Those who have in fact been subjected to childhood sexual abuse or incest are, for very understandable reasons, sensitive about anything that seems to minimize or deny their experience. They are angry, and they have every right to be. In the US, at least one in ten women have been raped, almost two-thirds before the age of 18. A recent survey reports that one-sixth of all rape victims reported to police are under the age of 12. (And this is the category of rape least likely to be reported.) One-fifth of these girls were raped by their fathers. They have been betrayed. I want to be very clear about this: there are many real cases of ghoulish sexual predation by parents, or those acting in the role of parents. Compelling physical evidence – photos, for example, or diaries, or gonorrhoea or chlamydia in the child – have in some cases come to light. Abuse of children has been implicated as a major probable cause of social problems. According to one survey, 85 per cent of all violent prison inmates were abused in childhood. Two-thirds of all teenage mothers were raped or sexually abused as children or teenagers. Rape victims are ten times more likely than other women to use alcohol and other drugs to excess. The problem is real and urgent. Most of these tragic and incontestable cases of childhood sexual abuse, however, have been continuously remembered into adulthood. There is no hidden memory to be retrieved.
While there is better reporting today than in the past, there does seem to be a significant increase in cases of child abuse reported each year by hospitals and law enforcement authorities, rising in the United States ten-fold (to 1.7 million cases) between 1967 and 1985. Alcohol and other drugs, as well as economic stresses, are pointed to as the ‘reasons’ adults are more prone to abuse children today than in the past. Perhaps increasing publicity given to contemporary cases of child abuse emboldens adults to remember and focus on the abuse they once suffered.
A century ago, Sigmund Freud introduced the concept of repression, the forgetting of events in order to avoid intense psychic pain, as a coping mechanism essential for mental health. It seemed to emerge especially in patients diagnosed with ‘hysteria’, the symptoms of which included hallucinations and paralysis. At first Freud believed that behind every case of hysteria was a repressed instance of childhood sexual abuse. Eventually Freud changed his explanation to hysteria being caused by fantasies – not all of them unpleasant – of having been sexually abused as a child. The burden of guilt was shifted from parent to child. Something like this debate rages today. (The reason for Freud’s change of heart is still being disputed – the explanations ranging from his provoking outrage among his Viennese middle-aged male peers, to his recognition that he was taking the stories of hysterics seriously.)
Instances in which the ‘memory’ suddenly surfaces, especially at the ministrations of a psychotherapist or hypnotist, and where the first ‘recollections’ have a ghost- or dreamlike quality are highly questionable. Many such claims of sexual abuse appear to be invented. The Emory University psychologist Ulric Neisser says:
There is child abuse, and there are such things as repressed memories. But there are also such things as false memories and confabulations, and they are not rare at all. Misremem-berings are the rule, not the exception. They occur all the time. They occur even in cases where the subject is absolutely confident – even when the memory is a seemingly unforgettable flashbulb, one of those metaphorical mental photographs. They are still more likely to occur in cases where suggestion is a lively possibility, where memories can be shaped and re-shaped to meet the strong interpersonal demands of a therapy session. And once a memory has been reconfigured in this way, it is very, very hard to change.
These general principles cannot help us to decide with certainty where the truth lies in any individual case or claim. But on the average, across a large number of such claims, it is pretty obvious where we should place our bets. Misremembering and retrospective reworking of the past are a part of human nature; they go with the territory and they happen all the time.
Survivors of the Nazi death camps provide the clearest imaginable demonstration that even the most monstrous abuse can be carried continuously in human memory. Indeed, the problem for many Holocaust survivors has been to put some emotional distance between themselves and the death camps, to forget. But if in some alternative world of inexpressible evil they were forced to live in Nazi Germany – let’s say a thriving post-Hitler nation with its ideology intact, except that it’s changed its mind about anti-Semitism – imagine the psychological burden on Holocaust survivors then. Then perhaps they would be able to forget, because remembering would make their current lives unbearable. If there is such a thing as the repression and subsequent recall of ghastly memories, then perhaps it requires two conditions: (1) that the abuse actually happened, and (2) that the victim was required to pretend for long periods of time that it never happened.
The University of California social psychologist Richard Ofshe explains:
When patients are asked to explain how the memories returned, they report assembling fragments of images, ideas, feelings, and sensations into marginally coherent stories. As the so-called memory work stretches out for months, feelings become vague images, images become figures, and figures become known persons. Vague discomfort in certain parts of the body is reinterpreted as childhood rape . . . The original physical sensations, sometimes augmented by hypnosis, are then labeled ‘body memories’. There is no conceivable mechanism by which the muscles of the body could store memories. If these methods fail to persuade, the therapist may resort to still more heavy-handed practices. Some patients are recruited into survivor groups in which peer pressure is brought to bear, and they are asked to demonstrate politically correct solidarity by establishing themselves as members of a survivor subculture.
A cautious 1993 statement by the American Psychiatric Association accepts the possibility that some of us forget childhood abuse as a means of coping, but warns,
It is not known how to distinguish, with complete accuracy, memories based on true events from those derived from other sources . . . Repeated questioning may lead individuals to report ‘memories’ of events that never occurred. It is not known what proportion of adults who report memories of sexual abuse were actually abused … A strong prior belief by the psychiatrist that sexual abuse, or other factors, are or are not the cause of the patient’s problems is likely to interfere with appropriate assessment and treatment.
On the one hand, callously to dismiss charges of horrifying sexual abuse can be heartless injustice. On the other hand, to tamper with people’s memories, to infuse false stories of childhood abuse, to break up intact families, and even to send innocent parents to prison is also heartless injustice. Scepticism is essential on both sides. Picking our way between these two extremes can be very tricky.
Early editions of the influential book by Ellen Bass and Laura David (The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse, 1988) give illuminating advice to therapists:
Believe the survivor. You must believe your client was sexually abused, even if she doubts it herself . . . Your client needs you to stay steady in the belief that she was abused. Joining a client in doubt would be like joining a suicidal client in her belief that suicide is the best way out. If a client is unsure that she was abused but thinks she might have been, work as though she was. So far, among the hundreds of women we’ve talked to and the hundreds more we’ve heard about, not one has suspected that she might have been abused, explored it, and determined that she wasn’t.
But Kenneth V. Lanning, Supervisory Special Agent at the Behavioral Science Instruction and Research Unit of the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, a leading expert on the sexual victimization of children, wonders: ‘Are we making up for centuries of denial by now blindly accepting any allegation of child abuse, no matter how absurd or unlikely?’ ‘I don’t care if it’s true,’ replies one California therapist reported by The Washington Post. ‘What actually happened is irrelevant to me … We all live in a delusion.’
The existence of any false accusation of childhood sexual abuse – especially those created under the ministrations of an authority figure – has, it seems to me, relevance to the alien abduction issue. If some people can with great passion and conviction be led to falsely remember being abused by their own parents, might not others, with comparable passion and conviction, be led to falsely remember being abused by aliens?
The more I look into claims of alien abduction, the more similar they seem to reports of ‘recovered memories’ of childhood sexual abuse. And there’s a third class of related claims, repressed ‘memories’ of satanic ritual cults – in which sexual torture, coprophilia, infanticide and cannibalism are said to be prominently featured. In a survey of 2,700 members of the American Psychological Association, 12 per cent replied that they had treated cases of satanic ritual abuse (while 30 per cent reported cases of abuse done in the name of religion). Something like 10,000 cases are reported annually in the United States in recent years. A significant number of those touting the peril of rampant satanism in America, including law enforcement officers who organize seminars on the subject, turn out to be Christian fundamentalists; their sects explicitly require a literal devil to be meddling in everyday human life. The connection is neatly drawn in the saying ‘No Satan, no God’.