Child Sexual Abuse and False Memory Syndrome (Hardcover)

by Robert A. Baker (Editor)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
While this handbook on child sexual abuse will be of primary interest to professionals and legal experts, its 32 lucid articles written by professionals will also be of value to victims, patients and their families. The compendium aims to help those involved identify instances of child sexual abuse while protecting innocent adults who may be wrongfully accused. Some selections demonstrate in disturbing detail how damaging recovered-memory therapy can be, especially when hypnosislike procedures produce confabulated memories--i.e., fantasies inseparable from reality. Other contributors attest that many or most of the stories they hear alleging childhood incest or sexual abuse are true. Strong sections cover the role of childhood sexual molestation in the genesis of serious emotional disorders and the ethical issues facing marital and family therapists, lawyers, litigants and child protective-services workers. Baker (They Call It Hypnosis) has produced a dispassionate overview of a minefield.

Copyright 1997 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Product Description
Is repressed memory fact or fiction? What role should therapists play in determining the truth? What, if any, weight should these 'memories' be given when prosecuting claims of child sexual abuse? Noted experts seek answers that could affect thousands of lives. Tabloid talk shows and the courts are overflowing with adults alleging sexual and other abuses they endured as children. Parents have been hauled into court, convicted, and jailed over their children's claims of abuse, many of which have been based upon 'memories' that have surfaced after therapists employed dubious techniques and suggestive 'therapies'. In some cases, the abuse really did occur. Alarmingly, in other cases, it did not. Noted psychologist and author Robert A Baker states that experienced and responsible therapists vehemently disagree about the nature, source, and reliability of these 'memories'. In this book, doctors, therapists, victims, researchers, and others search for answers in seven major areas: memory and its recovery, childhood trauma, repression and amnesia, hypnosis, suggestibility, professional problems and ethical issues, as well as needed research and legal implications. Distinguished contributors include Maggie Bruck, Stephen J Ceci, Gail Goodman, James Hudson, John F Kihlstrom, Elizabeth Loftus, Richard Ofshe, Harrison Pope, Leonore Terr, Ralph Underwager, Hillida Wakefield, Ethan Watters, Michael Yapko, and over 20 others.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 479 pages
• Publisher: Prometheus Books (June 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1573921823
• ISBN-13: 978-1573921824
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,519,421 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A careful, scholarly look at false memory syndrome issues, August 23, 1998

By A Customer

This book is an extremely useful addition to the debate on false allegations of child sexual abuse and false memory syndrome. Far too often, anyone who questions any "suppressed" and "recovered" memories of child sexual abuse is accused of protecting pedophiles and retraumatizing victims, yet research has shown that memories are far more malleable and susceptible to suggestion than one might think. Articles by Michael D. Yapko, author of "Suggestions of Abuse," Elizabeth F. Loftus, author of "The Myth of Repressed Memory," and researchers Stephen J. Ceci and Maggie Bruck are included, among others. If you are serious about researching the issue of false memories of child sexual abuse, this volume will be a valuable addition to your library.

32 of 54 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars More than just adding insult to injury, December 15, 1998

By A Customer

It is both sad and maddening to see the term "False Memory Syndrome" receive any credibility in the press, considering what it is alleged to represent. There is no designation of "FMS" in the latest (or any) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM-IV). FMS is a political/legal term contrived to systematically discredit any and every person alleging to have been sexually molested and to have discovered this by having recovered memories of the abuse later in life.

One of the contributing authors of this book, Elizabeth F. Loftus, ("The Myth of Repressed Memory") has consistently taken the indefensible position that no memory that emerges later in life can be trusted. This means that if I remember a pleasant summer day 40 years ago, it is a 'false memory'. What is suspect about her and others of like view is that *sexual* memories, in particular sexual *abuse* memories, are targetted for vehement discreditation. This says something. It says that someone is very very nervous about the resurfacing of abuse memories buried deep in the mind because of their traumatizing nature. Who would be nervous but those who perpetrated or were accessories to the abuse?

Children are especially susceptible to trauma, particularly from their adults, elders or guardians. Children can heroically and stunningly develop ways to rewrite traumatic events in their minds in order to live with them as they happen or after they happen. It is how they survive such traumas (and it is the reason they are called by the term "abuse survivor"). It is when those rewritten memories are untangled as adults that they hopefully start to get back to the core truth of their original abuse. This is a painful process of therapy. By the time persons who have recovered memories of sexual abuse are ready to confront or prosecute their abusers, they have usually spent years in agonizing private therapy, assessing and re-assessing their memories and feelings about them, testing them over and over again. Those who take these issues and their perpetrators to trial do not do so lightly. It is perhaps the most agonizing form of litigation for the victim to initiate, since it brings up, in a hostile legal environment, the most hurtful form of abuse conceivable, that of being molested and/or raped as a child. It is a terrible thing to face and confront one's abuser.

Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk, founder of the Trauma Clinic in Boston MA, pioneered the breakthrough into unravelling repressed memories. As it happens, his subjects were veterans from the Vietnam War, who were (unbeknownst to them) re-experiencing battle trauma in the present which they had suppressed in their minds at the time of the trauma. This led to the coinage of the term "Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder" or PTSD. PTSD is the brain chemistry of traumatic stress, i.e., how the brain processes horrific events it cannot bear and cannot understand. As children are the most vulnerable of all, they develop much deeper kinds of PTSD which often takes years to resurface in terms of memories as 'flashbacks' or 'body memories.'

Elizabeth Loftus, a self-acknowledged victim of child sexual abuse, has been systematically attacking the credibility of adult survivors of child sexual trauma for many years now, even though the research that established her as an authority led to conclusions of the validity of suppressed memory and its recovery.

This is not to say that there have never been errors in memory of sexually traumatic events. No one has claimed that memory is perfect, and in fact, it is acknowledged universally that memory is tricky and subject to redaction over the course of time. But to automatically dismiss all sexual trauma memories as invalid is precisely what Dr. Loftus and her colleagues have been promoting. And it is the underlying position of this and other books like it.

If I could give this book a "zero star," or better, a "black hole" rating, I would. As it is, I designate it with 1-star to mean deplorably bad science and systematic disinformation attempting to legitimize itself.

22 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Hogwash, July 7, 1998

By	[e-mail] (Springfield, Missouri) - See all my reviews

The term "False Memory Syndrome" is not a syndrome at all. It is a non-psychological term coined by the "False Memory Syndrome Foundation", whose stated purpose is to support parents who claim to be falsly accused of child abuse.

This book should NOT be read by anyone who has experienced childhood sexual abuse.