Another Crisis Hiding in Plain Sight

“Siblings that say they never fight are most definitely hiding something.”

– Lemony Snicket

The online London Free Press rarely contains much that I would call ‘news’. You know, information about important things happening in London. This is because they have no real reporters or other resources needed to gather news. What they have are ‘writers’ – and telephones and email.

Top articles this morning on the website are an interview with a retired UWO prof who was given an award, and a story about a school board trustee saying that the board’s deficit puts special education and class sizes ‘at risk’.

Not reporting. Just talking and then writing up what was said.

And, if you go further down the website, you come to a story with this title:

Two-thirds report sibling violence in first-of-its-kind Canadian study

With the subtitle –

Researchers say the findings highlight an often-overlooked form of family violence and its lasting effects.

Lord deliver us from findings that highlight an often-overlooked anything.

I dunno, do you think maybe it is overlooked because it’s trivial? Or silly, even?

Anyway, a King’s sociology prof, one Joseph Michalski, has apparently ‘co-led’ a ‘study’ to find out the incidence of ‘sibling violence’.

I went to the King’s website and found Michalski’s info. Sadly, one cannot find there any actual details of said study, only that it has been funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council. Perfectly good federal tax dollars, in other words.

That means that all I can judge this by is what is written in the Freeps.

One thing that is written is that ‘Michalski and his team interviewed 606 young adults aged 18 to 24 from all 10 provinces, asking them to recall their experiences of sibling violence and bullying between the ages of 12 and 18.’

I can imagine those interviews. ‘So, Bill, when did your brother stop beating you?’

More seriously, how were those 606 interviewees selected? No idea, and it matters. A lot. What we do know, and I have written often about this, is that this is a voluntary survey, hence the respondents are all, by definition, self-selected. They are thus not, and cannot be, a random sample of the population. Not possible. And, because we don’t know anything about the process by which they came to be interviewed, we don’t know how bad that self-selection bias might be.

Here’s the big finding, and you had to see this coming:

The study found 67 per cent of participants reported experiencing or perpetrating sibling violence. The figure was slightly higher among male participants, at 72 per cent, than among female participants, at 62 per cent.

My god, a 67% incidence of violence. The horror!

I am led to wonder, what counts as ‘violence’ in this survey?

Don’t worry, the prof is on it.

Michalski said the study does draw a line between typical sibling rivalry, such as roughhousing, and abuse.

And where is that line?

The most common forms of violence reported were what Michalski described as low-grade violence, involving some form of aggressive behaviour such as pushing or slapping that did not result in injury.

Right. Pushing that did not result in injury. That got classified as ‘violence’. Low-grade, but violence.

Man, I had a violent childhood. Well, 2/3 of us apparently did, right? Survey says!!

More from the prof:

Michalski said participants who experienced sibling violence were more likely to report higher levels of depression than those who did not. That relationship will be the focus of another study by his team.

Of course it will, they have SSHRC money to spend. And you may be sure that the second study will not focus on the fact that ‘those who report x also tend to report y’, but rather on the terrible tragedy that ‘those who experienced x also experienced y’.

The final lines from the article:

“What we hope to achieve here is certainly to raise awareness that a lot of the stuff that’s going on within families that has long been accepted or normalized can have some real serious consequences,” he said.

Michalski said he and his team hope to work with parents, school systems and family service agencies to raise awareness of the issue.

Ah, yes, that’s how it starts, ‘raising awareness’ of an issue whose existence you just conjured up out of thin air. Then it moves on to asserting ‘serious consequences’, based on nothing more than what self-selected folks claimed.

We know what comes next, and where it ends. The Government of Canada will one day boldly put forward a new statute in the Criminal Code, defining siblicide as a crime with special penalties. This crisis must be met head-on, folks.