Violence and Abuse within the Family: The Neglected Issues

by Dr. Ian Begg

June 9,1995 & June 10,1995

Transcript of the Presentation by Dr. Ian Begg, Pschologist, Department of Psychologist, McMaster University, Hamilton

Good Afternoon.

Now Let me start off by saying that I can't imagine anything more horrible than abusing a child, and there is a lot more around than perhaps we used to think, We may have insulated ourselves against those beliefs, but that doesn't mean that everybody accused of sexual abuse did it, even though court, or public opinions believe that where there is smoke, there is fire.

I have sat in hockey dressing rooms when someone mentions a person is charged with molesting a child. Soon after somebody else will say "I would like to be alone with that b*stard for two minutes", and everyone else will nod and say "me too". My gut reacts the same way, but that doesn't make the accusations true.

In her book, "The Myth of Repressed Memory" Elizabeth Walker recounts the case of Kerr Sutherland. He was acquitted of charges of molesting children at his daycare center, but he was shot to death at his house after shouting "but I didn't do it".

For the last ten years we have seen our jails filled with persons charged with abusing children. AND NOW WE ARE SEEING COURTS OF APPEAL TRIPPING ALL OVER THEMSELVES TO REVERSE THOSE DECISIONS.

For the people who are familiar with the "little rascals case" from Eatington, North Carolina, of McMartin of the Fatal Tunnels, the California Kelly Michaels case, and our good Saskatchewan Martensville case as well, THERE IS A SIMPLE QUESTION HERE: WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON? Why are all these people who apparently have a solid community reputation, suddenly appearing to have committed the most heinous crime you can ever imagine. The satanic cults, the cannabilised babies they have well hidden in tunnels under day care centers, they dress up as star wars characters while they abuse children in the day care centre. Frankly, IT'S TIME TO WAKE UP AND PUT AN END TO THE NONSENSE....WE CAN'T PRETEND THAT EVERY ACCUSATION IS THE TRUTH, TO PRETEND SO IS ITSELF A LIE.

I am going to focus on accusations that a family member, usually a father, abused his child, usually but not exclusively his daughter. We have all heard horror stories about false accusations during custody disputes.

There is the recent case about Jeanette Harris who is a juror in the OJ Simpson trial, who admitted to making false accusations of domestic violence and marital rape during a custody dispute. In a telvised interview she said, and I quote " I have never been a victim of domestice abuse". Why did she say that she was? Her anwer was "IT WAS JSUT A PART OF THE CUSTODY DISPUTE, NOBODY BELIEVED THAT".

Let me outline to specific American cases to put a face on these false accusations; in both, it was fathers who were wrongly accused to abusing their children. In the course of it, you will see that there are some mental health professional, in this case a pychologist and a social worker, who have let their desire to protect children, override their professional judgement.

So first meet Rebenzi, who is an associate of a Colorado Psychologist. Rebenzi reported to county officials that a father had abused his daughter, The mother had previously reported the abuse to the social worker who had investigated and had found no evidence to support the accusation, so then the mother went to Rebenzi. Rebenzi interviewed the child and concluded from the child's body language that the child had been abused. She refused to speak to the child's father. The social worker pointed out the inconsistency between what the child had told Rebenzi and what the child had told the social worker. Rebenzi shrugged it off and when the psychologist raised doubts about the childs story, Rebenzi shrugged that off too. Then a court appointed psychologist found that the child confused fantasy with reality and that Rebenzi's techniques were questionable. At that point, even with all that information in hand, Rebenzi testified under oath that she had no doubt that the child had been abused.

NO MATTER HOW MUCH WE LOVE OUR CHILDREN WE HAVE TO RECOGNISE THAT CHILDREN CAN CONFUSE FACTS WITH FANATASY AND CHILDREN ARE EXTREMELY SUGGESTIBLE.

Secondly meet Bryd, the Texas psychologist. Bryd had no previous experience in child sexual abuse. Bryd spent ten minutes with the child and conducted no tests; and then swore in an affidavit that the boy had been repeatedly sexually abused by his father. The father was the legal custodian who had left the boy with his mother for a time. When he returned to Texas to obtain his son, he was arrested. The court appointed experts concluded that the father had not abused his son, and all charges were dropped. Bryd had never even talked to the father.

SADLY THIS IS BECOMING A BOILER PLATE IN CUSTODY DISPUTES; ACCUSE THE FATHER OF ABUSE. To repeat, abusing a child is one of the most despicable things an adult can do. That does not however give anyone, including mental health professionals, carte blanche to trash people's lives.

Unfortunately many jurisdictions in North America have responded to the problem by adopting Ronald Reagan's zero tolerance political agenda by taking it away from drugs and applying it to abuse. Some jurisdictions have granted absolute immunity to child protection services so that individuals who work there can report every suspected case no matter how slim or even in the absence of evidence. Now most social workers carry out their duties to the highest ethical level, but the potential for abuse is enormous. THE SAN DIEGO GRAND JURY FOR EXAMPLE RECOMMENDED REMOVING THE ABSOLUTE IMMUNITY, BECAUSE IT CORRUPTS ABSOLUTELY. They heard evidence that social workers had lied in reports and had lied in their testimony, and that social workers had abused their power by threatening therapists, threatening lawyers, and threatening families who did not agree with them. Social workers have taken children from homes and conspired to have those children adopted by the social workers own family. They have even place children with unfit parents in apparent reprisal against parents who disagreed with them.

NOW THE IMPORTANT POINT THAT I AM MAKING IS; THAT NOBODY CAN SUPPORT THE PROPOSITION THAT ALL ACCUSATIONS OF CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE ARE TRUE. IT IS ABSOLUTELY IMPERATIVE THAT THERE BE SOMETHING BEYOND THE FACT THAT AN ACCUSATION HAS BEEN MADE, SOMETHING TO CORROBORATE THE ACCUSATION. The need for external evidence to support the accusations, especially accusations of child sexual abuse, is also evident in another growth industry; that is, recovered memories of child sexual abuse. There are hundreds of cases in North America, and now the rest of the world, in which an individual, an adult, with no previous knowledge of being abusedm comes to the opinion that he or she was abused as a child for many years in the past.

The classic case is the California Ramona case. Holly Ramona went to a family therapist Isabella, because she suffered from bulimia, which is an eating disorder. Isabella told holly that 80% of the people who suffer from bulimia were abused as children. Now that is nonsense but it got her foot in the door. Then Holly began to have vague flashbacks. Next Isabella and a psychiatrist named Rose, administered sodium amytol, that's a drug that heightens suggestibility, but Isabella told Holly that it was truth serum. There were no notes taken during the drug sessions, but Holly remembered some specific cases of abuse. So what did she do? She sued her father, and not surprisingly he lost his job, he lost his marriage, he lost his community standing. So WHAT DID HE DO? HE SUED THE THERAPISTS FOR THE HARM THEY DID WITH THEIR GROSS NEGLIGENCE, AND MALPRACTICE FOR IMPLANTING FALSE MEMORIES IN HIS DAUGHTER'S MIND. HE WON AND THE JURY AWARDED HIM HALF A MILLION DOLLARS. FRANKLY, I WOULDN'T TAKE THE HALF A MILLION IN ADVANCE, TO have the consequences but that's a different story. Holly's case was later thrown out because the abuse never happened. The accusation was false. But Holly still believes it, so I ask you who abused Holly, and I think that there is no answer but the therapists.

JUST LAST MONTH IN MAY 1995, a New Hampshire court held that memory repression and therapy that is deemed to recover repressed memories have not gained enough acceptance in psychology, or in scientific reliability, to admit them as evidence in the first place.

Joel Humberford's daughter claimed that he had raped her just days before her wedding. She repressed the memory, but it came back in therapy. The court heard evidence from leading experts from both sides of the recovered memory debate and decided it simply wouldn't put recovered memorys to the jury. The memories were too unreliable and the theories that the therapists used are not generally accpeted in the scientific community. NOW I THINK THAT'S THE RIGHT ANSWER, DON'T ADMIT THE QUESTIONABLE EVIDENCE IN THE FIRST PLACE. In a jury trial, it's the jury's job to assess the credibility of the witnesses. They do this based on their own common sense and experience.

But our common sense and experience, even in working in studies of memory for 25 years, does not equip us to tell if a memory recovered in therapy, covers real events or not. Scientists have no way of telling whether the story actually happened in the external world without some external evidence to corroborate. The person who recovers a memory in therapy is usually very passionate about the truth of the story. The story has been told very many times and may become very consisten, perhaps even plausable to that person. But some of thses passionate recovered memories and passionate beliefs are from impossible events. For example some people will even remember being an egg in a fallopian tube. Others remembered being abused in a past life or in some cases 15-20 past lives. It's hard to remember that others may not be impossible, but seem somehat bizarre. Such as being abducted by aliens or subjected to satanic ritual abuse by an intergenerational cult that cannabilizes babies; and that others program people to become assassins who will be triggered when the right colours are presented to them. So some recovered memories are false and we don't know how many, and we have no way of telling for sure if memory is true without some external evidence to support the story. Neither does the therapist, so you can ignore NONSENICLE COMMENTS LIKE "I LISTENED TO THEIR STORIES AND I KNOW THEY ARE TRUE".

We also know that people are susceptible to suggestions. The daughter in the Humberger case had rectal pains. The therapist suggested they might be body memories of previous abuse, and sure enough, shortly after, under the therapists leading hand, the daughter rememberd being anally raped. When the father was accused of these particular events he threatened to shoot himself and the therapist. Shortly thereafter, the daughter recovered a new memory, this time the father had put the gun to her vagina.

It is very clear that some accusations are false. A recent study used the polygraph or lie detector(and we know they aren't perfect) but the results should be cause for thought. This particular study looked at the polygraph results of the persons who were charged with child sexual abuse. One group were charged on the basis of continous memories, that is, these were victims who simply never forgot the abuse. 78% of thes accused persons who took the test voluntarily scored exceptive, only 22% scored truthful. Others charged on the basis of memories recovered by adults who have not remembered being abused until adults scored with 6% percent of them as exceptive and 94% of them scored as truthful in their repsonses. EVEN THOUGH POLYGRAPH RESULTS ARE NOT PERFECT, A RATIO OF 78% AND 6% IS BIG ENOUGH TO MAKE YOU STOP AND THINK.

A smart set of conclusions include:

1: some of the memories and the accusations based on them are false.

2. It's fairly easy to get people to beleive this especially with a hundred of so sessions to work with. The problem is more pronounced when you are dealing with children.

3. There is no sure way to tell with the story itself, if the allegation is true. The conclusion is that there is always a reasonable doubt, in fact, a doubt big enough to drive a Mack truck through, if the only basis for an accusation is a recovered memory.

Science is catching up, and the nonsense is going to die, but it's still going on. There's a recent Ontario case; in 1992 a farmer was accused of raping a 13 year old girl 24 years in the past. The woman had been in therapy for about 5 years, had the recovered memories of the rape as well as memories of also being abused by almost all of her male relatives. She had become involved in organisations to stop child abuse, she apppeared on television, sher wrote articles, she accosted the farmer and his wife at the fair, and told the wife that her husband was a rapist. She wrote a letter to the wife expressing fears that her children were being abused. Her parents wrote to the 4-H club and insisted that this "rapist farmer" be removed as vice-president. She asked the police to investigate a rumor that he'd been fired from his job for making sexual advances: The police investigated and he hadn't, but that didn't stop her. When the trial came up she repeated this false accusation knowing to was investigated and found to be false, and he was convicted. The judge was likely swayed by the passion with which she told her story. But her passion included remembering her terror at passing his workplace on her way to school. The p[roblem is that: he didn't work where she thought he did. She also vividly remembered his large hands on her body, but she missed the fact that one of his large hands was missing a very large finger and had another finger that was bent at a right angle. She also remembered passionately that he had freckles on his penis, his doctor denied it. He was not forced to go through the indignity of suffering the trauma of a line up at the trial. But sanity prevailed at the court of appeal which quashed the conviction and sent the case back for retrial, and at the retrial, as you might expect, the therapeutic records were no longer available, so the case was tossed out.

THESE ARE JUST A FEW EXAMPLE AND THERE ARE VERY MANY MORE, BUT WE HAVE TO GET RID OF THE MYTH THAT ALL ACCUSATIONS ARE TRUE. YOU OFTEN HEAR PEOPLE SAY, "WHY WOULD ANYONE MAKE UP SOMETHING LIKE THAT"? UNFORTUNATELY THERE ARE MANY ANSWERS AND SOME AREN'T VERY PRETTY. THE ANSWERS INCLUDE: GREED, CRUMMY THERAPY, HONEST BUT MISGUIDED ZEAL, AND THE RAW DESIRE FOR POLITICAL POWER.

I am sure that many of you remember that there were statements of an increase in wife beating on Super Bowl Sunday. Well there is not! Those statements were found to be false. They were also known to be false by the people who made them, but it did create a climate of fear in which certain people could demanda increased funding for certain advocacy groups. Several years ago, it might have been true that very few accusations of abuse were false. There has been so much encouragement for the people to come forth and report abuse. That is the case with tremendous media coverage such as Roseanne Barr who remembered being abused when she was 6 months old. But this rash of, out of woodwork and me too cases, has caused an increase in false accusations. Some of the accusers are extremely convincing. They've been through therapy, they have told their tale many times, often in a frenzy of group sessions, where the members come up with more and more extreme memories. They very likely beleive that they are describing things that really happened, they can be very passionate and very convincing, and their therapists believe them. But I have a question for the therapists. Modern science has no infallible way to tell whether a recovered memory reflects actual historical events or not. Therapists can't tell either. If you as a therapist beleive all your patients, then at least some of them who were not abused as children, through your efforts will come to beleive that they were. Then they will suffer all the effects of abuse, and the question then becomes.. Who is the abuser? I say in this case, it is the therapist. Should in any case the therapist, in all conciousness take such an emormous risk? And is it fair to say; I can always tell if it's true? because nobody cna. Therapists are no more infallible than anybody else, and even if therapists make that claim, the question becomes..How do you know you were alway right in the past? What evidence do you have?

The technology of lie detection even if it was perfect could only tell if the person honestly beleives what he or she is saying. A lie detector can never be a time machine to tell us if the past actually happened the way we beleive it did. There's nothing internal to the telling of the stroy that indicates whether that story is a historically accurate description of a past external event, or if it's an accurately remembered dream with no grounding in reality or a recurring honest belief that was injected by somebody else. All thse do is reflect a reality of belief that isn't always historical reality. All it is, is a belief of a memory that is filtered through our own psychological system. For example may people believe that lightning comes down from the sky and they claim to see it happen, but lightning usually goes from the ground up to the sky, which is why lightning rods work, and you couldn't see which end was first because lightning bolts are too fast for the human eye to resolve which end is first and which end was second. So there are other influences to what we've been told, that effect what we believe.

I'm also not sure whether the issue of accusation of child abuse has been stolen be certain advocacy groups. Most often the complainant is a woman and most often the accused is a man. But there are very many men who recover memories of abuse in therapy as well and many of the accused persons are wrong.

WE CAN'T LOSE SIGHT OF WHO SUFFERS WHEN THE ACCUSATIONS ARE WRONG. IT'S NOT JUST THE ACCUSED BUT IT'S THE ENTIRE FAMILY THAT SUFFERS AND FAMILIES HAVE WOMEN AND MEN IN THEM.

NOR CAN WE GORGET THE ACCUSER WHO AT LEAST SOME OF THE TIME COMES INTO THERAPY WITH A PROBLEM, AND COMES OUT OF THERAPY WITH AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT PROBLEM, believing that he or she was abused as a child. At least as many women as men are suffering from false accusations of childhood sexual abuse. The survivor movement in the United States is a billion dollar industry. The "Courage to Heal" and it's clones make a fortune. They offer checklists from which readers, can guess, "maybe I was abused as a child?" even though you don't really suspect it until you read the book and you don't know for sure until you've paid for your therapy. But what about the women and men who were abused as children and never forgotten and suffered for years because of it. It cheapens their suffering to invent hordes of others who have been repeatedly abused by managed to stay completely unaware til they were adults when the therapist prodded them into coming to beleive they were assaulted as children.

Many of our adult problems require hard solutions and we all know it is very hard work to be a contributing member of a complex society. It's too simple-minded to adapt a parent baching abuse excuse idea that, if anything is wrong with me, my parents must have screwed up somehow.

I am the author of my own destiny, my parents may have given me the typewriter but it is in my own hands to write the rest of my life story.

I think it's high time to begin to dismantle this tower of psycho-babble that is underwriting some of the most grievous harms that we have seen in a long time.