KEY POINTS:
Two men spoke out bravely this week on controversial issues affecting this country, and both deserve to be listened to because what they have to say is worth serious consideration.
One was Professor David Fergusson, of the Christchurch School of Medicine, who cast grave doubts on the validity of the latest World Health Organisation report on child sex abuse.
The other was NZ First leader Winston Peters, who maintained that the protesters marching against the police raids in the Ureweras were, in fact, supporting apartheid.
Dr Fergusson, one of New Zealand's most respected and trusted social scientists, said the WHO survey on child sexual abuse, which alleged one in four Kiwi girls were so abused, contained major flaws that seriously limited its value.
No way, he said, should it be used to frame public policy.
Writing in the Sunday Star-Times, Professor Fergusson said the main flaw was that the method of questioning was non-specific, so the degree of alleged abuse by respondents wasn't known. Respondents were asked if anyone "had ever touched you sexually or made you do something sexual you didn't want to do".
"This question encompasses a wide range of sexual experiences ranging from mild incidents of inappropriate touching to severe and repeated rape," wrote Professor Fergusson. "The difficultly with the survey is there is no method of assessing the severity of abuse."
This error, he said, repeated flaws in research conducted in the 1980s and '90s in which simple questions were used to make sweeping statements about the prevalence of childhood sexual abuse.
More importantly, it had been a well-established principle of modern sexual abuse research that prevalence estimates should be accompanied by descriptions of abuse severity.
That this was still not being done meant that "the public is being exposed to claims of 'shocking rates' of childhood sexual abuse without any clear idea being given of the incidents being classified as abusive".
Professor Fergusson said the public needed to ask searching questions about the process that led to substantial amounts of funding being devoted to studying sexual abuse in women without a parallel investment being made into researching men's experiences.
Because males were omitted in the gender-biased research design, "we do not know the exact prevalence of sexual abuse in either Maori or non-Maori populations".
Continued Professor Fergusson: "My overall reaction when reading this report was that I had been transported back to the late 1980s ...
"The risks of this type of research are, potentially, to evoke sexual abuse hysteria in which the public comes to believe that a large fraction of the female child population is subject to serious assaults during childhood."
I have never believed that one in four little girls is subjected to sexual abuse in this country, so I take great comfort from Professor Fergusson's analysis.
What I do wonder about are the motives of those who frame and undertake such "research". Judging by the reaction of spokeswomen for such outfits as Rape Crisis and Rape Prevention Education, it could simply be a means of trying to wheedle more money out of the Government.
Now for Mr Peters. He told his party's annual conference that the people protesting about the arrest of colourful Maori activist Tama Iti were doing so not because he was innocent (or guilty), "but because he is brown".
"We once marched against apartheid," he said, "now we are marching for it. What type of country do we live in when it is not the malcontents with the guns that get turned on by society, but the police?" Mr Peters accused Labour and National of tolerating separatism " ... because they do not want to cause offence".
Mr Peters is right. Maori, in particular, get away with all sorts of unacceptable behaviour, and are given all sorts of preferential treatment, simply because they are Maori.
And few are prepared to criticise because they are terrified of being labelled "racist".
Well, you can call me a racist until you're blue in the face and I don't give a damn.
I came to live, after all, in the Maori capital of New Zealand.
The fact is that it's not the Urewera raids that have set race relations in this country back 100 years, it's the reaction of the Maori (and some Pakeha) activists and their lawyers, and the dishonest and inflammatory pronouncements of such "leaders" as Pita Sharples and Hone Harawira.
Good on Mr Peters for telling it like it is.
