I have three wonderful daughters – two teenagers and one young adult. I can hardly imagine anything more horrible than the prospect that one of them might one day enter therapy for help with some common psychological problem such as anxiety, insomnia or depression and, at the end of that process, accuse me of childhood sexual abuse on the basis of "recovered" memories. Even though I would know with absolute certainty that such allegations were untrue, the chances are that nothing I could say or do would convince my accusers of this.
A few days ago I sat in a lecture theatre mostly filled with middle-aged or elderly parents living through this exact nightmare. Typically, their adult children had started therapy with no pre-existing memories of being sexually abused, but had become convinced during the therapeutic process that they had indeed been victimised in this way. So convinced were they that the "recovered" memories were true, they more often than not accused their parents directly of this vile act and then cut off any further contact, leaving their parents devastated and confused, their lives shattered.
The occasion in question was the 15th Annual General Meeting of the British False Memory Society. The BFMS began life in 1993, the year after the formation of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation in the US. Accused parents were at the forefront of founding both organisations. Both have scientific and professional advisory boards to support them in their aims, which include providing support – including legal assistance where necessary – to those affected by such accusations, providing information and advice to professionals, and improving our understanding of false memories by encouraging and supporting academic and professional research.
One serious problem appears to be that many people mistakenly believe that the false memory controversy is "yesterday's news". They are aware that there was a huge increase in such allegations back in the 1980s and 1990s. They may even be aware that many professionals and academics have reacted against such claims, most notably Elizabeth Loftus, whose pioneering work in this area has done more to increase our understanding of the true nature of false memories than any other scientist. But it is simply not the case that this is a dead issue.
Although the incidence of new cases is much reduced from when the controversy was at its peak, new cases do still come to light with depressing frequency, as the files of the BFMS can attest. Furthermore, the fallout from the peak period is still very much with us. There are still many families throughout the world being torn apart by these accusations, many of whom will sadly never achieve any kind of reconciliation.
One intriguing aspect of this awful situation is why the media generally appeared to lose interest. The press and broadcasters are often guilty of focusing on the human interest angle of stories at the expense of good solid scientific evidence, the MMR controversy being a case in point. As most scientists know, there never really was a "controversy" over MMR, with the consensus among medical experts being that there is no link between MMR vaccination and autism. But the human interest value of tearful interviews with sobbing mothers supported by the views of a few maverick scientists was always going to be enough to bias the media coverage of this issue, with tragic consequences.
In the case of the false memory controversy, however, there was human interest on both sides of the story. Obviously, sensationalist accounts of "recovered" memories of brutal childhood sexual abuse – or even better, ritualised Satanic abuse leading to the development of "multiple personalities" – were always going to be tempting to a certain type of journalist, despite the lack of any good scientific evidence supporting such claims. But we also had the other victims to consider: the accused family members and those around them. Why were their stories given so little coverage?
I got some answers at the BFMS meeting. There are some cases where the accused are willing to go public but are prevented from doing so by legal gagging orders and are thus not free to present their side of the story. But much more common is the situation where the accused do not want to jeopardise their chances of obtaining the one thing they want more than anything else in the world: reconciliation with their estranged children. Furthermore, to go public with such stories inevitably will invite suspicion. Unless one is very familiar with the scientific research relating to false memories, there may well be the temptation to assume that there's no smoke without fire.
There is a general perception that the public mood is much more volatile with respect to the issue of paedophilia than it used to be. Remember the attack on a paediatrician in Portsmouth by an illiterate mob who did not know the difference between a paediatrician and a paedophile? The episode has often been cited as a prime example of the dangers of adopting a vigilante mentality. The fact that the story appears to be an urban myth is often missed by journalists, who refer to it in sensationalist stories published in the very newspapers that attempted to whip up such sentiments in the first place.
According to an article by Brendan O'Neill on the BBC news website, the incident that gave rise to these stories involved a female paediatrician consultant, Dr Yvette Cloete, in Newport, Gwent (not Portsmouth), who returned from work to find "paedo" sprayed on her door, probably by local youngsters. Distressing as this incident was for Dr Cloete, it is a long way from an excited mob threatening physical violence. But for all that, the perception that there may be a violent backlash against anyone even suspected of paedophilia is a strong factor in explaining the reluctance of many accused to go public.
There are now many cases of "retractors" whose stories could potentially be featured in media coverage. Retractors are individuals who initially believed that their memories of abuse were real but later came to realise they were not. Again, one cannot overstate the courage of such individuals in acknowledging that they have put other family members through unimaginable pain and suffering on the basis of a sincerely held but mistaken belief. Understandably, however, such individuals are often too upset and possibly ashamed to want to tell their stories publicly.
It is hard to find a silver lining inside such a grim and depressing cloud, but there is one. Although it may be of little consolation to those who continue to suffer as a consequence of "recovered" memories, the controversy did trigger a huge amount of research into false memories. Since the mid-1990s, hundreds of papers have been published on the topic and it is probably fair to say that the results have come as something of a surprise even to the researchers themselves. Numerous experiments have shown that is much easier than anyone might have supposed to implant false memories in a large minority of the population.
Reliable experimental procedures have been developed to study susceptibility to false memories and we now understand a great deal about the conditions that are most likely to give rise to false memories (for an excellent introduction to the field, read Richard J. McNally's Remembering Trauma). It turns out that the conditions typically found in the psychotherapeutic context fit the bill perfectly. Specifically, a vulnerable individual being informed by the therapist, an authority figure, that their current psychological symptoms strongly indicate that they must have been abused as children even if they can no longer remember the abuse due to repression. Once this has been accepted by the client, they are encouraged to engage in a range of mental exercises to "recover" these memories, but which in fact are highly likely to result in the formation of false memories.
It is not surprising that many people find it easy to believe that when apparent memories of childhood abuse are reported for the first time during psychotherapy, they probably are based upon events which did take place. After all, we know that such abuse really does take place with alarming frequency and can sometimes have devastating effects upon the victims. We're also all familiar with the Freudian notion of repression – the idea that when something happens that is so awful, the mind will automatically bury it as a defence mechanism so that one could not remember it consciously no matter how hard one tried. This idea has been at the centre of countless novels and movies, which often portray the heroic struggle of the victim and therapist to dig deep into the unconscious mind to retrieve those corrosive memories so that healing can begin.
The problem is that there is very little evidence to support the existence of repression as conceptualised by Freud. The evidence strongly suggests that far from being unable to remember sexual abuse, victims typically find it all too difficult to keep such memories out of their consciousness.
My own interest in this topic was initially triggered by my wish to try to explain reports of anomalous experiences such as alien abduction claims and hypnotic past-life regression. Although many people find it plausible that psychotherapy allows people to retrieve repressed memories of childhood abuse, should it not give us pause for thought that exactly the same "memory recovery" techniques, including hypnotic regression and guided imagery, can give rise to apparent memories of being taken on board spaceships and medically examined by aliens, or a former incarnation as Napoleon?
The writer and broadcaster Karl Sabbagh addressed the meeting on Saturday and considered an uncomfortable topic that will have occurred to any intelligent person reflecting upon the work of organisations like the BFMS and its American counterpart. Even if most of the parents attending the meeting were in fact innocent victims of false memory, isn't it possible that at least some are perpetrators of abuse hiding behind the scientific evidence for false memories? I had, of course, reflected at length on this issue myself and it has to be acknowledged that it is a possibility.
However, I feel that if I were a perpetrator I may well protest my innocence but I doubt I would join a group that aims to keep this issue in the public eye. I would instead want to sweep it under the carpet and hope that everyone would forget about it. As Sabbagh asks in his new book Remembering our Childhood: How our Memory Betrays Us, "After all, if sex abusers all band together and pretend to be innocent, why aren't there established societies of murderers, burglars, and embezzlers doing the same thing?"
Chris French is a professor of psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he heads the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit. He is a member of the scientific and professional advisory board of the British False Memory Society, and edits the UK version of the Skeptic magazine