”This is from the same article in which 70% of therapists stated that clients had
reported direct sexual contact with a previous therapist....NOTE: IT ALSO STATES
"Only four to eight percent of victims ever report the sexual contact."
As Karen pointed out at the time, such "statistics" have to be taken with some care. There could in theory have been only one sexual contact and that one individual visited many therapists. But that's unlikely. Let's look more closely at this.
I don't know how long a massage lasts, but presumably not more than an hour. Say a therapist can do eight a day. Assume some vacancies in the daily schedule, but allow 30 massages a week. I have no idea whether this is accurate, but it's presumably in the ball park for full time therapists, who would presumably be the ones joining therapists organizations. Assume 50 working weeks a year, that's 1,500 massages a year. Assume half of those are repeats, that's 750 clients a year. Or maybe fewer, there may be some multiple repeats, though there are also many therapists working in resort spas, on cruise ships, etc. who presumably have few repeat customers. So allow 500 clients a year average. And assume that some clients come on from year to year. Still, in a ten year period, an average full time therapist could certainly be assumed to see 1,000 separate clients, and in the case of spas, cruise ships, etc. perhaps as many as 15,000 separate clients.
There don't have to be very many inappropriate touching incidents for 70% of those therapists to report that at least one client experienced one. The surprise may be that it's not closer to 100%. I suppose some therapists have been in business fewer than 10 years, though others will have been in it far longer than that, so it will balance out.
Also, we don't know what "direct sexual contact" is defined as. Is it a therapist brushing the breast of a woman? Is it intercourse? Is it prolonged massaging of the sexual organs? We have no idea.
Basically, then, all your statistic tells us is that direct sexual contact does happen on occasion, but we have no idea how often, and it could be a quite significant or a quite minimal problem.
Statistics are often like that -- they sound ominous at first, but on evaluation turn out to be much less significant than they first appear. |
