox Forum papers.
In fact, sexual abuse was a minor concern in that paper. Now, the November 2007 issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry, certainly a major publication, includes an article derived from the same study that served as the basis for the earlier paper. This one is on the “History of Past Sexual Abuse in Married Observant Jewish Women,” with Dr. Rachel Yehuda listed as the first of five authors and with the highlighted finding that “sexual abuse was reported by 26% of the respondents surveyed, with 16% reporting abuse occurring by the age of 13.”
This is now the definitive word on the subject, to be Googled for nearly all of eternity and regarded as authoritative and cited in books, newspapers and other publications. This newspaper did its part with a badly flawed article headlined, “No Religious Haven From Abuse.”
The Awareness Center responded with this call to action (here is their call on Yisroel Shapiro):
Marvin Schick lacks the information and education needed to be making any sort of public statement regarding the issue of sexual violence in Jewish communities. Unfortunately, the Jewish Week gave permission for Schick to have a voice to promote inaccuracies to the Jewish world.
It’s time we demand that Jewish newspapers only publish information and articles on the topic of sexual violence from those who have the appropriate credentials of being experts in the field of sexual violence — and not those who just who can afford to pay for full page ads, as in the case of Marvin Schick.
In Schtick’s article he attacks Rachel Yehuda, who is one of the foremost researchers in the trauma field. We all should be asking Marvin Schick to show us his resume so that we can determine his expertise in the field.
As a people we also must also demand honesty, transparency and accountablity from all of those who are attempting to influence the Jewish world. By not doing so we are allowing our community leaders to murder the neshema’s (souls) of those who have been sexually violated and their family members.
Rachel Yehuda writes:
I think the most insidious problem here is the use of a paid advertisement in the Jewish Week to undermine a scientific process. As a mental health professional and reader of the Jewish Week I find it incredulous that someone with no journalistic, clinical or scientific credentials at all can have a forum to discredit findings that have passed the rigorous process of peer review in a scientific journal.
It is one thing to be accused of writing a paper with "reckless scholarship and statistics" by a peer, and quite another by a layperson. I hope the Nefesh community will use its credibility to help set the record straight that talking about a mental health problem in the community does not constitute "group libel and severe cruelty toward observant Jews."
I hope the Nefesh community will be able to communicate to the Jewish Week that it is completely inappropriate to allow a paid advertiser to undermine the reporting of a finding in this manner, particularly since it was the Jewish Week itself who began all of this by publishing a story on the paper (for which they did interview me, but that is another issue). The paper we wrote was published in a peer review psychiatric journal with a large readership of mental health professionals who may treat members of the Observant community. It was written to make the point that clinicians should not fear discussing the possibility of sexual abuse even if their client/patient "seems" like they would be offended by such discussion. Even the most modest of women may have had such untoward experiences and if they did, therapy provides a safe place for discussion of these matters. Since over half the sample in our study sought mental health treatment, even if the sample is not representative of the general Observant population, it clearly is extremely relevant to clinicians treating such patients. Non-genital abuse was included specifically because it was reported as "abuse" by the respondents and was equally associated with mental health outcomes as genital abuse.
Mr. Schick was also mistaken in conjecturing that this paper must have been similar to the one presented, but ultimately not accepted for publication by the Orthodox Forum. That paper dealth with the primary aim of the survey — to examine relationshps among adherence to laws of family purity and sexual dysfuction and satisfaction, but not sexual abuse. The decision not to publish the paper in an Orthodox publication widely read by both singe and married laypersons was not based on the conclusions, but the frank and explicity language of the survey questions and answers.
It is particularly upsetting to see how certain Mr. Schick is that the sample we used was "less than 1/100th of those who refused to participate" since he has absolutely no way of knowing this. We discuss in the paper that given the nature of the distribution, we had no way of estimating the number of people who did not express interest by not asking for the questionnaire, but many did, and those who did returned the survey.
Furthermore, the absence of accurate information on the characteristics of Observant Jewish women prevents anyone – including Mr. Schick – from assessing the representativeness of the sample. A point we made in the paper was that constraining the sample to women who report regular use of the mikva prevented us from examining sexual abuse in other particularly relevant subgroups such as, married women who were raised observant but are now no longer so, or single women, including those never married, divorced, widowed, or gay. Perhaps this limitation also explains the high prevalence of ba’a lot teshuva in our sample, which we noted.
The rigorous process of peer review in scientific journals is designed to weed out the sensationalism that is often present in the media and paid advertisements. The purpose of publication was not to publicize the material to a general audience. We understood that the interesting topic would make it likely that it would be reported on elsewhere, but we had no control of how it would be reported. Even Mr. Schick acknowledged that we repeatedly discussed the studies limitations, some of which he reports. I hope the Nefesh community will help educate the public on this issue. It is terribly undermining to all of us for the Jewish Week to allow any person with a checkbook to say anything he pleases and jeopardize the work we need to do in education and treatment of the community.
Psychologist Michael J. Salamon (on the Awareness Center board) responds to Michael Schick:
I am amazed at how many of us are more interested in "shooting the messengers" than in attempting to use this information to help us serve our communities better. I was having a discussion about this topic the other day with a member of the Nefesh community who insisted that the study was not of rigorous random design and therefore could not be considered valid. I asked the person if they were familiar with survey techniques and non-parametric research. They were not. How then can they speak of validity in this study? They went on to say that they see a great many clients and only (ONLY!) about 10 percent of their have been sexually abused. My response was twofold: How can you generalize from your practice to another and that they do not specialize in these types of cases. I mentioned another of our colleagues who does specialize in this form of abuse who has more than half of their case load consisting of clients that were sexually abused. Are there flaws in this study? Sure. Does that invalidate it? Absolutely not (for statistical reasons far too complex to discuss here. (For those interested in this statistical issue I suggest you start with the many articles and books by Cohen & Cohen on power) The shame is that, even today, sexual predators may be encouraged to continue their ways because they take solace in the fact that the frum community is minimizing the problem. Please, let us take this study and use it to help our communities. Don’t shoot the messengers!
Marvin Schick has done another despicable thing.
To those who follow Schick’s writings, this is not surprising. Schick has spent much of his adult life covering for haredim.
When Hella Winston’s book Unchosen was published, Schick wrote a libelous review. I called him and challenged him to produce facts. He never did, at one point claiming illness as an excuse.
Schick libeled Winston on the pages of the New York Jewish Week, in an unlabeled advertisement meant to look like a news report or in-house column. The Jewish Week’s Associate Publisher Rich Waloff told me the line designating Schick’s ‘columns’ as advertising had "somehow" "inadvertently" "dropped out" months before. But Waloff did not understand why the Jewish Week had to answer any questions about its policies, and he refused to name the sponsor of Schick’s ads or to apologize to anyone for the lack of labeling.
