Terence Hines - Pseudoscience and the Paranormal

But recovered memory therapists postulate a mechanism in human memory that goes beyond just repression. They argue that, for example, women who suffered severe abuse during childhood would not only repress those memories, but create memories of a happy childhood in their place, memories in which their tormentors were kind and loving. A little thought shows how absurd such a claim is. If such a mechanism actually existed, it would be easy to find, for example, children who survived the holocaust who had memories of a very pleasant several years’ stay in, say, Auschwitz, watched over by pleasant and friendly SS guards. Obviously, not one single case of such memories exists.

Recovered memory therapists also believe that it is possible to recover memories of events that took place when a person was very young—as young as threee months in the case of Rosanne Barr. As the discussion of infant amnesia (pp. 168–69) shows, in the brain of a young child, the anatomical structures and circuitry needed for long-term retention of memories is not yet adequately developed. This is not to say, of course, that young children do not remember events from day to day. They do, but they lack the mechanisms that provide storage of these memories in forms that will be retrievable years later.

The issue of the reliability of children’s memories became the focal point in the debate about another aspect of claims about ritual abuse. In the early 1980s allegations began to appear that children were being subjected to truly ghastly forms of sexual abuse and torture by Satan worshipers. This abuse took place in private homes, but also in schools and day care centers. It was argued that there was a huge, nationwide ring of Satanists coordinating the abuse. Included were young women kept as “breeders” whose job was to have babies that were then used in ritual sacrifices and cannibalism. It was said that tens of thousands of people were being killed by satanic cults every year. But no bodies were ever found, leading an FBI agent who investigated some of the claims to write (Lanning 1991) that “it is up to mental health professionals, not law enforcement, to explain why victims are alleging things that don’t seem to be true” (p. 171). Why were no bodies ever found? In a typical case, charges of abuse at some school came to the attention of the local authorities, who then intervened by closing the school and interviewing the children said to have been abused. In many cases, these young children told the most chilling stories of abuse. Surely, it was widely believed by social workers and psychologists, the children couldn’t be making up such horrible stories. They had to be telling the truth. The full story of the “Satanic Panic” that spread across America in the 1980s and early 1990s is worth a book of its own, and Victor’s (1993) book of that same name is the best source for the full story. Carison and Larue (1989) is also excellent. I have relied on both for the following discussion.

The McMartin Preschool case holds the dubious distinction of being not only the first, but also the prototypical case of Satanic ritual child abuse allegations in a school setting. Eberle and Eberle (1993) have written a book-length treatment of this tragic and informative case. The best article-length summary I have read is by Fischer (1989). The McMartin Preschool was located in a suburb of Los Angeles, California. In 1983 Judy Johnson, the mother of three-year-old Jeffrey Johnson, charged that her son had been sexually abused by a staff member at the school. Medical support for this charge was, at very best, flimsy, and no charges were brought. Then, in an astonishing move, the local police department sent a letter to every parent with a child in the McMartin school. The letter was very graphic in describing the kinds of sexual abuse that had been alleged and asked that parents report anything suspicious. The effects of the letter were exactly what one would have expected: It started a panic. After all, parents assumed, if the police were sending such a letter, there must be real, solid evidence of something horrible going on at the school. Not surprisingly, soon after the letter went out, other reports of abuse appeared.

As parents reported their suspicions, their children were interviewed by police investigators as well as social workers. The interview techniques used on these children, and in other similar cases, did not involve hypnosis, visualization, or drugs, as is often the case with adults in repressed memory therapy. But the techniques that were used, when applied to children, were just as productive of false reports of abuse that, in the long term, became real memories of abuse that hadn’t taken place.

One of the most notorious methods used in these cases was the use of anatomically correct dolls. These are dolls that are complete with, as required, a penis or a vagina. When these dolls were first introduced in the investigation of child abuse in the 1970s, it was simply assumed that children who had been sexually abused would pay more attention to, and thus play more, with the “naughty bits” (to borrow a phrase) than would nonabused children. Thus, playing with the penis or vagina was evidence of abuse, even if the child said he or she had not been abused and there was no physical evidence of abuse. Unfortunately, it was only years after the use of the dolls was begun that attempts were made to find out if the way children played with them was really a valid indication of whether a child had been abused. As summarized by Wolfner, Faust, and Dawes (1993), Dawes (1996), and Bruck and Ceci (1999), it is clear that the use of these sorts of dolls was useless as an indicator of abuse. For example, in one study (Bruck et al. 1995), the subjects were young children who had been given a regular physical checkup, including an examination of the genital area that did not involve any touching or penetration. When asked to use anatomically correct dolls to “show me on the doll how the doctor touched your genitals”, a “significant proportion of the children (particularly the girls) showed touching on the doll even though they had not been touched” (Bruck and Ceci 1999, p. 428). Further, some children showed that they had been penetrated with the doctor’s finger or a spoon or that a stethoscope had been used in the genital exam. This unreliability of the dolls means that not only were children who were not abused classified as having been abused by the dolls test, but the reverse occurred—children who had been abused were missed by the test. The failure of the large number of psychologists and social workers who used these dolls without rigorous evidence that they were valid is inexcusable and resulted in much harm. Unfortunately, in some areas in social work and clinical psychology there seems to be little appreciation of the fact that it is unethical to use a test without evidence that it actually works. The belief that it works is thought to be enough.

The doll test tended to classify more children as having been abused simply because children would tend to play with the interesting new bits that they had not seen before. But it, in and of itself, did not result in specific reports of abuse. Other techniques used by police, child services personnel, and social workers, however, had exactly such an effect. In one simple example, a child would be told that he could not go home to his parents until he told the investigators the “truth.” And it was made very clear to the child what the “truth” was, through the leading questions being asked. In another situation, investigators would determine that Sam and Sarah were best friends. The two children would be interviewed separately. Sarah might be asked if Mr. Soandso had abused her in some way. Since he hadn’t, the child would answer “no.” The rest of the interrogation would go something like the following: