by Dreams End » Fri Dec 30, 2005 3:08 pm
Boy did I hijack this thread! But thanks again to everyone. <br><br>And sorry, but I need to ramble a bit....<br><br>Just clicking around in my ADD way, I thought I'd offer up this link. I'd never heard of the "Leadership Council". Has anyone here heard of them?<br><br>I'm going to link to two pages on their site.<br><br>The first is a nice summary of various studies (and in case you didn't know it...there are a good number of these) that show that "recovered" memories of abuse, either spontaneous or through therapy, have as high degree of accuracy as continuous memories. <br><br>There's a particularly moving one that I'll excerpt. <br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.leadershipcouncil.org/index.html">www.leadershipcouncil.org/index.html</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br>This excerpt actually doesn't qualify as a "study" but in a fluke, the original recollections of a six year old about abuse from her mom was on videotape as was an interview at age 17 after she'd forgotten nearly all of the details and began to remember them again before actually viewing the videotape from ten years earlier. <br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>Corwin, D. L., & Olafson, E.. (1997). Videotaped discovery of a reportedly unrecallable memory of child sexual abuse: Comparison with a childhood interview videotaped 11 years before. Child Maltreatment, 2(2), 91-112.<br><br>This article presents a unique case involving the recovery of traumatic memory by a 17 year old victim of documented child sexual abuse. By happenstance, both the child's disclosure at age 6 and the young woman's sudden recall of the abuse at age 17 after several years of reported inability to recall the experience were captured on videotape. This article includes transcripts of the interviews at ages 6 and 17.<br><br>The case was originally referred to Corwin for a court-appointed evaluation of allegations of sexual and physical abuse. The father was accusing the mother of having sexually and physically abused their daughter (Jane Doe). Corwin had three interviews with the child and also met with both parents. The evaluation along with previous documentation (Jane was seen for burns to the bottom of both feet after her mother punished her by burning them) strongly supported the child's allegation of both physical and sexual abuse by her mother. Moreover, Jane made consistent statements regarding the identity of her sexual abuser and the nature of the abuse in all three forensic interviews. Her accounts included sensory detail and she reported detailed maternal threats not to disclose. In her first interview, her disclosure was spontaneous and not in response to a question directed to sexual abuse. In addition to the interviews, the records included protective services reports, court declarations by the parents, pleadings, court decisions, reports by prior evaluators and therapists, letters from Jane's parents, friends, and relatives, and Jane's medical records.<br><br>Parental behavior during the interviews was also consistent with the mother having abused Jane. Before each parent left the room, Corwin asked each one to tell Jane to tell him the truth about anything he asked her. The father did so with ease. However, instead of telling Jane to tell the truth, her mother asked her to repeat what they had been talking about that morning. Psychological testing of the mother was consistent with the mother having a dissociative disorder. In addition, psychological testing on Jane's mother indicated impulsivity, inadequate judgment, and problems with perception and thinking. The father's psychological testing indicated emotional constraint but found no problems with perception and thinking. Based on the weight of the evidence the court gave Jane's father full custody and denied visitation Jane's mother. <br><br>At age 16, Jane was placed in foster care after her father had a stroke and was placed in a nursing home. Jane's foster mother reported that Jane had a difficult and rebellious early adolescence. Jane resumed contact with her mother during this time. After her father's death, Jane, who no longer had any memory of the abuse, wanted a closer relationship with her mother. Her mother denied the abuse allegations claiming that Jane's father had pressured Jane to repeat false allegations so he could get sole custody. Confused, Jane contacted Dr. Corwin and asked to she the videotape of her disclosure at age six. Jane said: "I've chosen to believe that my real mom didn't do anything, even though I don't really remember if she did or not." <br><br>Before showing her the videotape, Corwin asks Jane to remember everything that she could about her interviews with him at age 6. Corwin asked her if she remembered "anything about the concerns about sexual abuse." Jane replied: "No. I mean, I remember that was part of the accusation, but I don't remember anything--wait a minute, yeah, I do." Corwin asked her what she remembered. Jane responded, "My gosh, that's really, really weird." This was followed by tears as Jane remembers the pain of her mother vaginally penetrating with her finger during bath time.<br><br>Corwin then showed Jane the videotapes of his interviews with her when she was 6 years old. After watching the videotapes, Jane believed that the child on the tapes was telling the truth, but she also wants to continue seeing her mother and wants to believe that maybe her mother hurt her accidently and that she made it out to be worse then it really was.<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--> <br><br>The second link is a particularly satisfying one to see. It's a critical look at the film "Capturing the Friedmans", a film I haven't seen, but which takes the rather odd position that a man whose son fully confessed to helping his dad abuse groups of young boys in their care for computer classes and to being abused himself, in fact did not commit this abuse. The reason I'm happy to see this debunking is that the filmmaker was also the one to write the article we saw on this site several weeks back allegedly from one of the McMartin victims now claiming that none of the abuse happened. This article was odd in that it was written by the filmmaker, not a reporter, and was in the LA Times magazine TRAVEL section. <br><br>While I want to be very skeptical of concepts I believe as well as those I don't, I smelled a rat with that article and even found that someone of the same name and age as the alleged "non-victim" had actually died several years previous. I contacted the LA Times but, surprise, they didn't respond. The rat was even more odiferous as I noticed that, despite its odd and lowkey placement in the travel section, the article took off like wildfire and was reprinted ALL OVER the internet. I'd actually searched the day someone posted the article and a few days later and in those few days, hundreds of reproductions had popped up everywhere. <br><br>So, anyway, I was happy to see this very scholarly looking site address the Friedman film.<br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.leadershipcouncil.org/1/ctf/1.html">www.leadershipcouncil.org/1/ctf/1.html</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br>What the site does not do, as far as I can tell, is address RA issues. That's not to say that this type of abuse is not among the types examined in the various studies cited, but it isn't singled out as such. Sadly, it's unclear whether this is due to their skeptical attitudes, lack of knowledge, or fear that isolating RA as a subtype of abuse will discredit their other research.<br><br>I think we should not hold this against organizations that take this last line of thought. The good that is done by validating the memories of abuse, in the long run, is so helpful. I know that when I first started coming across these studies (as opposed to the vast number of studies showing how widespread false memory syndrome is...I mean I assume there are studies about this, given how prevalent the fear of it is...okay, maybe just a few studies....one? Come on...ONE freaking study? Oh, a study where they made some kids think they had once been lost in a shopping mall when they hadn't? That's IT?)<br><br>We can't be too hard on society for accepting the FMSF propaganda because, you know what, this stuff is simply too hard to accept. Within families, as I am seeing, siblings, for example, who love their sister very much simply refuse to believe certain possibilities. Debbie's sister can accept that their DID mom may have done cruel things to Debbie, but can't accept anything like that could have come from their dad. And I think when I gave her the vague idea of "cruel" she didnt' have in mind what I had in mind. <br><br>I make this little vow now. I'm a good writer, but due to ADD and various other "deficiencies" I've not made enough use of it. If I ever run across or have brought to my attention a case of RA (as opposed to "simple" familial abuse) that has some possibility of being corroborated, I will do all in my power to create a coherent investigative report on the matter. It's something I do really well. It would need to be someone willing to go somewhat public, however...and that may never happen. Completely anonymous accounts make verification by outside investigators impossible...though the best way to have it work would be to have a credible magazine back the story and have their own fact checkers and editorial standards in play. Then it could stay anonymous, I think.<br><br>In case anyone reading this is in the general southeast region of the US and might know of such a case, here would be some good criteria:<br><br>Access to childhood medical records<br><br>A portion, at least, of the memories should have been continous or recovered spontaneously outside of therapy (sorry, but got to head FMSF off at the pass.)<br><br>Access to childhood, adolescent journals (I just read all of Debbie's. I think one particular alter is the only one who wrote in these...and what's interesting is what's NOT in there. For example, as a young adult, she was raped. It gets half a page. That's it.)<br><br>Siblings who might talk.<br><br>Memory of specific locations of abuse (we're talking RA involving non family members)<br><br>Memory of specific people involved.<br><br>It probably shouldn't be a case with claims of extremely high level perpetrators as I could never get access to them and it would diminish credibility of the reports. And, it could get me killed. But lower level involvement would be easier to prove and at least establish that the pattern exists. The ones that usually make the news in the US are of marginalized groups such as in Ponchatoula, LA (though aren't there hints of higher level involvement.)<br><br>The case should not already be known. One thing I am now ready to say I definitely believe is that certain operatives get assigned, on higher profile cases, to muddy the waters. They do this two ways. First, by finding legit cases and alleging and "proving" things that go way beyond the evidence (regardless of their accuracy) and thereby discrediting the case. Second, by grabbing onto cases that are not legitimate and promoting them. Yes, I'm talking about Ted Gunderson, but I'm afraid I might be talking about DeCamp as well. I'm still open to the idea that Decamp is completely legit and surely there's a LOT of fire with that smoke in Franklin, but when the whole case started getting tied in so neatly to the Gosch case, I got suspicious. <br><br>The victim should have a very good therapist who is strong and believes the victim but does not necessarily make a general practice of working with such cases (heading the FSMF off at the pass again.)<br><br>I don't know if anyone will know of such a case that fits these criteria. It's something I'd really like to do, if it's ever possible. How to establish initial trust with a victim willing to go through this I don't know. We have a friend who is DID and I have a suspicion she might even be such a person but I've yet to talk with her in detail about her background. And there's always the chance that Debbie's case goes beyond the family, though there has been absolutely no evidence so far that this is the case. And BELIEVE me, I look for it. If I ever did find such evidence, I would rip that case apart like a freaking pit bull.<br><br>I know I'm rambling. Debbie comes home today and I just feel so freaking powerless that I want to find ways to be of some service to others in this regard. So all of the above is a "fantasy" I've had for awhile now. You guys know what I'm like when I'm trying to track down information. And on this board, it's simply web-searches done when I have a little time. There's a whole lot more information that can be accessed, along with personal interviews. And the cool thing is, if I ever DID come across such a case, I think there are folks on here who'd have tips about places to look for corroboration. <br><br> <p></p><i></i>
