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Adriaan Mak
-
- Recovered Memories of
Child Sexual abuse:
- A Father's Story
by Adriaan Mak
Here is a very brief chronology
of my experience with my son's Rowland descent into therapy,
his re-emergence into the real world and how I dealt for 10 years
with the false accusation of incest.
Let me introduce myself first.
I am a retired high-school teacher, an amateur organist, interested
in philosophy, scepticism, science, and humanism. Although my
wife and I separated well after my son and daughter had left
the home, my son tells me that this separation did not cause
the problems he encountered later and for which he went into
therapy.
My son, Rowland, grew up in
a family where he experienced much love and care from both his
parents in addition to three square meals a day. He was a very
good son, sensitive about fairness and justice, concerned about
the suffering of many people in the world, asking me questions
about life and death at a very early age. I used to take turns
with my wife reading stories and singing to him and his
sister at bed time when they were small children. He and his
sister were able to read and do some math before they entered
grade school.
As a family we did the usual
things that middle class parents do to give our children the
best of opportunities. I took Rowland and his sister to swimming
lessons, soccer practices, piano and flute lessons, and much
more. I became active in the governing board and work group organization
of the summer camp my children used to attend every year. We
had many good discussions. My wife told me that I was a good
father and she certainly was a good and devoted mother. Perhaps
some might have called us permissive parents, but then my son
and daughter gave us little reason to restrictive.
Although Rowland had a few
problems in elementary school, because he was then tall for his
age and older boys and girls teased him, in high school he blossomed,
became a popular athletic student, an excellent camp counsellor,
a fine flautist. We made lots of good music together. At times
I saw at camp a totally different side of him as he entertained
young people being the comedian. He was a good and forceful public
speaker. was an all round athlete, swimmer, basketball, soccer
and football player. Many people liked him. Girls considered
him "a catch" so I was told.
In 1984 he graduated from high
school with the highest marks in his graduating class, was elected
valedictorian, delivered a very serious - humorous address and
received several top awards at his graduation ceremony including
offers of scholarships to four Universities. I want to stress
that we as parents did not push him. He was entirely self-motivated
as was his older sister.
He entered into the mathematics
programme at The University of Waterloo, but dropped out in the
first year. He needed "to find himself" Of course I
was concerned, but reasoned that some time in the real world
would teach him self-reliance and show him where to go. I had
done the same myself when I was young. I trusted his good sense
although I knew that his openness and gullibility could
get him in trouble.
It is my view now that perhaps
after leaving the shelter of his family, he gradually lost control,
but he should be the judge of that himself. He went to Toronto
where he found employ in a succession of unskilled labour jobs.
In the summer of 1991, I met
him and he told me that he was going into therapy to straighten
out his life and deal with personal problems. I hugged him and
said that I fully supported that decision. I remember his last
words: "I love you, Dad."
In mid December 1991 I received
a call that he wanted to drive to London, Ontario, a 3 hour drive
west of Toronto, to tell me about something very important. Since
he had to rent a car to do so, I offered to visit him in Toronto
instead.
After some chit chat over tea,
showing me a guitar he had bought, he invited me to go for a
walk in a nearby park. During that walk he told me in a monotonous,
almost trancelike voice that while in therapy he had recovered
lost memories that I had sexually abused between the ages of
two and four. These had been anal rapes. I was of course in total
shock. I was told to hold my tongue until he was finished.
He did not give me much chance
to respond, but when I finally challenged him to give any other
evidence, such as reports from his mother or that he had evidence
I had inclinations towards homosexual pedophilia, after all he
had seen me as programme director in a camp and I would have
had the opportunity to be seen to be interested in small boys,
he told me that, as he had been led to expect from what his therapist
had said about this confrontation, that I would be "in denial"
and that my denial confirmed my guilt. With that he left
me standing in the street. His world and my world at that moment
had totally changed I was to realize later.
We had a few telephone conversations
thereafter. In each of these he became more and more insulting
and unreasonable. He did tell me that he had become suicidal.
I wrote letters which went unanswered, except once when he simply
told me to stop writing and that he would only open a blue envelope
containing a full confession.
Contact through his mother
or sister was also rejected. I phoned his therapist, an unqualified
counsellor I discovered later, who also hung up after telling
me that I "needed help".
For the next three months I
experienced for the first time in my life what depression is.
My reaction to overcome this debilitating effect of the false
accusation was to become active and do something about the mess
my son had become involved in.
I was pianist and choir director
in a Unitarian Church at the time. During the service there is
always time given for people to bring personal concerns to the
attention of the congregation. In the last December 1991 service
I announced that I had been falsely accused of incest by my adult
son and would welcome information and help as to how such a false
belief could have taken over my son's life. Although there were
therapists in the congregation they did not speak to me.
I also searched the University
of Western Ontario library for information and found, after reading
much information about incest that was always remembered, a recent
(1988) book: The Courage to Heal. The authors of that self-help
book, neither of them trained psychotherapists, made the astonishing
claim that many incest victims have no conscious memory of the
repeated acts of sexual abuse, but may recover these lost memories,
some of them involving years of abuse, later in life. The associate
minister of my church told me however that this was an excellent
book.
I also remembered an article
in the Skeptical Inquirer of 1987 about false memories of alien
abductions and satanic ritual abuse. This put me into contact
with its author, Robert Baker, emeritus professor of psychology
in Kentucky, who told me that he was just putting the finishing
touches to a book he was to call: Hidden Memories: Voices and
Visions from Within. He was one of the first I contacted, an
expert on hypnosis and memory, who had spotted the links between
the growing fad in psychotherapy, repressed memory therapy and
the satanic abuse / alien abduction nonsense that had been doing
the rounds.
After reading the first article
of a series, the first such in Canada, on false accusations of
incest caused by suggestive therapies, written by Bill Taylor
in the Toronto Star (May 1992) I called the number of the False
Memory Syndrome Foundation mentioned in the article and joined
that organization of falsely accused parents and concerned mental
health scientists.
My call was answered by Pamela
Freyd and since that time I have been active in that organization
ever since as guest on T.V. shows, the first was together with
Pamela. I participated as guest on Radio shows, became
an organizer, newsletter editor, and recently try to inform people
concerned about quack therapies, by sending out information such
as newspaper and research articles and book reviews on the topic,
maintaining daily contact via e-mail with people locally, nationally
and internationally.
There are now branches in the
U.K., other European countries, Australia and New Zealand. I
have written dozens of letters to newspapers and appeared
on more Canadian Radio and Television shows since. I helped
translate into English a booklet commissioned by the Netherlands
Ministry of Justice and prepared by Dr Peter van Koppen of a
forensic research institute attached to the University of Leyden,
to be used by crown attorneys, prosecutors, police officers and
others investigating claims of child sexual abuse made by adults
following suggestive therapies. I forwarded that booklet to the
RCMP, and provincial large city police forces of Canada. All
this was excellent therapy for me.
I have attended in the early
nineties several court cases where falsely accused parents were
to face the ordeal of having to defend themselves. I have kept
a record of 240 such cases in Canada. In some of these the verdict
went against the parent and a few have served time in prison.
Allan Rock and Anne McLellan, ministers of Justice during these
years, to whom many parents have written about their plight,
have ignored the problem.
First, Canadian defense lawyers,
notably Allan Gold, and soon after also Canadian judges discovered
the fallacy of amnesia for childhood sexual abuse and as far
as I know since 1996 there have been very few convictions
where the testimony was based on allegedly repressed memories,
supposedly recovered in therapy. In most of these cases where
people were convicted, the defense lawyers were not properly
prepared to defend their client. Often, in these cases the
same two particularly ill-informed Canadian psychologists, believers
that traumatic memories hide for years in the unconscious, acted
as expert witnesses for the crown.
Confusion of course exists
not only in the minds of some therapists, but among the public
at large as to what "repression" is. Freud, who first
used the term, even used the term ambiguously, sometimes meaning
consciously suppressing a memory. True believers nowadays prefer
the term" dissociative amnesia". They believe that
victims for years or even decades on end may have no conscious
memories of a history of many traumatic experiences, such as
childhood sexual abuses, but may retrieve the memories of these
events later in adult life. True believers in the "repression"
of traumatic childhood memories have never properly defined "repression".
Contact with my son was re-established
in 1999 when my son called me, announced that I had become a
grandfather, and that he wished for me to see my granddaughter.
He informed me that this did not mean that he was retracting
the allegations of incest. We were not to discuss that issue
he told me.
Since that time I visited his
family regularly. In 2000 he called me out of the blue to
tell me that he had come to see that his allegations of incest
were false. I told him that I would be right over to hear about
that.
Again we walked through streets
as he explained what had made him change his mind. I heard for
the first time that in addition to what he told me eight years
before, he had acquired additional beliefs that he and I had
been involved in a Satanic Ritual Abuse cult, and that when he
began to realize how absurd these ideas were, he also began to
doubt the other beliefs he had acquired in therapy.
He warned me however that he
well remembered that there had been emotional abuse. I was disappointed
about that and asked him to put that in a letter to me so that
I could discuss it with his mother and sister. That letter never
came. Instead my son told me soon thereafter that there had not
been any emotional abuse either.
Nov 3, 2001, my son described
to a meeting of Toronto and area parents how he acquired his
false beliefs about being a victim of incest and what his years
in therapy and being a member of "survivor groups"
were like. Since that time he has spoken to Justice reporter
Kirk Makin of the Globe and Mail. When his story appeared in
that paper, I was surprised to read that as a young child he
was always afraid of me. A true believer in repressed memories,
still thinking that I am guilty of child abuse, triumphantly
pointed that out.
When sometime later I asked
my son about his childhood fears for me, he told me that he had
just said this to Kirk Makin as a sort of excuse for believing
the false memories. Giving up false memories can be a slow process.
Another fad in psychotherapy
has run its course. While in the early nineties thousands of
parents were reporting cases of false accusations after their
adult sons or daughters had been in therapy, only a dozen or
so in 2001 reported such cases in the U.S. and only one in Canada.
Many of the therapists, most
of them so-called "traumatologists" once involved in
the Recovered Memory craze of the eighties and nineties, began
to advertise their services as distress and bereavement counsellors.
The U.S. Government and businesses did set aside huge funds
to help those distressed by the events that happened on Sept
11 and following get therapy from these quacks. As one U.S. critic
of the trauma therapy scene observed: "Good grief!"
For many parents the problem
is far from resolved. Their daughters still reside
in the limbo of their false memories. At present I act as clearing
house for newspaper and research articles on FMS, RM and MPD/DID
that reach me from all over the "civilized" world,
that is those areas where RM and MPD therapy has wreaked havoc
with families: North America, Western Europe, Israel, South Africa,
New Zealand and Australia. The rest of the world was blissfully
unaware, having better and more urgent things to do than engage
in navel gazing therapies. In spite of the fact that Recovered
Memory therapies are in rapid decline, Japanese psychotherapists,
unfortunately have discovered Multiple Personality
Disorder a.k.a. Disssociative Identity Disorder, Identities,
so we may have to add Japan to the still psychotherapeutically misguided
world.
Canadian psychiatrist Dr Harold
Merskey, who has been of such tremendous help to many parents,
well before the MPD craze infected a number of young therapists,
wrote articles condemning this new trend in psychiatry. His 2004
article series, co-authored with Dr August Piper, in the Canadian
Journal of Psychiatry, may well drive the final nail in the coffin
of one of the most absurd of diagnoses. Some film makers and
novelists seem still fascinated about this disorder, which
as Merskey and Piper know, belongs in the same garbage can as
beliefs in goblins, UFO's, spiritualism and similar so-called
paranormal phenomena.
My aim is to corner and recruit
as many people who have computers and can write brief letters
to editors to comment on articles about the disastrous effects
of repressed and recovered therapies. So far
only in one country, The
Netherlands, has a government fully condemned recovered
memory therapy, warned the professionals to smarten up and re-educate
themselves about avoiding suggestive methods and acquaint themselves
with the most recent findings in memory research.
From Adriaan
Mak: Many people have asked me what the Canadian Minister's reply
was to Allan Gold's letter about an inquiry involving repressed
/ recovered memories.
Because
my old computer crashed, I no longer have on-line the response
by the then minister of justice Anne McLellan.
Here is
some information
Can recovered memories
be trusted? Justice minister rejects call for inquiry
Stephen Bindman, The Ottawa
Citizen, May 4, 1998
Justice Minister Anne McLellan
says it is premature to call a special inquiry into the cases
of men convicted of sexual abuse on the basis of victims' "recovered"
memories. The unusual request to Ms. McLellan for such a review
is the latest salvo in a raging international legal and scientific
controversy over whether it is possible to repress traumatic
memories of childhood abuse and later recover them as an adult
during therapy.
Alan Gold, president of the
Criminal Lawyers Association, said in a recent letter to Ms.
McLellan that there is an "urgent and powerful need"
to review the cases of men convicted based on such "totally
unreliable" memories. Many courts in the United States have
begun to recognize the injustice of convicting people based on
recovered memories, yet the "now discredited concept"
has been applied in scores of cases in Canada, Mr. Gold wrote.
"Real or not, such alleged memories are too readily confused
with the results of suggestion and confabulation to have any
degree of reliability," wrote Mr. Gold, a prominent Toronto
lawyer who has campaigned against the use of "junk science"
in Canadian courts. "Those men convicted under the older
naive views continue to suffer, and some of them are still in
prison because of it."
Mr. Gold says he doesn't believe
that men are still at risk of being convicted solely on the basis
of recovered memories but estimates there are "several dozen"
wrongly convicted men in jail. "Today, except for a few
intellectual backwaters, the professional organizations have
caught up, they've blown the whistle. Recovered memories are
joining electroshock, lobotomies and other psychiatric malpractice
in the historical dustbin."
His request for a federal review
is supported by several dozen academics, psychologists and psychiatrists
and the Philadelphia-based False Memory Syndrome Foundation.
Mr. Gold said the inquiry should
be similar to the one conducted into the cases of 98 women who
claim they killed abusive men in self-defence, but were still
convicted of murder and manslaughter. After that report by Ontario
Court Judge Lynn Ratushny was released last year, the federal
government announced it would pardon two women and erase the
remainder of the sentences of two others. The Ratushny review
was set up after years of lobbying by women's groups, following
a 1990 Supreme Court of Canada ruling that recognized battered
woman syndrome as a defence to murder.
Mr. Gold wrote: "Given
the systemic nature of the original injustice, and given the
failure of Canadian courts to act on the problem even in individual
cases, and given the ongoing suffering of those convicted without
any adequate grounds, it is absolutely imperative that you act
on this matter without delay."
Ms. McLellan said she has asked
her officials to study Mr. Gold's letter, but she noted there
is already a process within her department to review individual
claims of wrongful conviction after all other avenues of appeal
have been exhausted. "Traditionally, the issue of the reliability
and admissibility of evidence, especially expert evidence, has
been left to the courts to decide. However, I will monitor the
case law in this area to ensure that applications (for review)
are dealt with appropriately. A decision to do anything beyond
this at this time is premature."
Toronto lawyer Susan Vella,
who handles many sexual assault cases, said Mr. Gold's letter
is another attempt by defence lawyers to "totally confuse
the public."
Ms. Vella said judges already
carefully consider the reliability of a particular recovered
memory before convicting an accused person. "I think it's
important to recognize that recovered traumatic memory is a delicate
issue and has to be dealt with accordingly. It is not a black
and white issue -- not all recovered memory is reliable and not
all recovered memory is unreliable. Sometimes it results in an
acquittal, and sometimes it results in a conviction. It depends
on the circumstances."
Carleton University psychology
professor Connie Kristiansen said that, contrary to Mr. Gold's
assertion, it is "blatantly obvious" from the academic
literature that there can be recovered memories of traumatic
events and that they can be as accurate as those that have never
been forgotten.
"Everybody is clear that
caution is necessary, but to claim that all recovered memories
are by definition false is certainly overstating the literature
to date and the research that's been done," said Ms. Kristiansen,
who has tangled with Mr. Gold on several occasions. "It's
clear that accurate recovered memories are possible."
While she doesn't support Mr.
Gold's call to reopen numerous cases, Ms. Kristiansen agrees
there is a need to develop ways of evaluating whether such memories
are true. "But until there are criteria, I don't know who
could go around and figure out which recovered memory is true
and which one is false."
In the United States, there
have been many lawsuits in which therapists and hospitals are
being sued by patients who accuse them of implanting false memories
of abuse by using coercive and suggestive therapies. In the most
prominent case, a Chicago woman and her family accepted a $10.6-million-U.S.
out-of-court settlement from a hospital and two psychiatrists
she accused of brainwashing her into believing she was a satanic
high priestess.
Earlier this year, an inquiry
commissioned by the Royal College of Psychiatrists in England
concluded that any memory recovered through hypnosis, dream interpretation
or regression therapy is almost certainly false. It blames "dangerous
and powerful tools for persuasion" for spawning hundreds
of false accusations against parents.
The Canadian Psychiatric Association
in a position paper two years ago said reports of recovered memories
of sexual abuse may be true but "great caution" should
be exercised before accepting them without corroboration.
THE GLOBE AND MAIL April 15,
1998
Editorial: Remember
Those Justice Forgot
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Truth can never be
told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd. William Blake, The Proverbs of Hell