Dahlia Lithwick of Slate has this column on whether a witness who tells you that s/he was molested years ago as a child but never mentioned it because the memory was "repressed" all this time and was only brought out during talk therapy or after hypnosis should be believed.
This is a subject of particular interest, as I've had occasion to deal with accusations so based, and have written about it in articles posted to this site on the character of memory. Do our minds work like tape recorders, in which if you peel away some layer of emotion, and the memory is waiting there, intact, ready to be unfurled in all its living glory and oh, so reliable? That's what believers in repressed memory want to believe, and want you to believe.
Or is memory more like reconstructing "My Fair Lady," long after the production has shut down and the props used elsewhere.
Memory is more like reconstruction, where some of the parts are missing. The left-brain's interpreter, according to Michael S. Gazzaniga, neuropsychologist, in The Mind's Past (U.C., 1998), fills in the missing pieces, making them up out of whole-cloth based on what is expected according to current need and belief. All lies, in other words.
Allegedly "repressed" memory is based on the idea that if something terrible happens to you as a child, you are somehow able to patch it over and forget about it. WWII concentration camp survivors would probably love to be able to do that. With sex its somehow said to be different. I've had jurors in rape prosecutions ask to be excused as older women because they'd been sexually assaulted while young and the prospect of re-dealing with the memory troubled them so.
Sigmund Freud, the toppled-God of 20th century psychology, thought there was something to the idea, having invented it. How is it possible that he could have invented a theory of mind that everyone else before him missed, I wonder, including Aristotle the biologist. Karl Popper gives Freud his due by pointing out that little that Freud hypothesized was capable of scientific testing, which made it pseudo-science. With Freud's theories one could hypothesize contradictory results, both either true or both false. Other than that, fascinating.
Freud has been supplanted in modern psychiatry by pills.
The problem is at its worst when the witness is unable to provide the original source for a alleged memory, making it both groundless and worthless on which to build a legal case, such as a criminal prosecution or suit for money damages.
See Daniel L. Schacter's The Seven Sins of Memory (Houghton Mifflin, 2001). He's Chair of the Harvard U. Dept. of Psychology.
See also False Memory Syndrome. There was a whole institution set up to deal with all the false memories that fed on each other to form a huge wave of false prosecutions during the 1980s. Researchers Elizabeth Loftus and Stephen Ceci showed experimentally how children could be suggested to "remember" things that had never happened, simply by talking to them as though certain false events had happened, reassuring them that their friends saw, or experienced it.
Most false accusations of child sexual abuse, when not the outright lies of a motivated young person, are enabled with the support of an adult confederate who is the real motivator and energy behind pushing the falsity to the limit.
Google this site for further references.
See also:
McMartin Pre-School Case
Kern County, California Attorney-General's report
Little Rascals Day Care Case, N. or S. Carolina
Jordan, Minnesota
Devereaux, 9th Circuit, State of Washington prosecutions
"Psychiatric Misadventures," article in American Scholar, by the head of the Dep't of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins U. Medical School;
Richard J. Ofshe, U.C. Dept. of Sociology, false confessions
Lawrence Wright, The New Yorker Magazine, on the Thurston County, State of Washington prosecutions;
False Memory Syndrome Institute, Philadelphia
Ms. Lithwick has this link to investigator Paul Ciolino, Chicago, IL, who has a number of excellent suggestions as to what to look for when investigating a false accusation based on allegedly recovered memory, i.e. formerly repressed memory until somehow either uncovered, or more likely, suggested by a motivated talk-therapist.
There's money in talk-therapy, remember. It became a cottage-industry, supported by Victim-Witness money from the State of California and perhaps other states as well. The talk-therapist couldn't be paid unless she opined that her patient had been the victim of a violent crime, such as sexual abuse as a child. There was an incentive first to suggest and then to confirm as found a claim of memory, as in, "Oh, so that's why I'm all messed up, I was molested by my father when I was in parochial school, now I get it, thanks. I'm not messed up because I made the wrong choices of men, alcohol, drugs, gurus, communes, and talk therapists. It's all my father's fault. And my Mom's."
I had a case like that. Police were checking the basement for dead bodies. The FBI refused to dig up their parking lot, the site of a former house where more bodies were said to be buried. No fools, those FBIs. The daughters had sued their parents, telling a story of how the parents held witches covens in the basement where they dressed in hooded robes and daddy sacrificed all these babies and molested the daughters. Mom was sued on a theory of failing to protect. The parents were in their late sixties. Had sent their daughters to Catholic school to protect them from the evils of the world. The daughters managed to find it anyway, with the help of talk therapists and a women's talk therapy group which helped them come to believe.
The evil was in themselves, it turned out.
Odd, how that seems to work, isn't it.
[Here's a better link to the Ciolino article on investigation referred to below.].
To read the quoted Ciolino item in the continuation below (referred to above), you may have to hit Ctrl-+ to enlarge the font display, and Ctrl-minus to reduce again, and disregard the formating issues.