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New Zealand Listener
November 12 1994
Vol 146 No 2848):16-24
Accused!
by Noel O'Hare
Note
peterellis.org.nz:
Gordon and Colleen Waugh have given permission to be identified as the real
names for "Len" and "Julie Wade” referred to in this article
Abstract:
Talks to victims of false memory syndrome, those who have been falsely
accused of sexual abuse by their children. Looks at the devastating effect on
families and queries the authenticity of repressed or recovered memories.
In an interview just before her death, Mary told the Listener how her last
years had been turned into a nightmare when two of her sons accused her of
sexual abuse. The accusation was all
the more devastating for having come at the end of a pleasant family
holiday. The clan had rented a large
beach house for the weekend. They were
about to load their cars and depart, when one of Mary’s sons, Alan, got up to
speak. `I’d like to talk to you all
before you leave. I want to say
something to the whole family. I want
everybody to know that Mum sexually abused me when I was little.'
Mary could not believe what she was hearing. 'I didn’t know what he was
talking about. It just came out of the blue. I was just appalled. I couldn’t
let it go by and not say something, so I said it was ridiculous. It just
wasn’t true.'
Looking back, Mary was able to see that Alan’s announcement had not come out
of the blue. A few months before, he had been suffering from depression and
had gone to a counsellor. Gradually his behaviour changed and he became more
and more distant from her. 'We always got on awfully well, but he moved to a
flat and I hardly saw him. He had the
impression that his depression was related to his being at the house."
Mary was distressed by her son’s coolness, but it was only when he joined the
family at the beachhouse that she realised the extent of his antagonism. "He was annoyed with me the whole
weekend. I remember I sensed this terrible backing off and he was very
tense."
Alan’s public allegations, however, were a hurt beyond anything she could
imagine. "I could hear the voice endlessly coming at me, saying those
terrible things. I was an absolute wreck." Mary had never heard of false
memory syndrome - the validation of unreliable and uncorroborated memories
recovered in therapy - and the destruction caused when the person assiduously
avoids confrontation with any evidence to the contrary. A talk with her GP
and a psychiatrist friend helped. "When I understood it was happening to
other people, I was greatly comforted."
Mary was alert to the warning signs when another son Rod started to go to the
same counsellor. "He would say, ‘I’ve got this image of something
awfully unpleasant happening, but I don’t know who the person is.
I’ll wait until I have a sleep tonight and I’ll probably dream about it.’ Rod
became convinced that both his parents had sexually abused him. Some months later, he settled overseas and
joined an incest survivors’ group. One
day Mary received a 15-page letter from him.
`It went on endlessly and he went into horrendous detail of abuse dating
back to when he was four. I tried to answer it, but it was impossible. To
him, it was just denial.”
It took a long time for Mary to get over the hurt. "I went away on a
trip to Europe and when I got back I got a
little note from Rod with photographs of the children. The letter was just as if nothing had
happened. It was a very sweet note,
but I just couldn’t answer it. I
really didn’t want anything to do with him."
At the time of the interview Mary had learnt to live with the fact that her
sons believed she was a child molester.
"I’ve drawn back from it all. I gather you do that with something
really horrible." She was even hopeful that Alan would change his mind.
"I do think he is coming round to a different point of view." She
set off to Australia
to visit Rod and his family; a trip that filled her with some trepidation. She had not seen her son since his
accusations. How would he react if she mentioned it? She was on the visit to
her son when she died suddenly a week later.
"Those who trust in Him will understand the truth," read Alan at
his mother’s funeral. Rod did not attend. When I contacted Alan afterwards,
he had no comment to make about the sexual abuse allegations.
There is little scientific support for the theory that memories of traumatic
events, such as sexual abuse, can be repressed and recovered in graphic
detail several decades later. Though
details of traumatic events may be blocked out, the fact that they actually
took place is rarely forgotten (see box).
If Mary was the victim of her sons’ inept and destructive counselling,
then in some ways she was lucky. She
did not face criminal prosecution, most of her family refused to believe the
allegations and she was able to keep in contact with her sons. In Auckland
last month, a 59 year-old man was acquitted on charges of sexually abusing
three of his four daughters. The
charges were based on memories recovered in therapy. The allegations destroyed the family and
cost him $117,000 in legal fees. For
every allegation that gets to court, there are many others that do not, but
they still wreak quiet havoc in a family.
The Wades are just such a family.
The evening of May 6, 1992 is engraved on Len Wade’s memory. "My daughter came home, sat me down
and told me this absolutely horrific tale, of abuse that I had allegedly
perpetrated on her." Among the charges levelled at him and his wife
Julie was that he had arranged for a family friend to rape her when she was 1
and that Julie knew and condoned it.
He had also indecently assaulted her on many occasions. "She told me that ‘I had touched her
inappropriately by fondling her breasts and had therefore committed incest
with her’." Two months earlier Sandra had become depressed and had gone
to a counsellor. Her sister Maureen
had also gone with her to lend support.
According to Len and Julie, the sexual abuse incidents had been
recovered in therapy. "Sandra
told me her counsellor had advised her to confront me with these ‘secrets’ so
that she, Sandra, would be free of them and I would have to deal with them as
best I could. If I went to the
counsellor and confessed my ‘sins’, then I too could be helped."
Len Wade is a 58 year-old former engineer who has spent most of his working
life in the military. After retiring with a senior rank, he accepted a
civilian managerial position with his old employer. "My friends say that
in a negotiating sense the softest part of me is my teeth, and I guess they
say that with some reason," says Wade with some pride. He also prides
himself on being able to compartmentalise his life. The military boss is not the same man who
enjoys a joke at the golf club or who fulfils the role of husband and father
after 5.00pm. Inevitably, though, there is some crossover. You sense that no
matter what role he is in, he is not a man to suffer fools gladly, a man who
will remain cool under fire, no matter what the situation.
Certainly he remained cool that evening as his daughter made her accusations.
He told her that she was talking utter nonsense and ordered her to leave the
house. He sought advice from the police, then briefed his lawyer in case
criminal charges were brought against him.
"My method of defending myself was to attack them and I made no
bones about it. I went so far as to issue them with a trespass notice. People
say, ‘How on earth did you do that to your children?" Len felt he had no
option. Contact with his daughters would leave him open to further
allegations and he could think of no other way to defend himself Two months
later, Sandra made a written formal complaint to the police. It comprised six
typed pages that alleged a range of indecent assaults committed on her by her
father since she was four.
The Wades live in a comfortable house that they had built themselves in a
quiet, semirural area not far from the military base where Len used to be
stationed. The framed photographs on
the bookcase and walls tell the family history. The attractive woman in
military uniform is Julie of 36 years ago.
Alongside, a young Len in uniform, too. Pictures of Julie’s father and
mother also take pride of place next to those of Len and Julie’s
grandchildren. Four generations of family.
Len and Julie married in 1958. It was in many ways a typical services
marriage: the family shifted from base to base as Len moved up the
ranks. In fairly quick succession they
had two daughters - Sandra and Maureen - and then, after three years, another
daughter, Elsie. The album that Sandra compiled for her parents’ 30th wedding
anniversary in 1988 might be a photographic history of any family: the first
family car, smiling children on the beach squinting at the camera,
well-scrubbed faces in school uniform, family weddings. The Wade family was no different from any
other of the time, Len was head of the house and he drew the line at changing
nappies and other domestic chores. He admits he was a fairly strict father:
the children got spanked when they 'deserved it'.
As with many families, the trouble started when the children became
teenagers. It was the early 70s and rebellion was in the air. One evening,
after a school dance, Sandra declared that she had lost her virginity. "She came in and made this grand
announcement. Quite frankly it floored the lot of us. She would have been 14
and a half at that stage," recalls Len.
Despite excelling at school - her marks were often in the 90s - Sandra
decided to leave at 15, against her parents’ wishes. A year later she moved in with a
boyfriend. "What they call a
trial marriage," says Len disdainfully. "She was physically beaten,
introduced to drugs. She got pregnant and had a miscarriage." Both Len
and Julie believe many of Sandra’s problems stem from that traumatic period.
A year later, Sandra got pregnant. The
Wades had a family conference and Len, in his logical fashion, laid out the
options.
Sandra decided to marry the father.
The marriage failed after two years and she moved back home with her
daughter Beth. Another marriage some years later lasted 18 months. "She has been living at home for most
of the years before, between and after her marriages. She has been in and out of jobs and on and
off the DPB. Beth is now 18 and has
lived with us for most of her life," says Len.
Four years after her second marriage, Sandra decided to strike out on her own
and get a flat, while Beth divided her time between her mother and her
grandparents. In March 1992, Sandra began seeing the counsellor. Three months
later, she made her complaint to the police. They took statements from
Maureen, who supported the allegations, and from Elsie, who did not. Julie
was not formally interviewed, but Len was required to do a video-taped
interview at the police station. The police decided not to prosecute for lack
of evidence.
Len believes that it was only his training that saved him from a prison
sentence. "I was in deep thinking
mode. When you are under pressure of
that nature, unless you can think clearly, you can fall into a trap. And I was absolutely determined that I was
not going to prison for something I did not do. All my training and
experience came into play."
Len was able to point out that the initial allegations made to the family in
May bore no relation to the statement that Sandra made to police. There was,
for instance, no mention of the claim that he had set up and condoned his
daughter’s rape by a family friend.
Some time later, Sandra, in conversation with a TV documentary maker,
alleged that her father had repeatedly raped her since she was 12 and that
she had been a virgin at the time. This contradicted her statements that she
was a virgin when she was allegedly raped by a family friend and her
contradicted her announcement to the family that she had lost her virginity
after a school dance. Comments Len: "She was the only woman I came
across who claimed to have lost her virginity to three different men!"
Julie cannot understand why, if sexual abuse was a recurring pattern as
Sandra alleged, no one was aware of it.
"We lived so close to each other.
There were only three bedrooms in many of the houses we stayed in and
the girls had to share." In addition, they had Julie’s mother living
with them for most of that time, and later two grandchildren.
Elsie is adamant that the allegations are false. A few days before Sandra
confronted her parents, she rang Elsie to tell her of the abuse and find out
where she stood. "Her counsellor
said she must surround herself only with people who support her," but
Elsie was unable to lend that support.
"I can’t believe my father did it. I have no proof, but he has
never touched me and he had ample opportunity. He never touched Beth."
Later, when the police interviewed her, she was unable to reconcile what
Sandra had said in her statement with what she had told her two months
earlier. One alleged incident suggested to Elsie that the charges against her
father were fantasies. "According
to Sandra, Dad had invited a group of men to the house and made her undress
in front of them. Well, you don’t do that sort of thing if you live on a
military base. It’s a very tightknit
community. It doesn’t stay within four
walls. It just wouldn’t happen."
But why would her sister make such charges against her father if they weren’t
true? "You have to have lived with Dad and Sandra to understand. Sandra
is pure emotion and Dad’s pure logic. It’s like trying to mix oil and
water." Her sister, she says, has always been a difficult person who
demanded and got most of the attention from her parents. "She’s very emotional, very
suggestible, very melodramatic and very jealous."
The Wades are at a loss to understand why two of their daughters have turned
against them. "The fact of the matter," says Len, "is that we
shared everything we could possibly share." When Sandra wanted to be a
potter, Len built a kiln in the back garden.
When she switched to photography, they arranged tuition. When her first marriage failed, they raised
her daughter. When she remarried and
wanted a fancy dress wedding reception at home, the Wades footed the
bill. They paid the fares back and
forth to Australia
for her and her daughter. "We
have always given our daughters whatever they wanted," says Julie. "If we are to be blamed for some
crime, the crime is loving those kids and giving them whatever they asked for
financially, physically, emotionally. They had only to say, ‘Mum, can I have
something?’ and I’d say, ‘Yep.’ Because, fortunately, we could afford
it."
"What was the crucial factor in flipping them from a normal stable
existence to what they’ve got now?" asks Len. "It was nothing we did. What went
wrong is they went to see a counsellor."
The Wades wanted to put their side of the story to the counsellor, but they never
got the opportunity. "We
phoned. We wrote. We left messages. We did everything we could reasonably do,
short of laying a complaint with the police ourselves about false
allegations." Most of all they wanted to show the counsellor the album
that Sandra had given them for their 30th anniversary inscribed "from
the tribe with love". To Len, the
album of happy family snaps said it all.
"Either the allegations are true or the 30-plus years of
collective data is true. They can’t
both be true."
For Sandra and Maureen, family history has had to be rewritten to fit with
this view of their parents as child molesters. In the feminist psychological approach
favoured by Sandra’s counsellor, abusers are often family tyrants who
sexually abuse their children to control and dominate them. The dynamics of the family echo the
dynamics of the patriarchal society, where men economically and sexually
oppress all women, keeping them powerless and compliant. Viewed from this vantage point, acts of
parental generosity take on new meaning: they are attempts to control and
manipulate.
The Wades have lost two daughters as well as the two granddaughters they had
partly raised. "They’re not
allowed to see us and I daren’t see them," says Len. "It affects them directly. When they get married and have children,
it’s also going to affect their children.
It’s an insidious process."
Elsie has also suffered. "It has
affected my relationship with my son.
I was very scared to touch him, because I didn’t want him to come back
and accuse me of sexually abusing him.
I don’t think that is really fair and I’m trying to put it
aside." Her sisters have cut all communication with her because she
doesn’t go along with the allegations "I’ve lost two thirds of my family
as well." Her family now exists only in photographic keepsakes and she
dreads the day when her son asks why he never sees his aunties. "I’m going to have to tell him and I
don’t know what it’s going to do to him.
He adores his granddad and it’s going to ruin that relationship."
The Wades have resigned themselves to the fact that they may always be
non-persons to the two elder daughters and their children. "Because of the traumatic situation we
find ourselves in, we have written it all down and we have left it with our
lawyers in case the grandchildren ever want to read our story," says
Julie. "It’s the only way, at the
moment, that we can have our say. And
hopefully one day someone will be curious enough to know why a grandfather and grandmother
disappeared."
How would they react if one day their daughters recanted?
"I wouldn’t reject them," says Julie, "because, after all,
we’re not bad people. How long would
it take to get back to where we were and how many years have we got ahead of
us?"
"Trust has been absolutely destroyed," says Len. "I can never trust either of my
daughters again. If they did recant,
how do you rebuild trust of that special nature after such a horrendous set
of events? I would say, with the utmost difficulty."
If the telephone conversation I had with Sandra is any guide, the chances of
her recanting are slim. Though her
parents claim that she told them she had recovered the memories in therapy,
Sandra now denies it.
"I have not forgotten anything. I went to a counsellor because I needed
to know how to deal with what was happening to me. She didn’t tell me I was being sexually
abused. I told her. I’ve been dealing with it my whole
life. I spoke to my mother about it
when I was 12 - 22 years before I went to see a counsellor."
If your parents are child molesters, why did you leave your daughter to live
there?
"I didn’t leave my daughter to live there, I lived there myself."
Your parents said you went to Australia,
for instance.
"I went to Australia
on their advice . I’m fed up with this nonsense. They can’t get over it. They can’t do anything constructive to help
themselves or their families. Look, I
spoke to my mother when I was 12 years old.
And I’ve spoken to her many times since. Her constant answer was, ‘Oh he didn’t mean
it like that.’ Tell me what did he mean it like? What did he do that he
didn’t mean?"
What do you say he did do?
"None of your goddamn business, is it? It’s my life. I’ve had to live with this my whole
life. I’m trying to make an effort to
make my life healthy for me. If they
don’t want to be part of that, well, stuff them."
The difficulty for me as a journalist is that you remained living at home all
those years.
"I don’t care if it’s a difficulty for you. You weren’t brought up in my family. You have no idea what it was like to live
with those people. They are control
freaks. I did absolutely everything
they told me to. If they said go to Australia, I bloody went to Australia. When they said come home, I came home. If they said jump, I’d say how high? I
might have protested about it, but they were still controlling me. I had no life of my own. I did what they told me. You didn’t live in it, you weren’t
subjected to all the bloody threats and the beatings and the whole bloody
works that goes with it. Of course you
wouldn’t understand. The last two and
half years I have had my life to myself and it’s been the best years of my
life. And if anybody, but anybody,
goes to ruin it, I’ll fight to the death."
SEXUAL ABUSE allegations always leave damaging doubt. Len and Julie Wade will never be free of
that. As Elsie says: "The real
story is that nobody’s ever going to know.
It’s only between Dad and Sandra.
Nobody knows what goes on behind closed doors."
In another case, that of Margaret, a middle-aged woman, the facts of the case
are somewhat more verifiable. In
February 1993, Margaret’s daughter Sarah became depressed and went to see a
counsellor at the Presbyterian Support Services counselling centre. The first hint that something was wrong was
when Margaret received a garbled phone call from her daughter. "She said that we’d kept things from
her when she was young: ‘You must think I’m a fool if you think you can keep
that sort of thing from me.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ and she slammed the
phone down."
The accusation became clear a few days later.
Margaret’s ex-husband Andrew received a letter accusing him of
supervising a group rape on Margaret at a party when Sarah was a child. As a result of witnessing the rape, she had
been traumatised and had become a failure.
Margaret and her family quickly found that there was no point in trying to
convince Sarah that it had never happened.
"She told us that her counsellor said we had forgotten and her
father was too drunk to remember. We were
all in denial and we needed counselling ourselves. My daughter said that she wouldn’t see her
father unless he was prepared to confess it was true."
"I just thought the world had gone mad," says Margaret. Afraid that her daughter might try to commit
suicide, she tried to get her admitted to the psychiatric unit at Wellington Hospital. After making inquiries, the hospital told
her that they were happy to leave her in the care of the counsellor, who was
a middle-aged woman with a high success rate.
Inquiries to the Presbyterian Support Services led nowhere. "Nobody wanted to talk to us. Everywhere we went a door slammed in our
face. Believe me, we were treated like
the enemy."
Even when her daughter disappeared, Margaret could get no help. Eventually she traced her to a private
hotel. "She received me very
lovingly, but she was trembling and terrified her father was going to
appear."
The "memory" has had a
devastating effect on the family. When
Sarah first accused her parents, she also contacted her brother. He at first believed her - he’d been away
at school at the time - and had bitter rows with both parents. Andrew has been so traumatised by his
daughter’s accusation that he is on medication for high blood pressure. It has ruined both parents’ relationship
with their daughter. When she first
cut off all contact with them, they sent her gifts. They were returned with the note that
Margaret still has: "I will not accept this from liars. I think you are trying to buy me back. I am a big girl now and I can survive
without gifts anyway.
Though she now sees her mother occasionally and has been in telephone contact
with her father, any attempt to dissuade her that the rape never happened is
met with hostility. On one occasion
when the subject was raised, Margaret tried to show her information that she
had collected on false memory syndrome.
"`If only you would look at this, If you’d let me speak,’ I
said. And she lashed out with her hand
and struck me."
Margaret is a sensible, middle-class woman and hardly the type to have
consorted With motorcycle gangs or other groups who condone or practise gang
rape. Though she remembers they did
have parties in Sarah’s youth, they were mostly attended by fellow members of
the local amateur operatic society.
The wildest thing Margaret can ever remember happening is someone
eating lettuce while standing on his head.
"I was not gang raped. He did not
stand over me and laugh while he supervised the gang rape. He is completely incapable of that. I’ve never been raped or abused," she
says emphatically.
Margaret is bewildered by it all.
"I always thought that the worst thing that could affect us,
apart from death, is that if they went on drugs. But, you know, if my daughter was on drugs
I could understand her behaviour, why she’s bizarre.
How can they do this to people’s minds?" Margaret cannot understand why
the counsellor accepted her daughter’s story without corroboration and
allowed her to confront the family with her damaging accusation.
"It’s just been a nightmare and it’s an ongoing one," she says.
"If there’s one thing that I have wanted all the way through this, it’s
to see the counsellor. I think we have
the right, don’t you?"
Presbyterian Support Services refuses to name the counsellor, claiming
confidentiality under the Privacy, Act, but did agree to meet Margaret. Since she was invited to bring a friend for
support, I went too, not disclosing that I was a journalist.
The meeting with human resources manager Lorraine Ward and counselling
supervisor Rod Sandal lasted two hours.
Margaret was again refused the name of her daughter’s counsellor. Nor was it possible for PSS to contact the
counsellor and ask if she would be willing to meet Margaret. The counsellor had since left and they could
see no point in contacting her.
"But I hear what you’re saying.
You are saying you’ve been hurt by all this," says Sandal
reassuringly. Though her daughter’s
counsellor did, nothing unethical, Sandal admits that there may have been
problem with "containment’- in other words, whatever fantasies of abuse
the client entertains are okay as long as they are confined to the therapy
sessions. (The implications of this only strike me later - is it ethical and
moral for a counsellor to allow a client to build his or her recovery on the
serious calumny of someone else?)
"We work with what the client brings up, says Ward". So, if a client said they had been raped by
Jim Bolger and the entire cabinet, you wouldn’t say, ‘Hold on a
minute’?" I ask incredulously. "No, because it’s not beyond the bounds
of possibility," says Ward. So
you accept no responsibility for what happened to Margaret and her family?
"No, says Sandal. Neither is
prepared to acknowledge that the gang rape never happened. "We just can’t do that" says
Ward.
In real cases of sexual abuse it is a central tenet that experience must be
validated by others so that the abused person can heal. The reverse may also be true. Those, like Margaret, who are falsely
labelled as victims yearn to hear people say: "Yes, we believe it never
happened to you." Ever since her daughter made the accusation, Margaret
has longed for the opportunity to ask the counsellor if she believed her
daughter’s story. It is a question
that keeps nagging her.
A FEW DAYS after the unsatisfactory meeting with Presbyterian Support
Services, she obtains the name of the counsellor from an unofficial
source. After 18 months of being
fobbed off, it feels like a major breakthrough. "I do appreciate that under the
Privacy Act there may be certain things you can’t talk about" she says,
when she finally makes contact by phone.
"But I do have a vested interest.
After all, I am supposed to be the victim. After the way my daughter reacted, I do
feel I have the right to know how she came by that belief and whether you
believe it."
"I’m sorry," says the confident voice. "You’ll have to contact Presbyterian
Support Services."
"I’ve already spoken to them.
It’s from you that I want to know."
"I was a trainee counsellor in that period of my life. I’m not involved in counselling
anymore. I’m very sorry for you, but I
can’t discuss it." "I just want to know, did you believe?"
"I’m sorry, I’m going to put the phone down now..."
[Mary and Margaret did not want to be identified in the story. Len, Julie and
Elsie Wade were happy to have their real names used because they said they
had nothing to hide, but the names of all the Wade family and some details
were changed on legal advice.]
Documented cases of recovered memory follow a predictable pattern. A woman in
her 30s, who is suffering perhaps from depression or bulimia, goes to a
counsellor. She may be asked whether she has ever been physically or sexually
abused. Sometimes she will be requested to record her dreams, keep a journal or
establish contact with the "inner child". Techniques such as guided
fantasy work, body work or hypnotism may be used. After weeks or months of
therapy, shadowy images of abuse begin to form in her mind. As these
"memories" are discussed and clarified, they become more vivid and
concrete. The face of the "offender" may swim into focus. She may
be recommended The Courage to Heal by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis. This self
help book has become the incest survivor’s bible and will confirm any
suspicion of sexual abuse. "If you don’t remember your abuse, you are
not alone. Many women don’t have memories and some never get memories.
This doesn’t mean they weren’t abused ... If you think you were abused and
your life shows the symptoms, then you were, the authors confidently assert.
Confronting the `abuser' is a central rite of passage for incest
survivors. It is not only therapeutic
but heroic. "You are challenging
the secrecy that is the foundation of abusive family structures. You are taking revolutionary steps towards
self-respect and respect for all children.
You are exercising your power. The inevitable result of confrontation is
acrimony, split families, wrecked lives and even prison sentences. If the literature is any guide, clients are
never given the common-sense warning about confrontation: you better be
damned sure you re right.
Unfortunately for all concerned, the authenticity of repressed or recovered
memories is deeply suspect. As Elizabeth Loftus, Professor of Psychology at
the University
of Washington and an
acknowledged expert in memory, has pointed out, there are few studies that
actually support the theory of repressed memory. Moreover, each of these
oft-quoted studies is flawed. Most research suggests that, far from
repressing traumatic memories, people have difficulty forgetting them. Says
Harvard psychiatrist Dr Harrison Pope: "In a study of 16 children who
witnessed a parent murdered, all 16 remembered the murder vividly. In studies
of children kidnapped on a school bus, children involved in a sniper attack,
and in survivors of marine disasters, concentration camps and war atrocities,
all of the individuals remembered the events, often in painful detail. Rather than having amnesia, they seem to
have hypernesia for the events."
If the memories are not real, where do they come from?
Contrary to popular belief, memory is not like a video-tape or a computer
hard disk. We reconstruct the past in
our brains, taking the facts and weaving them into coherent and plausible
stories that are recreated with each telling.
Emotion and imagination influence the memories. In experiments, Lotus and others have
demonstrated just how easy it is to create memories by suggestion. Though therapists will not admit that they
implant ideas about sexual abuse, Lotus remains unconvinced. Even if
clinicians are not the first to bring up sexual abuse, they will often
reinforce what begins as a mere suspicion."
In the
jargon of recovered memory therapy, the therapists may be 'in denial'.
Lotus notes that a 1991 study, by psychiatric researcher Sherrill Mulhern,
documents `alarming discrepancies that often exist between therapists’
accounts of what they have done in therapy and what is revealed in video or
audio tapes ‘of the same sessions'.
Despite the documented unreliability of recovered memories, people have been
imprisoned and families torn apart by accusations made without
corroboration. In the US,
about 14,000 families have contacted the False Memory Syndrome Foundation,
set up to aid victims of false allegations.
In New Zealand,
Cosa (Casualties of Sexual Allegations) knows of at least 50 families
affected, and suspects there are many more.
But the tide appears to be turning. New books such as The Myth of Repressed Memory.
by Elizabeth Loftus, are adding to a
groundswell of dissent by US academics.
In June, the American Medical Association’s Council of Scientific
Affairs issued a report that concluded `The AMA considers recovered memories
of childhood sexual abuse to be of uncertain authenticity, which should be
subject to external verification. The
use of recovered memories is fraught with problems of misapplication ... Most
controversial are those ‘memories’ that surface only in therapy and those
from either infancy or late childhood (including adolescence).'
Dr Felicity Goodyear-Smith, executive director of Cosa, believes the tide may
be turning here. ‘The problem is that
the training of therapists here has been, and still is, full of
misinformation. Research papers and reputable
data often don’t reach them because it’s considered to be part of the
backlash.'
Goodyear-Smith, one of the pioneers in the sexual abuse field, is considered
part of the backlash association with Centrepoint - she is married to Bert
Potter’s son John, who was imprisoned for indecent assault - has led some to
dismiss her arguments without examining their validity.
Goodyear-Smith believes the problem lies not with the fantasies, but with the
counsellor’s acceptance of them. “The
counsellor should validate the feelings, but not the content. ‘I can’t know whether what you tell me
happened or not. But I can certainly
hear you’re suffering.”’ Yet, most therapists, impressed by their client’s
pain, tend to believe what they hear even when it touches on the
bizarre. In two large-scale studies of
therapists dealing with satanic ritual abuse an "overall 93 percent of
clinicians believed that the alleged harm was actually done and that
ritualistic aspects were actually experienced by the client", says Loftus.
Goodyear-Smith believes that we’ve come a long way since the early 80s in
recognising that sexual abuse is tragically commonplace. But finding sexual abuse where it doesn’t
exist only undermines public credibility and redirects resources from real sexual
abuse victims. "To create sexual
abuse where there was none is potentially just as damaging and harmful as
actually being sexually abused", she adds. "Any therapist who’s doing it is
causing as much abuse as any abuser."
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