> there are some topics that I feel a moral responsibility for taking a stand on.

Yeah. But WHY do you feel a moral responsibility to take the particular stand you have taken? Is it because you feel that if we say that certain acts may or may not be acts of abuse committed by abusers against victims then - that is to undermine or invalidate the suffering of people who experienced that and / or that is to condone the act?

I don't think I invalidate or deny the suffering of people... But maybe I'm wrong on that. I also don't condone acts like hitting or calling names etc. So... I guess I'm not really seeing that we disagree with respect to that...

> I cannot bear to be part of something that might cause pain and harm to people.

Yeah. One of the things I'm interested in, though, is that harm that MAY be caused to people by our encouraging them (or by our encouraging ourselves) to see things in 'persecutor', 'victim', 'abuse' terms. I guess... I'm looking out for the harms, too.

> Some conversations are best not aired IMO.

But if they aren't aired then we won't get the chance to see whether something dodgey is going on with lines of reasoning. For example... It was once found that yellow people were smarter than white people were smarter than black people. What to do with that finding? One thing you could do (one thing that was done) was to use that to justify implementing certain social policies - where it was pointless to educate the innately stupid and where one didn't want ones country to be full of stupid immigrants. Another thing you could do (something that people often suggest) is to just sweep this finding under the rug somewhere and forget about it - because it simply is too horrific. Another thing you could do (what was eventually done) is say to yourself - 'this really doesn't sound right to me, I'm pretty sure things aren't that way' and look at the studies a little bit harder. The tests of 'IQ' were problematic (culturally biased so that recent immigrants were severely disadvantaged). The population sample was problematic (recent immigrants aren't representative of the rest of their race). The inference from the finding to 'innately genetic' is problematic as they didn't adequately control for (what have been subsequently been shown to be) massive environmental confounds like level of education and social class.

It was holding the finding up to scrutiny that enabled us to make progress on this issue. We came to learn that environmental circumstances play a bigger role than heredity and now we try and implement that in social policy - by providing education for all. That wouldn't have come to be if we had refused to face the finding and wonder about 'how come'?

> The thesis of my paper was that because of her lack of attachment, the neurons needed for this development died off.

Ah. Well... The trouble is that Genies parents said that she never was a normal infant / child. So... It emerged that she was severely developmentally / intellectually disordered BEFORE she was subjected to her confinement and isolation. Her parents said they isolated her precisely because she was not normal. So... Is it the chicken or the egg? Did attachment and language fail because she was already disordered, or did the absence of attachment and language result in her disorder? The initial excitement was over the thought that she was the second... During the courtcase it emerged that it was an example of the first - and hence the loss of interest in, and ultimate institutionalization of Genie...

(Of course there is OTHER evidence out there that early experiences have an impact on the pathways in the brain that are formed and that it can be hard for people to break out of those habitual ways of thinking / feeling / relating. Genie doesn't support that over nativist / innate alternative theories of neural development, though...).