Thread: Revenge, rehabilitation and secular society Board: Oblivion / Ship of Fools.
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Posted by Arethosemyfeet (# 17047) on
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A man has recently returned to live in my local community having been released from a fairly short sentence for sexual offences against children committed between 20 and 40 years ago.
A lot of people are understandably upset and a little fearful in a place where children generally roam freely. The reactions in some quarters have been visceral, bordering on disturbing. Calls to hound him (and his wife) out of their home, to run them out of the community etc.
It's all the fun of a witch hunt but with the added bonus of an actual "witch" at the end of it, and it makes me feel deeply uneasy.
Maybe it's a contrast between Christian thought and secular ideas, but my first thought in this sort of case is not "how do we make the perpetrator's life worse than the victim's" (which was the gist of one proposal) but "how do we stop this person offending again". And the answer to the second aim (from what I've read) appears to be by keeping a close eye on them but engaging them in society again, with ostracisation appearing to make reoffending more likely.
It also occurs to me that a community where every knows the name and face of the perpetrator and will be keeping an eye out for them being near children is a heck of a lot safer than the alternative - putting them in a hostel in the east end of Glasgow where they'd only have to go a short distance and be unrecognised. In the same vein this man's crimes were committed against family members, children he had close and regular one-to-one contact with. Now his family know his proclivities the risk of him being able to offend is much lower. Frankly it's far more likely that children in the wider community are being abused by their own family members already than that they would be abused by this man.
Why are reactions so visceral? Is it a learned response, a "2 minute hate" that is condoned by society as one of the last allowable outlets for undiluted rage? Or is it a natural parental response to feeling that your children might be under threat? Is it the reaction to this threat that is excessive, or the reaction to other threats (domestic violence; sexual assaults on adults) that is too weak?
Posted by Brenda Clough (# 18061) on
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It sounds like all those things.
Posted by quetzalcoatl (# 16740) on
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Yes, all those things, but I suspect some fake outrage, and some projection by violent people, who like to justify their own violence, (e.g. 'he deserved it').
Posted by Bibaculus (# 18528) on
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I have had some dealing with people who have been guilty of child abuse and child pornography offences. It seems to me that if one is looking to work with people on the margins of society, one cannot get any more marginal than this.
All perspective seems to evaporate. Someone who has downloaded pictures of teenagers, possibly inadvertently, is as bad as someone who has done unspeakable things with tiny tots. An elderly ex-priest who 30 years ago forgot himself and put his hand on a boy's thigh is damned for ever.
There is a natural (and laudable) desire to protect vulnerable children. It is a biological urge. they are the future of the species and all that. We are moved to the defence of the vulnerable. But people do change. One priest I know who committed offences decades ago, for which he was only tried and gaoled a few years ago (the delay was not his fault) spent the whole intervening period in remorse for what he had done, had all the therapy that was available, and frankly was no further danger to anyone.
Society, and the Church, has an obligation to these people, and you are quite right that reintegration into society (which is what organisations like Circles of Support try to do) is the best way to deal with them. But sadly people are too full of hate, bigotry and lack of forgiveness. Many end up on the streets. Many end up in further trouble with the law because they cannot keep the conditions imposed on them (a homeless person finds reporting on set days to a police station rather difficult, even more so providing an address!), and most homeless hostels will not accept sex offenders.
Posted by Arethosemyfeet (# 17047) on
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I'm steering clear of the word "forgiveness" in this context because I think that to advocate forgiveness can come across like telling the victims that they should be doing the forgiving, or that the crimes committed somehow don't matter. Victims may decide they want to forgive, but outside of that forgiveness probably needs to be between the perpetrator, their conscience, God and their confessor (if they have one). The history of churches telling victims of abuse they should forgive their abusers while doing nothing to prevent the abuse continuing is far too recent and extensive for anything more nuanced.
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on
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Fuck love and forgiveness. No, I'm serious, they should never be considerations in dealing with this. Not because they are worthless things, but because they blind.
But also fuck hate and revenge for the same reasons.
From a purely pragmatic POV, rehabilitation, integration and monitoring have shown to be more effective than marginalising and shunning.
i so understand the feelings of anger and revenge, but they do not best serve other potential victims.
Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on
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Yes to almost all of the above [except what lilbuddha just cross-posted...]
In my anecdatal experience most sex offenders have abused members of their own family and are unlikely to target random kids. The rarer and more devious ones are likely to run rings round any effort to keep them away from trouble.
While this type of crime is inexcusable, the public attention focused on it is disproportionate and unproductive.
One avenue of restorative justice, "circles of accountability", seeks to care for offenders released from jail and prevent them reoffending; in some countries church structures form part of probation schemes.
However, I have a lot of troube with this to the extent that offenders are treated as part of a programme rather than part of the community. The friendship extended appears token rather than genuine.
Media hypocrisy in this respect is blatant. The size of the headline relating to sex offenders is usually in direct proportion to the number of pictures of scantily-clad, sexed-up, under-age-looking girls in the same publication.
Sex offenders are like modern-day lepers.
[ 03. January 2016, 16:51: Message edited by: Eutychus ]
Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on
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quote:
Originally posted by lilBuddha:
Fuck love and forgiveness. No, I'm serious, they should never be considerations in dealing with this. Not because they are worthless things, but because they blind.
Forgiveness is complicated and I think arethosemyfeet is onto a good thing leaving it to one side.
As to love, it depends in which capacity one is interacting with the offender. Certainly it shouldn't be part of the criminal justice approach. I'm not sure where it fits in the restorative justice approach, but I think it should definitely be part of the Christian-in-the-pew approach.
I have a convicted sex offender in my congregation and my attitude to them strives to be exactly the same as towards everyone else (not least because that person is not the one I worry about most in the congregation in that respect). Which does not exclude vigilance.
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on
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I embrace all inclusing lilBuddha. Bibaculus. The priest/s you mention. The first and theoretical, generic is damned forever in this life. And rightly so. And as for the other, if he isn't the same one, who's fault is it? He should have confessed. Publically. Turned himself in. Atoned. Asking no forgiveness, no understanding. They should have sacrificed their freedom, their privacy. Their churches should have compensated their victims including with fully financed therapy.
Revenge, punishment is meaningless.
Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Arethosemyfeet:
... a fairly short sentence ...
This is part of the problem. A sentence for sexual offences should be rather more lengthy than they typically are. In Canada a non-penetrative sexual offence is usually 'provincial time' of 'two years less a day' or considerably less in jail, with penetrative offences starting at about 4 years. While in jail, only a minority are offered actual treatment. In my view sentences should be very lengthy but served in the community with monitoring, starting with the electronic ankle bracelets, and the corrections system should allow probation workers and police the authority to return the offender to lock up if assessed risk is rising. Treatment and compliance with treatment should be mandatory and a condition of being in the community. It is far cheaper to monitor in the community than lock up people. I'm specifically referencing the economic argument with this.
The hounding of sex offenders, while it appeals to our instincts to treat others fairly and without discrimination, is directly caused by a system that does limited things to reduce risk and give the community confidence that the offender isn't a risk to further people.
I know people often say in cases like this that the offences are decades old, and such dated and old offences with no intervening report suggest risk is low. However, this is not known, and the offender may well be undertaking additional deviant sexual acts harmful to people, with improved covering over of what (s)he's doing.
quote:
Arethosemyfeet continued
It's all the fun of a witch hunt but with the added bonus of an actual "witch" at the end of it, and it makes me feel deeply uneasy.
While there may be a minority considering this sort of thing "fun", usually it is fear, and usually some of the fear is reasonable.
quote:
Originally posted by Arethosemyfeet:
In the same vein this man's crimes were committed against family members, children he had close and regular one-to-one contact with. Now his family know his proclivities the risk of him being able to offend is much lower. Frankly it's far more likely that children in the wider community are being abused by their own family members already than that they would be abused by this man.
This part of your OP underscores a very significant problem. If he was sexually assaulting family members, then the family members knew about their's and the other family members' abuse quite a long time before they reported them to the authorities given the decades since the offences. Which means that family members failed to provide any monitoring or control of his behaviour. What would make us think they would do it now? That the offences were decades old leads me to wonder if this crime fits the pattern of the offender either moving on to grandchildren or the parents of grandchildren feared for them and wanted to prevent this.
Would the community have confidence if the offender were advertised as having electronic monitoring and his/her whereabouts always known to the authorities? I would default to lifetime monitoring for sexual offenders were it possible. (An open and unanswerable question, as the monitors used usually just require the offender to remain in proximity to a base station in the home, and then travel to work and back, and do not do other than document the time of travel between.)
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Martin60:
Revenge, punishment is meaningless.
No, they are not. Punishment (aka consequence) is a part of the healthy development of humans. And it is a preventative in many (though not all) cases for adults.
Revenge can serve a psychological need for treats listing a feeling of control lost by being a victim. The idea that it eats everyone from within is not an objective one, but a subjective to the individual reality.
Now granted, both your philosophy and mine contend that it is ultimately harmful to one, but that is not universal. Not even within those who ostensively share those.
Posted by Arethosemyfeet (# 17047) on
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I think were he to have committed the crimes more recently the sentence would have been longer. Because of the historical nature of the offences they would have been prosecuted under older statutes and sentencing carried out under older guidelines. It's not an ideal situation but I can see why the law is arranged that way.
The community response I've seen is that they want him gone. It's not really about likelihood of reoffending, it's just about the visceral reaction to the offence itself, whatever the broader cause of that reaction may be.
[ 03. January 2016, 17:39: Message edited by: Arethosemyfeet ]
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on
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We're both 1000% right lilBuddha. Vengeance is delicious and can involve closure in individual transactions. But it's meaningless on a social scale. Nobody learns. I don't regard any non-violent process that ends in the rehabilitation of offenders (where possible: with 'sociopaths' it isn't) and the reconciliation and compensation of victims as punishment.
Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Arethosemyfeet:
I think were he to have committed the crimes more recently the sentence would have been longer. Because of the historical nature of the offences they would have been prosecuted under older statutes and sentencing carried out under older guidelines. It's not an ideal situation but I can see why the law is arranged that way.
The community response I've seen is that they want him gone. It's not really about likelihood of reoffending, it's just about the visceral reaction to the offence itself, whatever the broader cause of that reaction may be.
Good clarification.
On the revenge aspect, as posted by lilBuddha etc, is it a desire to assert some sense of power over which someone previously felt powerless? But this hardly explains the community response.
Posted by Bibaculus (# 18528) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Martin60:
I embrace all inclusing lilBuddha. Bibaculus. The priest/s you mention. The first and theoretical, generic is damned forever in this life. And rightly so. And as for the other, if he isn't the same one, who's fault is it? He should have confessed. Publically. Turned himself in. Atoned. Asking no forgiveness, no understanding. They should have sacrificed their freedom, their privacy. Their churches should have compensated their victims including with fully financed therapy.
Revenge, punishment is meaningless.
I think you forget the power structures in the Catholic Church. The priest I was thinking about belonged to a religious order. He did what his superior told him to do at the time. he was sent away from the school he had been working in (and which the order ran). That was how superiors dealt with things at the time. I think that when, as a result of police going through files, he was finally arrested, he was actually relieved (though frightened).
I have seen a few clergy abusers. In my experience the structures of the church have contributed to their abusing. I say this not to remove blame from the individual, but to say that there have been systemic failures by people in authority.
This is not restricted to the Catholic Church, or to churches, of course.
Posted by Doublethink. (# 1984) on
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I think it is probably unreasonable to expect successful resettlement in the same area really. It would have made sense to plan a new start in a new place, with appropriate monitoring.
For everybody's sake, including the perpetrator and his wife.
[ 03. January 2016, 19:03: Message edited by: Doublethink. ]
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on
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I knew that you were talking about the RCC Bibaculus. No other denomination was that bad. It was still his total personal responsibility.
Posted by Bibaculus (# 18528) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Martin60:
I knew that you were talking about the RCC Bibaculus. No other denomination was that bad. It was still his total personal responsibility.
I'm not sure that is quite fair. It is larger than most churches (well, any other church) and so has more cases. But I do think the power structures in the catholic Church exacerbate things.
Of course we are all responsible for our own actions. But circumstances can have a big impact on us. These things do not happen in isolation, and the 'culture' in which we find ourselves, and structures which put people under pressures they cannot stand, can all contribute to offending behaviour.
Sadly the Catholic Church, because of all the adverse publicity it has received, now tends to cut these people off, which does not help rehabilitation at all (to return to the topic under discussion). I think the CofE does much the same. As the OP said, if offenders are integrated into a community, they can be more closely watched, and also made to feel they belong, and reoffending is less likely.
Posted by Arethosemyfeet (# 17047) on
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I think there is some mileage in the idea that it cannot be the same community. There cannot be a sense of returning to a former life as if nothing has happened.
In the specific case I'm thinking of I don't believe the victims live locally and my understanding is that the offences took place elsewhere.
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on
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Fuck 'fair' Bibaculus. There is just no way anything said about corrupt Christians is 'unfair' compared with the suffering of their victims.
Posted by Bibaculus (# 18528) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Martin60:
Fuck 'fair' Bibaculus. There is just no way anything said about corrupt Christians is 'unfair' compared with the suffering of their victims.
Well, we are all corrupt in one way or another.
I am not trying to downplay the sufferings of victims. I know someone who has attempted suicide because of sexual abuse by a priest. But it is not right to suggest, as you did, that the catholic church is somehow uniquely at fault here. I am not going to mention other prominent examples from other churches, because name calling serves no purpose, but we all know who they are.
Posted by Albertus (# 13356) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Martin60:
Fuck 'fair' Bibaculus. There is just no way anything said about corrupt Christians is 'unfair' compared with the suffering of their victims.
That word 'corrupt' begs the question, doesn't it? There's a world of difference between someone like Bishop Peter Ball, who was it seems a serial abuser (although not of children) and used his position to enable him to do that, and someone who resists temptation except on one occasion, with dreadful results.
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on
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And is covered up by his corrupt superiors. And no, there is NO difference to EACH victim.
And I implied no such thing Bibaculus.
[ 03. January 2016, 22:04: Message edited by: Martin60 ]
Posted by Lamb Chopped (# 5528) on
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The only thing I can contribute here is that I think the victims ought not to be forced to live with the daily presence of their former abuser in their neighborhood. Relocation ought to be a part of any court settlement to avoid this problem. If victims move in the future, they can do their due diligence to avoid accidental encounters--but they should not be forced out of their family homes by his return to the scene of the crime.
We have a case in my city where a sex abuser has returned to the very home and street where he abused victims (non-family) living today still on the same street. The neighbors are up in arms, obviously, but nothing can be done. IMHO the victims' freedom of residency ought to take precedence over his/her own. The former abuser need not move that far away--just enough to be out of the daily supermarket/post office/bank runs.
[ 04. January 2016, 00:16: Message edited by: Lamb Chopped ]
Posted by Arethosemyfeet (# 17047) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
We have a case in my city where a sex abuser has returned to the very home and street where he abused victims (non-family) living today still on the same street. The neighbors are up in arms, obviously, but nothing can be done. IMHO the victims' freedom of residency ought to take precedence over his/her own. The former abuser need not move that far away--just enough to be out of the daily supermarket/post office/bank runs.
I'd certainly agree with that. It's about protecting the victim, not getting revenge on the abuser.
Posted by Bibaculus (# 18528) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Albertus:
quote:
Originally posted by Martin60:
Fuck 'fair' Bibaculus. There is just no way anything said about corrupt Christians is 'unfair' compared with the suffering of their victims.
That word 'corrupt' begs the question, doesn't it? There's a world of difference between someone like Bishop Peter Ball, who was it seems a serial abuser (although not of children) and used his position to enable him to do that, and someone who resists temptation except on one occasion, with dreadful results.
Peter Ball seems a very good example of the abuser. Just what was going on?
There was (is) another side to him, that much is clear. In many ways he seemed a rather holy man, if rather eccentric. I certainly thought at the time that his indulging of unstable young men who thought they had vocations was worrying, but more because I assumed that he was too simple (or holy) to see through them. But I certainly never guessed that he was an abuser. He seemed, if anything, one of the more saintly bishops in the CofE.
Was all that just a front? Or is he, in fact, a rather complex person in which there is both great good and great evil?
And how does someone end up doing the sorts of things that Peter Ball (or Fr Kit Cunningham, or Archimandrite Panteleimon Metropoulos) did? What makes an abuser of someone who, presumably, has the best of intentions to serve God in the priesthood? I know personal sin and personal responsibility exist. But is that all?
Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on
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hosting/
Let's keep the discussion away from speculation about specific, living persons, please.
/hosting
Posted by North East Quine (# 13049) on
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From the OP:
quote:
Why are reactions so visceral? Is it a learned response, a "2 minute hate" that is condoned by society as one of the last allowable outlets for undiluted rage? Or is it a natural parental response to feeling that your children might be under threat? Is it the reaction to this threat that is excessive, or the reaction to other threats (domestic violence; sexual assaults on adults) that is too weak?
What strikes me as odd is that there wasn't this reaction, say 40 or 50 years ago. My local community had a sad old man who used to "flash" schoolgirls, and the onus was on the schoolgirls not to look. The reaction would be totally different nowadays. At least part of the huge wave of prosecutions of historic sex offences is because at the time, people were willing to turn a blind eye, or minimise in some way, or disbelieve victims.
I would lean towards "learned response" partly because sexual offending is understood differently nowadays.
Posted by rolyn (# 16840) on
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I was thinking along those same lines NE.Q
When, 40 or more yrs ago,I attended comprehensive school there were a couple of dodgy characters in the small town who everyone sort of knew about. School kids would warn each other, (just in a 'don't go in his house for a cup of tea' type way).
Adults never got involved, and to my knowledge no harm was ever done. Certainly nothing to justify the kind of paedomania that's running amok these days.
But then I suppose, given hindsight, this was the environment in which serial offenders could freely operate. When the bubble burst over savile it's as if all the hatred and demonisation has came in a tidal wave. And, it has to be said, with similar destructive power that hatred brings with it.
Posted by Arethosemyfeet (# 17047) on
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quote:
Originally posted by rolyn:
But then I suppose, given hindsight, this was the environment in which serial offenders could freely operate. When the bubble burst over savile it's as if all the hatred and demonisation has came in a tidal wave. And, it has to be said, with similar destructive power that hatred brings with it.
It goes back further than Savile. You can date it to the turn of the century, to the News of the World campaign publishing names and photos of abusers. I mean the media frenzy was satirised by Chris Morris in Brasseye back in 2001.
Posted by Albertus (# 13356) on
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quote:
Originally posted by North East Quine:
From the OP:
quote:
Why are reactions so visceral? Is it a learned response, a "2 minute hate" that is condoned by society as one of the last allowable outlets for undiluted rage? Or is it a natural parental response to feeling that your children might be under threat? Is it the reaction to this threat that is excessive, or the reaction to other threats (domestic violence; sexual assaults on adults) that is too weak?
What strikes me as odd is that there wasn't this reaction, say 40 or 50 years ago. My local community had a sad old man who used to "flash" schoolgirls, and the onus was on the schoolgirls not to look. The reaction would be totally different nowadays. At least part of the huge wave of prosecutions of historic sex offences is because at the time, people were willing to turn a blind eye, or minimise in some way, or disbelieve victims.
I would lean towards "learned response" partly because sexual offending is understood differently nowadays.
But I wonder, too, whether the way in which sexual offending is portrayed affects the way in which people who experience it respond to it? I don't mean things like rape or physical assaults, which i can only imagine are always horrible to experience- more things like the flasher that you mention. If the general view is that it's just a bit of a sad thing to do and all you need to do is not look, does that mean that being flashed at is less distressing than it would be if you'd had it drummed into you that it was a terrible psychological violation? Never having been flashed at, I don't know.
Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on
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quote:
Originally posted by rolyn:
... to my knowledge no harm was ever done. Certainly nothing to justify the kind of paedomania that's running amok these days.
But then I suppose, given hindsight, this was the environment in which serial offenders could freely operate. When the bubble burst over savile it's as if all the hatred and demonisation has came in a tidal wave. And, it has to be said, with similar destructive power that hatred brings with it.
Saville, as I've been educated by the forums (the man has not stature whatsoever here) came many years after we learned of extensive sexual abuse in various contexts in Canada. I recall the initial sensitisation here came in the early 1980s, so 30+ year ago. At that time, virtually every behavioural issue and symptom could possibly have been an indicator, with subsequent refinements of understanding. But very clear understanding that all of it was harmful, and underlies a good proportion of prostitution, drugs and alcohol abuse, among many other evils. The Badgley Royal Commission (Canada, many links to the info on the 'net) from 1984 told us much, such as 1 in 3 or 4 girls and 1 in 5 or 6 boys had some exposure to sexual abuse before adulthood.
Posted by Lamb Chopped (# 5528) on
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I don't think I know any women who weren't flashed at or worse as children. I used to walk home along a daytime-deserted road in suburban California (with no homes overlooking it, and a wall so you couldn't escape) and men would regularly drive up next to me and start masturbating in the car. One actually walked a mile alongside me and I spent the whole time frantically thinking of how I could get somewhere public enough to shed him. I thought he'd make it all the way to my home, but he didn't--thank God for a four mile walk.
I don't think I was sexually scarred by this shit, but I was sure as hell scared out of my mind that one of these men would grab me. I was fairly portable in those days, being only 14 or so.
My sister had similar experiences, but added to that being approached by a serial killer in a shopping mall (he was asking teenage girls to "model"). We found out later who he was.
In view of this kind of thing and how common it is for young girls, I really hesitate to treat flashers as harmless. Some of them are, I suppose. Some of them, brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
Posted by North East Quine (# 13049) on
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I don't think flashers are harmless. But 40 years ago, say, being flashed was a bit like falling out of a tree and breaking your arm; it was one of those things that happened in childhood and was no reflection on your parents.
What has changed is parental reaction to this threat to their children.
At the same time parental reaction to other threats has reduced. The shotgun wedding where two teens were forced into marriage by their enraged parents because the girl was pregnant would be unimaginable today.
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on
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Flashers are not harmless. They only appear this way to men, for whom they are not a threat.
Posted by Albertus (# 13356) on
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quote:
Originally posted by North East Quine:
I don't think flashers are harmless. But 40 years ago, say, being flashed was a bit like falling out of a tree and breaking your arm; it was one of those things that happened in childhood and was no reflection on your parents.
...
Well, that's what I was wondering. When viewed like that, was being flashed at something that was unpleasant but which you expected to get over reasonably soon, just as you would get over breaking your arm? Or did it continue to cause distress for a longer period, just nobody spoke about it?
Posted by Lamb Chopped (# 5528) on
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Feelings are feelings, and shouldn't be subject to judgement by others. They are also intensely personal as they result from a whole lifetime of circumstances which will be different for everybody. Of course, what somebody DOES with those feelings is judge-able, which is why we have laws.
The main effect flashers/curb crawlers had on me was to create fear. Sustained, serious fear that was really quite justified, given my age and vulnerability on a deserted, unobserved street. Rape would have been easy under those circumstances, as I had no escape, and the flashing only forced me to realize that they could do any damn thing they liked with me, and I would have no defense or protection. And I was in that boat for a good four years because of the direction I had to walk to school.
Someone who flashes adults on a crowded metrolink car is a nuisance and deserves an umbrella to his ass; someone who flashes children in deserted areas does far more serious harm and deserves more severe punishment for it. And I think the fear effect would be the same regardless of the generation one grew up in, or prevailing social attitudes toward "getting over" things.
Posted by North East Quine (# 13049) on
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The OP asked
quote:
is it a natural parental response to feeling that your children might be under threat?
or quote:
Is it a learned response,
It seems to me that it is natural for parents to respond to a threat to their children, but that it is in some ways a recently learned response, because previous generations didn't respond that way to that threat.
In answer to your question, Albertus, quote:
did it continue to cause distress for a longer period, just nobody spoke about it?
what I think it did was to cause children (mostly girls) to adjust their behaviour in the long term; to behave in a way that minimised the risk into adulthood and beyond.
I have seen adult women my own age live limited lives, because of this. I absolutely do not want my daughter to limit her life. If anyone had threatened my young son or daughter sexually, I would have reacted with white hot fury and utter outrage.
I think this is a generational difference; my parents' generation wouldn't have reacted that way. It's a learned response for me, because I can see the damage it does in a way that my parents' generation couldn't. I think the previous generation got it woefully wrong, and the witchhunt described by Arethosemyfeet is the backlash.
Posted by Lamb Chopped (# 5528) on
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Limited lives--that's a really good point. Possibly the reason previous generations didn't make such a stink about it is because they took for granted that girls would be subject to limited lives anyway (whether they agreed with that or no) and didn't therefore feel the same sense of outrage?
In a parallel way, I've noticed that my husband and I rarely react to racist behavior with the moral outrage our (white) friends display. And it probably is because we're "used to it." Not that we agree with it at all. But it's hard to get all energetic and morally outraged when you know damn well that the same thing is going to happen to you a zillion more times in your life. And it seems better maybe to us to save one's energy to try to subvert and undermine the racism--the direct outrage rarely seems to work, and wears you out besides.
Posted by Chill (# 13643) on
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Also I think that unspoken anger may have been far more common than we imagine in our more open demonstrative modern culture. There were things which were not talked about by past generations. Much more was Taboo and sleeping dogs were thought to be best left that way. Also there was a strong belief that stiff upper-lipped perseverance was the best way to meet the savage injustice of life.(Of which there was Much) I'm not saying it was right. I am just observing it was part a broader emotional and cultural landscape inherited from the world of those parents own childhoods. These are of course generalisations but it is possible that to some degree natural instincts were supressed by culture and circumstance. I think the picture is more nuanced than a simple dichotomy between learned response and natural tendency.
Posted by Lamb Chopped (# 5528) on
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There were also things that were talked about only in whispers with two people present.
Posted by Gee D (# 13815) on
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Upthread, No Prophet said that in (his part of) Canada, the usual sentence was 2 years less a day. Very definitely, that is not the going rate here. This case, reported yesterday concerns particularly bad abuse, with one of the victims being but 2 years old. The aggregate sentence of 18 years covers all the offences, rather than being an accumulation of the various individual, is higher than the usual, but that reflects the higher than usual criminality involved. Indeed a few years ago an aboriginal man barely into his 20s had penile/vaginal sex with a 2 year old girl. Her injuries were extremely serious - she nearly bled to death, and while surgery was reasonably successful, the victim can never bear children. The offence with which he was charged carried a maximum sentence of 20 years; given his comparative youth, a plea of guilty, and his deprived upbringing, a majority in the Court of Criminal Appeal considered that a sentence of 14 years was not excessive. The dissentient judge said that it was lenient and that he would have given 18 years having allowed a utility discount of 2 years for a late plea of guilty.
If the abuse is limited to a single victim and a few occasions, the going rate in NSW would be around 2 years or less for a flasher, 7 to 10 years for more serious abuse, and 12 years plus for the most serious. If there are multiple victims, the sentence would be higher. These are broad terms of course ignoring the technical details of sentence structures.
The question of delay has been raised. A very good friend was repeatedly abused in his early teenage years by a highly respected family member. He felt unable to tell anyone, not even his wife, until after the death of the abuser. When younger, he thought that he would not be believed, and further that the allegations would tear the family apart. He also suffered from feelings of guilt by not disclosing the abuse as it may have allowed abuse of cousins and young neighbours to occur.
All that is understandable, an you can easily imaging similar thoughts in other instances. What I find hard to understand are the late disclosures of abuse by teachers or even strangers. So far, no-one seems to have come up with a suitable explanation for that.
Posted by itsarumdo (# 18174) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Gee D:
Upthread, No Prophet said that in (his part of) Canada, the usual sentence was 2 years less a day. Very definitely, that is not the going rate here. ...
All that is understandable, an you can easily imaging similar thoughts in other instances. What I find hard to understand are the late disclosures of abuse by teachers or even strangers. So far, no-one seems to have come up with a suitable explanation for that.
You have to look historically at this - when I was growing up in the 1960's/70's, it was common knowledge that Cyril Smith, a local MP, "liked young boys", but nothing was raised by ANYONE in any formal way until he died. Well - actually that's not true - I understand a social care team presented evidence to the police and it was suppressed. So there was institutional suppression, condonance, and one suspects, participation by people too big to be prosecuted. Smaller fish were in the same culture - I think a lot of people were walking round with guilty feelings. I'd also say that there was also a culture in some police forces and other official circles of suspecting, persecuting and prosecuting (not just for child abuse) anyone who brought complaints. There was a cultural denial that anyone could sexually abuse babies and small children, and after "a certain age" which was undefined, it seems that teenagers were fair game to a small number of people and "everyone" knew that one too, and it was "how the world is". Bear in mind e.g. that in some parts of the world and historically throughout the world, marriage and consumation could take place after menstruation. And there's finally the factor that when someone has sat on it for long enough, they can go two ways - one is, yes, to say "it needs to come out" and the other is guilt for not having said anything sooner which then prevents them from saying anything.
I find it remarkable and reassuring that all this has shifted in a very short space of time. At the moment child protection measures are a tad over the top (in that everyone is a suspect - NOT a good attitude) and creating imbalances, but that will also settle down. There are still groups like the False Memory SIG who insist that any and all cases of more serious nature are made up - but again, they will gradually die a death under the accumulation of evidence.
Posted by mark_in_manchester (# 15978) on
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As a boy some rather unpleasant things happened to me, and I've found this thread interesting.
quote:
Or did it continue to cause distress for a longer period, just nobody spoke about it?
For a long time I didn't think what happened to me had much of an effect on me - but actually I think the taboos my parents felt they were under (which, if one were charitable, might go a fair way towards explaining their failure to protect me) perhaps had the strongest effect, since this left me to sort the problem (as much as a 7 or 8 year-old can) alone.
I absorbed the idea that whatever shit happened, I had to sort it out myself. Far from turning me into Marlboro Man, for a long time I was anxious and depressed - eventually emerging with a 'fuck that, I'll pass' attitude about pretty much anything I felt I might not be able to handle. This seems to be a category which has grown, rather than shrunk, as I have got older.
And on a later point in this thread - for me, I didn't 'tell' because as a small child I was not believed, and later, once I realised what had taken place, I told myself I did not want to destroy the man's wife (a relative). After she died, and he was no longer a threat, I found myself in the odd situation of visiting him in hospital / care home when no-one else was left to do so. Funny how things go.
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on
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What a blessing.
Posted by mark_in_manchester (# 15978) on
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Go on then Martin - why a blessing? I'm not getting at you; but not one of reconciliation, since by that time he didn't know who he was, let alone me. Not much magnanimity, since a closer relative was dying when she asked me to keep an eye on him, rather putting my reservations into perspective. Not forgiveness, since for some odd reason I've never been angry at the man. Well, maybe that's a blessing; or evidence of a need for therapy.
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on
:
Even more so. I'm sorry mate, it's got to be said. I was thinking of this BEFORE I read your response, it leapt up during.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
If you haven't ever watched it, you should.
Because like your account, it makes no claims, it yearns with minimal words. It feels its way forwards in incredibly constrained circumstances.
There has to be ... an Invisible Sun.
[ 13. January 2016, 21:03: Message edited by: Martin60 ]
Posted by mark_in_manchester (# 15978) on
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Well, I sat up until 2am and watched it. I liked it - I like to think it's good to make a virtue of necessity - thanks. I don't have so much to complain about.
Posted by Arethosemyfeet (# 17047) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by mark_in_manchester:
Go on then Martin - why a blessing? I'm not getting at you; but not one of reconciliation, since by that time he didn't know who he was, let alone me. Not much magnanimity, since a closer relative was dying when she asked me to keep an eye on him, rather putting my reservations into perspective. Not forgiveness, since for some odd reason I've never been angry at the man. Well, maybe that's a blessing; or evidence of a need for therapy.
I did wonder when you first posted about it whether you'd been able to forgive your abuser. In some ways it's even more admirable that you are able to offer him care even without it.
I suppose the question that arises in my mind is that of whether and how we criminalise psychological harm. I think it's generally accepted that we criminalise child sexual abuse for the psychological harm it does. Does the fact that we can point to particular physical actions in such cases mean that we prosecute this particular form of harm and tend to disregard other forms of abuse. A good friend of mine was emotionally abused as a child by his father and recently had to give up work for fear that panic attacks related to the PTSD arising from the abuse would cause a danger to him or his clients. The harm is just as real and tangible as that of sexual abuse victims, but I doubt that, even were his dad convicted (which itself is unlikely) he would be treated as a pariah in the same way as a sexual abuser would.
Posted by itsarumdo (# 18174) on
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The problem with psychological abuse is that intention to harm has to be clear. My father was essentially loving and caring but a series of car accidents and head impacts left him emotionally abusive in a way that has had some knock-on effects. My mother also not intentionally abusive but in reality is "difficult" (to quote my friends who have met her). That is in reality not so uncommon, and as an adult I have responsibility for myself - my parents responsibilties in any matter ended when I left home. But it goes further - I know one family where the level of (unknowing, unintended) disorganisation of the parents has left the children both psychologically and physiologically scarred in really serious ways - the fact that one of them is now beginning to be functional is something of a miracle. Since this happens to some degree or other in about 50% of families, and in a more serious way in maybe 5% of families, a) how would you enforce proper emotional care through law? and b) if the majority is unintentional, it has to be quite extreme to be able to be recognised and interrupted through due process. Physical abuse, attack etc is far easier to identify and also prosecute simply because one expects even people who are not completely "with it" to have some sense of the limits of reasonable behaviour. I think if a careful analysis of paedophiles was made then the findings would be that a substantial number fall into the category of eitehr not really understanding the magnitude of what they are doing, or not even aware that it's particularly wrong at all, or carrying out things that they know are not right and to some extent don't even want to do but it's a compulsion they are unable to stop. All these people are in essence not very different from chocaholics or anorexics or workaholics - it's just that the damage they leave in their trail is usually somewhat greater. And we impose legal sanctions on the ACT, not the intent or mental-emotional capacity to control ones actions - with the hope that the punishment will act as deterrent for others. I guess it does to some extent. The small number of people who are wilfully malicious or who know what they are doing but just don't care are far more dangerous, and usually more slippery - the "Jimmy Savilles" of this world. Since the OP is about revenge and rehabilitation, I think it should be clear that most pasedophiles are rehabitable. My personal opinion is that they should be accepted back into society, with due care and suitable treatment. I guess that is not easy in practice to manage. I guess also there is an argument that if they are not re-accepted and treated permanently as pariahs that does eventually make a lasting impression and may ensure less people "accidentally" do this, but at the same time it makes it very very difficult for people to be helped and to turn themselves in for help. As has been said earlier, categorising everyone into the same box regardless of volitionary issues and circumstance is itself an act of violence and something of a lynch-mob mentality. Some 12 year olds are sexually and emotionally mature - and conversely some 20 year olds are not. Do you permanently mark a 17yo who has a relationship with a mature 14yo in the same way that you would brand a 40yo who tortures and penetrates toddlers? Or would you put in the same category someone who compulsively collects child porn videos and someone who makes them? The important subtleties that make rehabilitation possible are somewhat lost in a tabloid-driven culture, partly because the important issues are determined by states of mind and will/volition that are almost impossible to definitively assess. The state keeps something of a lid on this, but the instinct in society in general appears to be for revenge regardless of circumstance. The suspicion is that this degree of reactive violence reflects both the degree of abuse prevalent in society (and hence the number of people who have been affected by it and are deeply angry) and also the fact that many people unconsciously recognise their own capacity for abusive behaviour (and are angry because they are frightened of themselves).
I'd also add that the loss ands distortion of personal boundaries that results from physical and emotional abuse is also characteristic of the vast majority of people who carry it out. The way that the state is engaged in bullying and trashing vulnerable people at the moment is just another level of authority-figure abuse that adds fuel to the fire and sets a poor example. It is symptomatic of the whole problem, and personally, I'd rathe have mature, responsible and self-aware grown-ups in charge. It's an interesting question - if the way forwards is to rehabilitate and forgive abusers, how do we do that with our governers, leaders, politicians?
Posted by mark_in_manchester (# 15978) on
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From my point of view, everything in the last two posts is entirely sensible.
The situations I had to cope with which were criminal, though protracted, were occasional and outside my home. Those situations which (as the last two posts highlight) could not have been prosecuted, were more protracted, continuous and inside the home. As far as I can tell myself, it has been the latter which have shaped me - or perhaps I should say have given me more head-work to be getting on (and on) with.
But everyone is different, the law is a blunt tool; I don't relish a witch-hunt, but the situation now is for me preferable to that in the 70s, as far as I can judge as a man comparing apples to a boy's oranges.
Posted by Lamb Chopped (# 5528) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by itsarumdo:
It's an interesting question - if the way forwards is to rehabilitate and forgive abusers, how do we do that with our governers, leaders, politicians?
I had trouble reading your very long paragraph, but this last bit caught my eye. IMHO it's almost never appropriate to leave an abuser, whether rehabilitated and forgiven or not, in a position of leadership. (I'm referring to positions of leadership in which the sin impacts the leadership--for example, child abuse found in a pastor or teacher, or a national leader who is supposed to uphold the law. I'm much less concerned with removing (say) the CEO of a car company who gets caught with child porn, though his subsequent jail term would probably put paid to his job anyway).
There's a whole ton of reasons for that. First is the difficulty of getting properly rehabilitated while still in a position of stress and temptation. Then there's the fact that a person who has fallen in such a serious way is at higher risk than normal for falling again, and for everybody's sake ought to be replaced by someone stronger. There's the feelings of the victims to consider--if abuse carries no apparent consequences for the abuser, what does that say about the importance of their suffering? And so on.
In a way the best gift we can give such abusers is to take them out of office or leadership and give them time to get their shit together. This also provides a solid consequence to underscore just how necessary it is to work on shit-revision.
Posted by itsarumdo (# 18174) on
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Hmm - I agee - I went a bit off piste in the last paragraph and was thinking about just plain old abuse of power by bullying.
However, yes - probably one reason that sexual abuse (and its various more unpleasant cousins) have not been prosecuted historically is that people in positions of power have been partaking of it. And letting them retain power or re-attain power in these circumstances is not a good idea. The various manoevres round the head of the recently appointed commission gave the impression of more strings being pulled than in a puppet festival.
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on
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mark_in_manchester, when I said,
quote:
Originally posted by Martin60:
Even more so. I'm sorry mate, it's got to be said. I was thinking of this BEFORE I read your response, it leapt up during.
you do realise I meant you were being, and had been even more of, a blessing? And I was being typically convolutedly 'humourous'? Apologizing as if I was about to say the opposite?
You operated on instinct, unthought, unfelt, unresolved, unclear, hopeless, yearning buried. You just went on that, under that, in that higher, transcendent trajectory.
Of The Spirit.
It's SO real. Alan Bennett or Michael Ignatieff couldn't dramatize it better.
And I'm glad you saw the relevance of Solzhenitsyn.
And you may not have much to complain about, but you suffer greatly.
All will be well.
Posted by mark_in_manchester (# 15978) on
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You're much too generous - I'm a small-minded angry f*cker in RL. I don't know anything about Ignatieff, but from reading his diaries, AB appears to transcend his upbringing with considerably more grace (and a lot more humour) than I do.
If you like Bennet (and given our heroes are dying in large numbers at the moment, even discussing him feels like a jinx) then you might enjoy David Sedaris.
To desperately claw back towards the OP - Bennet describes his horror of being alone in deserted places. The fear of stumbling across the body of a child, and being (as then a single middle-aged homosexual man (using even a venerable neologism like 'gay' feels odd around him)) helpless before a media witch hunt.
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on
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Love Sedaris.
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on
:
Of COURSE you're a small minded angry fecker. You wouldn't be such a blessing if you weren't.
Ignatieff
Says it ALL really.
RL?
[ 16. January 2016, 10:02: Message edited by: Martin60 ]
Posted by mark_in_manchester (# 15978) on
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I can't go watching another one just now - in RL (real life) I have to go to work! But I'll make time later...
Posted by Liopleurodon (# 4836) on
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quote:
Originally posted by itsarumdo:
There are still groups like the False Memory SIG who insist that any and all cases of more serious nature are made up - but again, they will gradually die a death under the accumulation of evidence.
I don't think that people who worry about False Memory Syndrome necessarily believe that all cases of a more serious nature are made up. I certainly don't think that. It's more about the issue of unethical practices among therapists. There may be some people, unfortunately, who have got involved in campaigning about FMS as a cover for their own abusive ways and there's no way of avoiding that unfortunately. But you badly misrepresent or misunderstand the nature of concerns about FMS if you think it's about claiming that abuse victims are all lying liars who lie.
Posted by itsarumdo (# 18174) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Liopleurodon:
quote:
Originally posted by itsarumdo:
There are still groups like the False Memory SIG who insist that any and all cases of more serious nature are made up - but again, they will gradually die a death under the accumulation of evidence.
I don't think that people who worry about False Memory Syndrome necessarily believe that all cases of a more serious nature are made up. I certainly don't think that. It's more about the issue of unethical practices among therapists. There may be some people, unfortunately, who have got involved in campaigning about FMS as a cover for their own abusive ways and there's no way of avoiding that unfortunately. But you badly misrepresent or misunderstand the nature of concerns about FMS if you think it's about claiming that abuse victims are all lying liars who lie.
Ever since the first false memory trials, professional trauma therapists working on high level cases (i.e. those dealing with aggravated incest, systematic child abuse and ritual abuse) - and anyone who goes through a formal trauma therapy training - have all been trained to NOT suggest anything to the patient.
Knowing quite a few people in this profesion, I am aware that their patients still have major problems being recognised through the legal system due to the false memory myth. One major problem that is faced is that in organised child abuse the syndicate sometimes pretend to be a famous person (or in one case I saw, they wore disney masks - when the events are at a young age and are so severe that there is a memory blank, it's somewhat disturbing/terrifying to remember that Mickey Mouse is doing it when the memory starts to return at age 30 or 40yo). The more organised abuse groups go to some lengths to deliberately confuse and terrify their victims. Or even brainwash them by forcing them to take part in abuse of other children. But the overwhelming experience of therapists working in this field is that recovered memories are reliable if given enough time to be unfolded - because they are somatic memories, not mental ones. If it's a real somatic memory, the body tells you it's a real memory. And therapists are usually capable of telling the difference between a fantasy and a real memory though observing the body, just as the patient is capable of recognising a real memory by feeling the body's response.
The fact is that very few people who have undergone major abuse/trauma take it to court and there is a long process - years - of stabilisation of the personality before that might even be possible. Abuse before age 7 results in fragmentation of the identity in ways that I think very few lay people really understand.
And it's not in any professional's (or victims) interests to promote cases through courts that are ambiguous or uncertain, and so it is far less common than any media report you see will have you believe. FMS is a very damaging urban myth that has consistently been used to protect some very dangerous people.
The OP is about secular society. When faced with this kind of atrocity, secular people often state that they believe evil exists. That is spectacularly unhelpful - one has to believe that good/God exists. Otherwise secularism defaults to a poorly thought out satanism-lite.
Posted by Liopleurodon (# 4836) on
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OK, I suspect that we're not ever going to agree on the subject of recovered memories and memory repression, or what the scientific evidence says on this subject, but I don't want to derail this thread.
Posted by itsarumdo (# 18174) on
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OK - I'll post a few links, because this is important. There was a review of FMS recently in New Scientist, and on BBC last June, and pretty well every psychologist in the UK (and Europe) involved at the pointy end of treating abuse victims was appalled that a load of disproven hearsay could be paraded as fact in a scientific magazine and a major public information network.
A reply was written in Psychology Today 28(12) p952 "A Discoure of Disbelief" by Rainer Kirtz, which also gives references to the mainstream articles on the subject. Becker, Karriker, Overkamp (2008). Dorahy, Brand, Sar (2014). Lacter, Lehman (2008) and two books : Miller (2012). Van der Hart, Nijenhuis, Steele (2006). You can also see online the ISSTD/ ESTD therapy guidelines & research papers on dissociation & trauma. There are also several other recent works on Neurobiology that make the core arguments of FMS unsustainable - Janina Fisher, Nijenhuis, and Alan Schore's summary of the scientific evidence in his latest book 'The Art & Science of Psychotherapy' (esp. Chap.3).
Every time some journalist trots out 1970's "science" as if it is current, it puts back another 5 years the time when proper measures are put in place to prosecute organised abuse networks, because everyone would rather believe that none of this stuff ever happens and its all some unfortunate error of memory.
Posted by Dave W. (# 8765) on
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quote:
Originally posted by itsarumdo:
OK - I'll post a few links, because this is important.
These links - will you be posting them sometime in the near future?
Posted by itsarumdo (# 18174) on
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sorry - references
The above refs are easy enough to follow up on Google if you're interested in them. The article in PT is unfortunately not available outside a library loan or if paid for.
[ 20. January 2016, 07:30: Message edited by: itsarumdo ]
Posted by itsarumdo (# 18174) on
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this is a good start - ESTD online papers
Posted by Liopleurodon (# 4836) on
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OK. We’ll do this thing and I’ll rely on the hosts to let us know if they think that this should be taken somewhere else.
Firstly: please don’t make assumptions about my motives. I will assume that you are making your arguments in good faith. Telling me that I “don’t want to believe that these things can happen” is patronising and wrong. Well, nobody *wants* to believe that awful things can happen to children, of course. But I fully acknowledge that terrible things do happen to children and actually, my first instinct is to believe people who tell me that they’ve been abused. I’m by no means any kind of abuse apologist. I’ve interacted with many adults who were abused as children. In one awful case a pair of siblings had to be rescued from a paedophile ring and put into foster care. So I know it happens.
In terms of evidence: at best you’ve indicated that a bunch of people have written things. They may back up your arguments. I don’t know because you’ve not directly linked to anything that might persuade me. The one link you’ve actually provided goes to a vast database of articles on lots of different topics, some of which might be relevant. I don’t know. I’m not going to sift through all of them in the hope of backing up your argument. I could do something similar with links, and perhaps I will shove some of them in in a followup post, but you know that there are people who disagree with you so I don’t suppose that my demonstrating their existence will get us anywhere.
So far, your main argument is that some therapists (not the majority, incidentally) believe that recovered memories are reliable. I know that, but it doesn’t tell us anything. Lots of people can be wrong at the same time. What gets us to the truth of things is a careful examination of the evidence. For recovered memories, there’s enough evidence to demonstrate that a huge number of them are not accurate.
I realise that a lot of sexual abuse can happen without any corroborating evidence. A guy can go into his stepdaughter’s bedroom every night for six years and leave no trace except the memories and the pain caused to her. In many cases, that’s just how it is, and he has the power over her to manipulate her into keeping quiet. However, in many of the cases which we’re talking about, the acts described are so extreme, and the number of people involved so large, that it raises alarm bells for there to be no traces. The “victims” have no physical traces on their bodies of having been tortured as young children. Rooms in which murders supposedly occurred don’t even exist. Hundreds of children were somehow brought to the same place, tortured by a huge cabal of adults, not one of them said anything, no uninvolved adults suspected anything? We’re not talking about the balance of evidence being equivocal, as it often is. We’re talking about big glaring absences of evidence that should be there. Then there’s the evidence of people who’ll tell you that they became convinced that they had been abused before realising that it wasn’t true.
They then remembered nothing for thirty years until they went into therapy. The science of the memory of trauma strongly suggests that it just plain doesn’t work like that. PTSD tends to manifest as recurrent intrusive thoughts/flashbacks/dreams. It doesn’t disappear. And why does this only happen with sexual abuse? Why not any of the other awful things that sometimes affect children – war, natural disasters, being savaged by an animal, nearly drowning? These can cause PTSD but for some reason not repressed memories.
Don’t tell me that therapists never try to suggest things or ask leading questions. I know they shouldn’t, but I’ve directly experienced a therapist trying to lead me towards his hypothesis that all of my problems were caused by something awful happening to me when I was very young. I’m pretty sure I know what he had in mind. Honestly, if you think that everything from depression to anorexia to a phobia is caused by early childhood abuse, and that memories are repressed and can be recovered and this aids healing, I don’t think that you can avoid having that creep out into your interactions with clients. Therapists are human – they have their biases and buttons and beliefs like anyone else. I remember as a teenager in the 1990s that “you might have been abused; just because you don’t remember it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen” was all over magazines for teenage girls. This stuff was everywhere. That bloody book was a bestseller.
Criticism of repressed/recovered memories is not some outdated concept from the 1970s. It’s a very active area of research today. I know this, because I work at a university where there are researchers studying it as we speak. Memory generally is fallible and suggestible, particularly when it comes to stressful situations, and particularly in young children. It’s also been found that it’s surprisingly easy to implant memories of things that didn’t happen through suggestion. That’s not to say that people are making stuff up or lying. I believe them that they believe that it happened.
Posted by Dave W. (# 8765) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by itsarumdo:
sorry - references
The above refs are easy enough to follow up on Google if you're interested in them. The article in PT is unfortunately not available outside a library loan or if paid for.
Not all that easy, I'm afraid. There doesn't seem to be anything in Psychology Today that matches that description - I think you mean this letter from Rainer Kurz (not "Kirtz") in The Psychologist. It doesn't seem to be a response to either an article in New Scientist or a program on the BBC, but rather to an article in a previous issue of The Psychologist which discussed various possible explanations for "memories" of alien abductions. It seems Kurz is unhappy that the article didn't mention abuse as a source of these false memories - not that the memories aren't false - which rather undercuts your point.
Posted by Karl: Liberal Backslider (# 76) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by North East Quine:
From the OP:
quote:
Why are reactions so visceral? Is it a learned response, a "2 minute hate" that is condoned by society as one of the last allowable outlets for undiluted rage? Or is it a natural parental response to feeling that your children might be under threat? Is it the reaction to this threat that is excessive, or the reaction to other threats (domestic violence; sexual assaults on adults) that is too weak?
What strikes me as odd is that there wasn't this reaction, say 40 or 50 years ago. My local community had a sad old man who used to "flash" schoolgirls, and the onus was on the schoolgirls not to look. The reaction would be totally different nowadays. At least part of the huge wave of prosecutions of historic sex offences is because at the time, people were willing to turn a blind eye, or minimise in some way, or disbelieve victims.
I would lean towards "learned response" partly because sexual offending is understood differently nowadays.
Possibly it was seen as more of an illness and less of primarily a moral evil. Certainly when I was young my mother worked at a mental hospital and there were one or two old men in there who had originally been committed because of (nod, wink) little boys (nod, wink).
They were primarily seen as people who needed keeping away from the community because of their problem.
Posted by itsarumdo (# 18174) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Dave W.:
quote:
Originally posted by itsarumdo:
sorry - references
The above refs are easy enough to follow up on Google if you're interested in them. The article in PT is unfortunately not available outside a library loan or if paid for.
Not all that easy, I'm afraid. There doesn't seem to be anything in Psychology Today that matches that description - I think you mean this letter from Rainer Kurz (not "Kirtz") in The Psychologist. It doesn't seem to be a response to either an article in New Scientist or a program on the BBC, but rather to an article in a previous issue of The Psychologist which discussed various possible explanations for "memories" of alien abductions. It seems Kurz is unhappy that the article didn't mention abuse as a source of these false memories - not that the memories aren't false - which rather undercuts your point.
Not that aliens are going to be prosecuted and rehabilitated. ![[Biased]](wink.gif)
It doesn't undercut the point in that the memories are substantially real - the details may be disputable in some cases, but not in most cases. The perceptions that anyone who has a memory of being abused will take that to a court, or that well trained psychologists will deliberately elicit memories of abuse, or that they will encourage their patients to take thinly evidenced cases to court - are all very far from the truth.
I think you should read the titles of the ESTD literature library to get some idea of what happens, and then have a look at news reports for how many cases go to trial. Hardly any organised or ritual abuse rings get prosecuted because they deliberately damage their victims capacity to remember. The names of people in some of these rings are quite often known to practicing psychologists who over a period of years will see several people who all have corroborating stories. Translating that into a court case is almost impossible for several reasons, one of which is memory distortion. It is utterly degrading for someone to be told that they made it all up, when there is a clear physical memory of something having happened, and very few people will expose themselves to the high risk they run of that happening in a court.
So most cases that do appear before courts are mid to low level or a few particularly severe cases carried out by violent stupid rather than psychopathic individuals. In these, memory detail and evidence usually isn't a problem. But FMS is still one way that a jury can be swayed, because the arguments are - to a lay person - persuasive.
Posted by itsarumdo (# 18174) on
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Hi Liopleurodon
Lotsa points there
quote:
Originally posted by Liopleurodon:
OK. We’ll do this thing and I’ll rely on the hosts to let us know if they think that this should be taken somewhere else.
Firstly: please don’t make assumptions about my motives. I will assume that you are making your arguments in good faith. Telling me that I “don’t want to believe that these things can happen” is patronising and wrong.
Not you specifically as a person - but in our society there is a marked unwillingness to believe that the worst stuff is possible or happening, or to engage with it. That is, after all, how Barnsley happened.
quote:
Well, nobody *wants* to believe that awful things can happen to children, of course. But I fully acknowledge that terrible things do happen to children and actually, my first instinct is to believe people who tell me that they’ve been abused. I’m by no means any kind of abuse apologist. I’ve interacted with many adults who were abused as children. In one awful case a pair of siblings had to be rescued from a paedophile ring and put into foster care. So I know it happens.
In terms of evidence: at best you’ve indicated that a bunch of people have written things.
That bunch of people are the top dogs in their field. Allan Schore, Ellert Nijenhuis et al have international reputations second to none. Well earned ones.
quote:
They may back up your arguments.
I don’t know because you’ve not directly linked to anything that might persuade me. The one link you’ve actually provided goes to a vast database of articles on lots of different topics, some of which might be relevant. I don’t know. I’m not going to sift through all of them in the hope of backing up your argument. I could do something similar with links, and perhaps I will shove some of them in in a followup post, but you know that there are people who disagree with you so I don’t suppose that my demonstrating their existence will get us anywhere.
There are a very small number of academics who continue to support FMS and their number is getting smaller. In the UK, there is one at Goldsmiths, and he's more or less on his own, but he still gets a lot of media attention. It has taken years for a more up-to-date and non-soundbite version of trauma psychology to get into media - FirstPersonPlural managed to get a Channel4 documentary recently. Very rare event. The NS article was by a journalist with no psychological background. quote:
So far, your main argument is that some therapists (not the majority, incidentally) believe that recovered memories are reliable. I know that, but it doesn’t tell us anything. Lots of people can be wrong at the same time. What gets us to the truth of things is a careful examination of the evidence. For recovered memories, there’s enough evidence to demonstrate that a huge number of them are not accurate.
I realise that a lot of sexual abuse can happen without any corroborating evidence. A guy can go into his stepdaughter’s bedroom every night for six years and leave no trace except the memories and the pain caused to her. In many cases, that’s just how it is, and he has the power over her to manipulate her into keeping quiet. However, in many of the cases which we’re talking about, the acts described are so extreme, and the number of people involved so large, that it raises alarm bells for there to be no traces. The “victims” have no physical traces on their bodies of having been tortured as young children. Rooms in which murders supposedly occurred don’t even exist. Hundreds of children were somehow brought to the same place, tortured by a huge cabal of adults, not one of them said anything, no uninvolved adults suspected anything? We’re not talking about the balance of evidence being equivocal, as it often is. We’re talking about big glaring absences of evidence that should be there. Then there’s the evidence of people who’ll tell you that they became convinced that they had been abused before realising that it wasn’t true.
They then remembered nothing for thirty years until they went into therapy. The science of the memory of trauma strongly suggests that it just plain doesn’t work like that. PTSD tends to manifest as recurrent intrusive thoughts/flashbacks/dreams. It doesn’t disappear.
Not true - you are talking trauma with a primarily sympathetic/adrenal component. If there is really severe overwhelm, the dissociative component is stronger and memories are not available because they are walled off by the brain. They re-appear when life starts to be less overwhelming. quote:
And why does this only happen with sexual abuse?
It doesn't quote:
Why not any of the other awful things that sometimes affect children – war, natural disasters, being savaged by an animal, nearly drowning? These can cause PTSD but for some reason not repressed memories.
Usually in these cases there are supportive adults and societal structures and the trauma is reduced or dissipated by that resource. 9/11 victims all recovered well if they had secure jobs, supportive families, secure homes and friendly supportive neighbours quote:
Don’t tell me that therapists never try to suggest things or ask leading questions. I know they shouldn’t, but I’ve directly experienced a therapist trying to lead me towards his hypothesis that all of my problems were caused by something awful happening to me when I was very young. I’m pretty sure I know what he had in mind. Honestly, if you think that everything from depression to anorexia to a phobia is caused by early childhood abuse, and that memories are repressed and can be recovered and this aids healing, I don’t think that you can avoid having that creep out into your interactions with clients.
He wasn't following guidelines and would not be allowed to work in a properly run centre for treating major trauma. quote:
Therapists are human – they have their biases and buttons and beliefs like anyone else. I remember as a teenager in the 1990s that “you might have been abused; just because you don’t remember it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen” was all over magazines for teenage girls. This stuff was everywhere. That bloody book was a bestseller.
Not useful to anyone - popularised stuff is usually so distorted because sensationalism sells more copies quote:
Criticism of repressed/recovered memories is not some outdated concept from the 1970s. It’s a very active area of research today. I know this, because I work at a university where there are researchers studying it as we speak. Memory generally is fallible and suggestible, particularly when it comes to stressful situations, and particularly in young children. It’s also been found that it’s surprisingly easy to implant memories of things that didn’t happen through suggestion. That’s not to say that people are making stuff up or lying. I believe them that they believe that it happened.
See my reply in previous post
Posted by Dave W. (# 8765) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by itsarumdo:
quote:
Originally posted by Dave W.:
quote:
Originally posted by itsarumdo:
sorry - references
The above refs are easy enough to follow up on Google if you're interested in them. The article in PT is unfortunately not available outside a library loan or if paid for.
Not all that easy, I'm afraid. There doesn't seem to be anything in Psychology Today that matches that description - I think you mean this letter from Rainer Kurz (not "Kirtz") in The Psychologist. It doesn't seem to be a response to either an article in New Scientist or a program on the BBC, but rather to an article in a previous issue of The Psychologist which discussed various possible explanations for "memories" of alien abductions. It seems Kurz is unhappy that the article didn't mention abuse as a source of these false memories - not that the memories aren't false - which rather undercuts your point.
Not that aliens are going to be prosecuted and rehabilitated.
It doesn't undercut the point in that the memories are substantially real - the details may be disputable in some cases, but not in most cases.
No, the memories referred to in the letter you cited (sloppily, mistaking both the name of the author and the publication) were false. Kurz does not believe those people really were abducted by aliens; his complaint about the previous article doesn't support your position in the slightest.
Posted by itsarumdo (# 18174) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Dave W.:
quote:
Originally posted by itsarumdo:
quote:
Originally posted by Dave W.:
quote:
Originally posted by itsarumdo:
sorry - references
The above refs are easy enough to follow up on Google if you're interested in them. The article in PT is unfortunately not available outside a library loan or if paid for.
Not all that easy, I'm afraid. There doesn't seem to be anything in Psychology Today that matches that description - I think you mean this letter from Rainer Kurz (not "Kirtz") in The Psychologist. It doesn't seem to be a response to either an article in New Scientist or a program on the BBC, but rather to an article in a previous issue of The Psychologist which discussed various possible explanations for "memories" of alien abductions. It seems Kurz is unhappy that the article didn't mention abuse as a source of these false memories - not that the memories aren't false - which rather undercuts your point.
Not that aliens are going to be prosecuted and rehabilitated.
It doesn't undercut the point in that the memories are substantially real - the details may be disputable in some cases, but not in most cases.
No, the memories referred to in the letter you cited (sloppily, mistaking both the name of the author and the publication) were false. Kurz does not believe those people really were abducted by aliens; his complaint about the previous article doesn't support your position in the slightest.
Hi Dave W
I repeat that aliens are not going to be prosecuted, rehabilitated or have revenge taken. You are taking an extreme position in order to prove a point. That Socratic type of argument may be OK for debating societies, but it doesn't account for the more accountable and more explicable events in this world.
I could speculate on alien abductions, but it's way off the OP, and we'd be just two guys talking about things we can't account for, have no experience of, and know nothing about.
There are lots of proofs that everybody's senses are fallible (in extreme and very contrived situations), but I wager that you have never mistaken your bacon and eggs for a pair of underpants. Memories do get very unreliable in rapidly moving situations. However, the cases we're talking about here were not over in a second or two - they are strung out over hours and days and sometimes years and decades. You might recall the way that concentration camp victims are able to recognise their guards decades after the event. What I'm getting from your posts is that, logically, you don't trust your own senses or memory, because you're not prepared to trust another person's.
U, I - if you look, they're next to each other on the keyboard.
Posted by itsarumdo (# 18174) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Karl: Liberal Backslider:
quote:
Originally posted by North East Quine:
From the OP:
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Why are reactions so visceral? Is it a learned response, a "2 minute hate" that is condoned by society as one of the last allowable outlets for undiluted rage? Or is it a natural parental response to feeling that your children might be under threat? Is it the reaction to this threat that is excessive, or the reaction to other threats (domestic violence; sexual assaults on adults) that is too weak?
What strikes me as odd is that there wasn't this reaction, say 40 or 50 years ago. My local community had a sad old man who used to "flash" schoolgirls, and the onus was on the schoolgirls not to look. The reaction would be totally different nowadays. At least part of the huge wave of prosecutions of historic sex offences is because at the time, people were willing to turn a blind eye, or minimise in some way, or disbelieve victims.
I would lean towards "learned response" partly because sexual offending is understood differently nowadays.
Possibly it was seen as more of an illness and less of primarily a moral evil. Certainly when I was young my mother worked at a mental hospital and there were one or two old men in there who had originally been committed because of (nod, wink) little boys (nod, wink).
They were primarily seen as people who needed keeping away from the community because of their problem.
It's an interesting point - Freud originally found that incest was at epidemic levels in the middle class in Vienna. He was forced to retract his findings, and reframe them into the penis envy etc "Freudian" fantasy complexes we know today. If you consider this, it is exactly the scenario presented by the idea of false memory. The society cannot contemplate what is happening, so it demands that the victims memories cannot be accurate - so we assume that they are fantasising, and it's all OK, no boats are being rocked, and a few people are locked up and institutionalised because their minds are obviously not working properly. That isn't to say that some people's minds do not work so well. But it is very convenient to drop everyone into the same box. This is essentially how Jimmy Saville got away with it for so long - nobody was prepared to believe the possible cause of onset of hysteria in already compromised children, and the staff suspicions were clearly paranoia.
What is wrong is that instead of taking a measured stance, the Govt/authority had to be seen to be doing something. So we now have institutional paranoia as an expression of the previously projected paranoia. Who's crazy now? Unfortunately, that is projected onto the general and normally innocent public instead of at more specific and dangerous targets. Because it still can't be comtemplated that organised abuse occurs.
[ 21. January 2016, 07:48: Message edited by: itsarumdo ]
Posted by itsarumdo (# 18174) on
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... and bringing that back to the OP in a full circle. In the 19th century middle class society took revenge on the victims (by institutionalising them) for the psychosis etc induced by their experiences and for daring to say anything (or even daring to be affected by their experiences). Lower class society took it all for granted, part of life's rich and ugly tapestry. Upper class society - who knows.
Now we do that a little less (but not a lot less) and also in exchange take revenge on everyone by assuming they are guilty until proven innocent. The general levels of fear and mistrust were completely underlined by the Sep 2000 case of the Paediatrician's house being defaced by her neighbours. Shame about the spelling mistake. Daily Telegraph
Posted by Liopleurodon (# 4836) on
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quote:
Originally posted by itsarumdo:
Hi Liopleurodon
Not you specifically as a person - but in our society there is a marked unwillingness to believe that the worst stuff is possible or happening, or to engage with it. That is, after all, how Barnsley happened.
I don’t think it’s an unwillingness to believe that terrible things happen. Society gloms onto the most terrible things with palpable delight. It’s often what sells tabloids. What there is is a reluctance to believe the testimony, innocence and full humanity of people who are marginalised relative to their abusers, whether it’s a celebrity who goes around raping young women, a charismatic preacher who abuses children, or the police beating up a mentally ill prisoner or killing a black man (obviously this last guy isn't available to testify). That reluctance is wrong. Be reluctant to believe on the basis that the balance of evidence is against a crime having happened. Don’t be reluctant to believe on the basis of the accuser’s relative status in society. But now we’re into social justice talk. We feminists do that. quote:
That bunch of people are the top dogs in their field. Allan Schore, Ellert Nijenhuis et al have international reputations second to none. Well earned ones.
Many people have reputations in a field. Including, for instance, Elizabeth Loftus and That Horrible Goldsmiths Man ![[Razz]](tongue.gif)
Of itself, it means nothing. Whenever you have an academic dispute, people on both sides have reputations. Hell, you can find almost any position with a clever person who agrees with it. Show me what these people say. Show me the evidence. Show me why they’re respected in scientific terms. Show me case studies. Again, I’m not going to search through the database for the titles of papers. That papers exist doesn’t of itself tell me anything. It’s what’s in them that makes the difference, but again, I’m not going to do your work for you.
What is so frustrating here is that the world would come round to the horror if the evidence was found. I would come round. Honestly. As I've said, my first instinct is to believe people. The reason why people believe in the reality of - for instance, the child abuse that took place in that children's home in Jersey - is that the evidence is consistent with it having happened.
I also, unfortunately, have no doubt that a nasty character of defence lawyer will drivel on about FMS in a case in which it’s not even a remote possibility and doesn’t fit the pattern, just to discredit a genuine victim. That’s what they do. So let’s be quite clear here about what I think. I’m not saying that abuse doesn’t happen – even the most awful and egregious forms of it do happen. I’m sceptical about a very specific scenario, in which memories surface years later, in therapy - memories that need help and coaxing to come out, or emerge using techniques such as hypnosis or administering “truth serum”. When these memories arise in people who read books that tell them that repressed memories of extreme abuse are a common issue. When they make allegations of extreme and horrific violence that would inevitably cause permanent damage to a young child’s body, but there is no sign of any such thing on theirs. When they talk about people killing and eating babies regularly but there’s no record of these babies existing or disappearing, or any trace of human remains at the site where it supposedly happened – and forensic science is very good at uncovering traces of human remains. If the rooms where it happened even exist. When they go to therapists who seem to have a large number of clients who remembered extreme abuse after starting therapy. We know that at least some of these people were not actually abused, because they have later testified that they became muddled and confused in therapy and developed disturbing memories which they later realised were definitely not true. The others -?
Here’s the key issue. In science, if you have a slightly uncertain hypothesis, which can then be backed up by known scientific measures that work, you can make it much stronger. If investigators who first heard these extreme allegations discovered that there really were torture chambers, if they took cadaver dogs to the site and found scraps of human bone, if they searched the homes of perps and found old photos they’d taken, or if they found records of missing babies, it would lend these allegations weight. I realise it’s more difficult to do this decades later, but it’s not impossible. Cold cases are opened all the time. If the police had reason to think that a group of people still living had tortured and murdered children thirty years ago, they would be all over that. Imagine what it’d do for careers to be the ones who caught those monsters. If they thought it was happening now they’d be all over that too. These things have been investigated. The evidence hasn’t been found.
Posted by itsarumdo (# 18174) on
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[QUOTE]Originally posted by Liopleurodon:
[QB] ...
Many people have reputations in a field. ...
[\QB] [\QUOTE]
Schore, Nijenhuis and other names on that list have between them defined therapeutic interventions that return people to a well functioning state. Their reputation is partly academic, but mainly on the insights that have helped everyone else to be more effective in treatment.
...
[QUOTE] [QB] ...
What is so frustrating here is that the world would come round to the horror if the evidence was found. I would come round. [\QB] [\QB] [\QUOTE]
There I have to disagree with you - the world has consistently decided not to face many horrors until the evidence became overwhelming, because it is easier to listen to people manipulating the evidence. You only need to look at the Tobacco and Asbestos industry's success at keeping going for decades after the first strong evidence was produced, by dint of misinformation and obfuscation. That was only possible because people didn't want to believe the evidence. Governments didn't want revenue sources to go. Industry didn't want to face its culpability. I would be rich if I had a £ for every old lag who said to me that they had smoked for years (as had their grandfather) and had no (cough) lung problems.
[QUOTE] [QB] ...
...
I’m sceptical about a very specific scenario, in which memories surface years later, in therapy - memories that need help and coaxing to come out, or emerge using techniques such as hypnosis or administering “truth serum”. When these memories arise in people who read books that tell them that repressed memories of extreme abuse are a common issue. When they make allegations of extreme and horrific violence that would inevitably cause permanent damage to a young child’s body, but there is no sign of any such thing on theirs.
[\QB] [\QUOTE]
Firstly, your view of trauma memory is just incorrect. In severe trauma the conscious mind compartmentalises so that some part of the identity can survive relatively unscathed. The overwhelming memories are pigeonholed so that they do not interfere with the need for basic survival. And they re-surface when a period of relative safety occurs in the persons life - a few weeks, months or decades after, it makes no difference because effectively the compartmentalised memories are frozen in time. "Truth serum" - no - that doesn't happen, mainly because the problems revolved around a loss of control, and no therapist wanting to help their patients is going to remove their self-control by chemical means just to get at a few bits of information. Hypnosis is also used very sparingly, and unlike the coercive forms used in popular circus acts, what has been found therapeutically is that hypnosis that forces an outcome or releases even a fraction too much memory at once is detrimental, and is a form of abuse in its own right.
[QUOTE] [QB] ...
When they talk about people killing and eating babies regularly but there’s no record of these babies existing or disappearing, or any trace of human remains at the site where it supposedly happened – and forensic science is very good at uncovering traces of human remains. If the rooms where it happened even exist. When they go to therapists who seem to have a large number of clients who remembered extreme abuse after starting therapy. We know that at least some of these people were not actually abused, because they have later testified that they became muddled and confused in therapy and developed disturbing memories which they later realised were definitely not true. The others -?
[\QB] [\QUOTE]
Here we have to separate apples, oranges and watermelons. Most abuse still happens in families, just like in Freud's good old 19th century Vienna. It's a form of mental illness in its own right - loss of boundaries, loss of adult responsibility, etc etc - which afflicts a substantial % of the population. Maybe 1%? I don't know what the abuser stats are, or even if they have been enumerated. Many of these people are not intrinsically that bad - they have just unwittingly caused damage in a way that they have insufficient imagination to fathom.
From there, we start to get various degrees of organised abuse. At the top end of this, the more sophisticated of these groups do participate in ritualised sexual abuse and murder, and have a very good grasp of the principles of brainwashing - deliberately confusing their victims so that they don't know exactly what they have seen or experienced - only that it was horrendous. The corroborated detail recovered as memories by individuals who do not know each other is consistent in most part of the world, but rarely is it of sufficient strength to stand up in court. Evidence - is hard to get. The most organised groups have probably never even been identified at all. The less organised groups (who leave evidence lying around because they are not so systematic) have - when brought to court - successfully used FMS as a defence, when it is hardly any defence at all in any other situation, for the reasons I have described previously.
If the focus is rehabilitation, then the people who have been affected by all this need more resources and support. At the moment, that is being severely cut back with austerity measures. Treatment is complex and takes years of training to achieve competency - and there just are not enough skilled therapists to go round, or the institutional will to recognise the need for them. Quietapine and Lithium are easier and cheaper options, so really we're not that far advanced from 19th century Vienna.
Posted by Dave W. (# 8765) on
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quote:
Originally posted by itsarumdo:
quote:
Originally posted by Dave W.:
quote:
Originally posted by itsarumdo:
quote:
Originally posted by Dave W.:
quote:
Originally posted by itsarumdo:
[qb] sorry - references
The above refs are easy enough to follow up on Google if you're interested in them. The article in PT is unfortunately not available outside a library loan or if paid for.
Not all that easy, I'm afraid. There doesn't seem to be anything in Psychology Today that matches that description - I think you mean this letter from Rainer Kurz (not "Kirtz") in The Psychologist. It doesn't seem to be a response to either an article in New Scientist or a program on the BBC, but rather to an article in a previous issue of The Psychologist which discussed various possible explanations for "memories" of alien abductions. It seems Kurz is unhappy that the article didn't mention abuse as a source of these false memories - not that the memories aren't false - which rather undercuts your point.
Not that aliens are going to be prosecuted and rehabilitated.
It doesn't undercut the point in that the memories are substantially real - the details may be disputable in some cases, but not in most cases.
No, the memories referred to in the letter you cited (sloppily, mistaking both the name of the author and the publication) were false. Kurz does not believe those people really were abducted by aliens; his complaint about the previous article doesn't support your position in the slightest.
I repeat that aliens are not going to be prosecuted, rehabilitated or have revenge taken. You are taking an extreme position in order to prove a point. That Socratic type of argument may be OK for debating societies, but it doesn't account for the more accountable and more explicable events in this world.
I could speculate on alien abductions, but it's way off the OP, and we'd be just two guys talking about things we can't account for, have no experience of, and know nothing about.
I'm not taking any kind of extreme position - I was commenting on the reference you chose to illustrate your position. If you now think it's silly and irrelevant, feel free to produce a better one. quote:
What I'm getting from your posts is that, logically, you don't trust your own senses or memory, because you're not prepared to trust another person's.
Well, no; if anything, the inference runs the other way - I don't entirely trust other people's senses or memory in part because I don't entirely trust my own. Also, in the case of "recovered memories", those memories sometimes contain fantastic, impossible elements, and this makes me wonder about the reliability of other things that have been recovered with similar methods, particularly when they're being used as evidence of a crime.
Posted by itsarumdo (# 18174) on
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If you had ever been in a car accident and it had taken several hours to cut you out, your memory would consist of large blank parts - which may be recovered later or may not. And also some very vivid parts - which would be very accurate, but skewed to your own point of perception. And there would be a few other fuzzy memories. If you then suffered PTSD, the treatment might (it doesn't always) result in some very clear and vivid and accurate memories re-surfacing. They would be fragments of the total event, but would represent moments that were for some reason key to how the experience was processed by your brain. Those memory fragments would be very reliable, but of course would be from a personal point of view. They would be much clearer and have a much stronger accompanying emotive content than usual memories. These fragmentary snapshots are not normal memory - though they might be comparable to, say, the memories described by Krishnamurti - because they would be snapshots taken when you were in a non-normal state of consciousness. Comparing trauma memories to your normal everyday memories is another case of apples and oranges. The "film running in my head" reported in some cases of PTSD is not a vague woffly memory of a film - it's very real and present as if it is happening here and now, in minute detail. If you will - like every sensory channel in your body had been stored for a few seconds on HD and was being replayed through your nervous system. Telling someone that their memory of this kind is "fantasy" or "unreliable" is - mistaken. If the situation was deliberately and maliciously manipulated to confuse these trauma memories, then yes - they would be partially incorrect. But even then, aspects of them would still be extremely clear and precise and accurate. I've spent over a decade talking to people about their sensory experiences an dthe mental processes accompanying those, and - it is a mistake to think that everyone else has even vaguely the same experience of life and mental processes that you do. The fact that courts have to assume commonality of human experience in order to uphold the law is both a strength and a weakness. Strength because it enforces a common humanity, and a weakness because witness reports are taken at face value assuming a common experiential basis.
Posted by Liopleurodon (# 4836) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by itsarumdo:
If you had ever been in a car accident and it had taken several hours to cut you out, your memory would consist of large blank parts - which may be recovered later or may not. And also some very vivid parts - which would be very accurate, but skewed to your own point of perception. And there would be a few other fuzzy memories. If you then suffered PTSD, the treatment might (it doesn't always) result in some very clear and vivid and accurate memories re-surfacing. They would be fragments of the total event, but would represent moments that were for some reason key to how the experience was processed by your brain. Those memory fragments would be very reliable, but of course would be from a personal point of view. They would be much clearer and have a much stronger accompanying emotive content than usual memories. These fragmentary snapshots are not normal memory - though they might be comparable to, say, the memories described by Krishnamurti - because they would be snapshots taken when you were in a non-normal state of consciousness. Comparing trauma memories to your normal everyday memories is another case of apples and oranges. The "film running in my head" reported in some cases of PTSD is not a vague woffly memory of a film - it's very real and present as if it is happening here and now, in minute detail. If you will - like every sensory channel in your body had been stored for a few seconds on HD and was being replayed through your nervous system. Telling someone that their memory of this kind is "fantasy" or "unreliable" is - mistaken. If the situation was deliberately and maliciously manipulated to confuse these trauma memories, then yes - they would be partially incorrect. But even then, aspects of them would still be extremely clear and precise and accurate. I've spent over a decade talking to people about their sensory experiences an dthe mental processes accompanying those, and - it is a mistake to think that everyone else has even vaguely the same experience of life and mental processes that you do. The fact that courts have to assume commonality of human experience in order to uphold the law is both a strength and a weakness. Strength because it enforces a common humanity, and a weakness because witness reports are taken at face value assuming a common experiential basis.
Actually, scientific studies have shown the exact opposite of what you say about stress and memory. Memories become much less reliable under extreme stress. Vivid they may be. Emotional they may be. Reliable in a factual sense they are not. In your car crash example, the loss of memory of the event can occur because of loss of consciousness from the physical trauma of the crash. If the person then "recovers" memory from this period (and usually they don't) it can be a case of the brain filling in bits that are missing with what seems plausible. Your brain does that all the time. It fills your visual blind spot with visual information which would make sense if it were there. If you suffer, as I do, with extreme anxiety (fortunately well controlled with medication in my case) you can find yourself in the position where you become convinced of something that's patently false because the anxiety is there so the brain came up with something to explain it. I might think "I'm afraid that my husband is going to leave me!" with no evidence whatever that that's the case, but actually the reality is the reverse. My brain, experiencing extreme anxiety, said to itself "What could explain this fear? I must be afraid that Mr Liopleurodon is going to leave - that's the only thing that could make me this afraid!" All of this happens in a split second. The brain is always doing this stuff: it uses shortcuts to make sense of the world, and then it persuades itself that the shortcuts are reality. The more we learn about memory, the more we learn about its limitations. But in a situation like the car crash, often we find that people remember details which clearly demonstrate that they’re not remembering what actually happened, because they were unconscious at the time, but what the brain thinks is a reasonable narrative to explain events. Again, they’re not lying or making it up. They really do remember, but that memory is wrong. The human brain is a magnificent machine but it’s not perfect, and it’s not a computer or a CCTV camera.
I get it with your guys. They’re renowned. They’re prestigious. They’re accomplished. Unless I have an indication of what claims they make in a factual sense and what their evidence is (and so far you still haven’t provided either) it’s really neither here nor there. You can be prestigious and well-loved and wrong. I want to know that, and I want to know how they know what they know specifically about memory and how it works.
Posted by itsarumdo (# 18174) on
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In the end it's all about us wanting to ascribe meaning. The rules of society (and courts) require that meaning is considered to have a common basis. The meaning of any event is the person's attribiuted meaning in a split second, so one person may be traumatised at 3yo by a glass eye falling out of their teddy bear, and another person might have a recognition that everything is transient and life is ultimately precious. Everyone's immediate response is primed by previous events, so the response (fear, Love, awe, need for revenge) is stacked on top of a set of other preceding events - the response becomes more and more habituated because the stack of previous experiences gains more and more weight. At the bottom of the pile, are often prenatal experiences that, being pre-verbal are a set of gestures, shapes - not what you would usually consider to be memory, because there is no obvious storyline, no words, no familiar objects, no outside world.
As a society we like everything to be as we think it is because that's most comfortable. I agree that the memory response you describe happens with unclear memories. It is not characteristic of "film"-like or flashback memories arising from altered states - which tend to be accurate. As they are analysed and run round the head (so they start to get warped and wrapped up with other habituated responses) then yes - they start to get confused. The Bourne trilogy is pretty good at replicating (in a hollywood fashion) the effects of waterboarding on memory retention. Migraines are common. Information comes back in small initially confusing, disconnected and incongruent flashes, which gradually piece together - the film was pretty good in that to piece the memory flashes together you had to know the story, but those flashes were quite accurate. What the film didn't show was the emotional overload that would have come with them, making that process of piecing together quite difficult.
The autobiography of Meir Schneider is well worth a read - not on memory, but on meaning.
Posted by Liopleurodon (# 4836) on
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Nope, I've read through this post several times and I still can't figure out what relevance it has or indeed the meaning of "meaning" in this context.
Posted by itsarumdo (# 18174) on
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Memory of events and interpretation are closely linked. The usual claptrap sprouted by populist science is that memory is fallible - but actually, it is the interpretation that is potentially fallible. With the eyes, we see a rapid set of spot foveal images which are stitched together based on prevoious images, expectation (familiar patterns) and the brain interpolates to give us a panoramic view of moving objects. So if you present the eyes with something that confounds that process, the eyes as a sensory organ will misinterpret. However, that is not the only interpretative layer - and as an organism, the whole purpose of senses is to provide information to which can them be ascribed meaning, the whole purpose of which is to decide how we will act in the world - how we respond. Without meaning we cannot act, so the entire brain is geared to producing an interpreted meaning from a set of millions of discrete parcels of information. You were describing with the anxiety how the process of deriving meaning has become hyperaroused - it has lost its sense of proportionality. The thing about memory of "things" as opposed to meaning is that it is capable of being reliable. So it is possible to memorise the whole Koran, or remember the route to somewhere you haven't visited for 20 years. It is the interpretation that creates the distortions. The brain compartmentalises, and so often (there are unfortunately no fixed rules) information is stored separately from interpretation/meaning in such a way that the details are retrievable. This is because we have an objective observer in the prefrontal cortex as well as a reactive and interpretative midbrain/reticular system. In extreme trauma the pathways become particularly compartmentalised - so that we can survive with our sanity more or less intact, and therefore retain some capacity to respond in a way that is beneficial to our survival. So although emotional memory is a constant ensuing backdrop, behind that are often quite exact memory fragments. In therapy one has to assume that all of these are exactly correct in order to practice the trauma therapy. In reality - there may be some mixing of interpretation. However, the general experience of people who treat high end trauma is that many memories are not distorted - it's just that by the fact of in what circumstances they were collected, they are a set of short films reappearing in an apparently random order rather than an obviously coherent sequence of events. Layered in top of that is an emotional turmoil that initially causes confusion and so appears to indicate that the memory itself is confused. If traumatised people are carefully listened to so that the emotional noise becomes transparent, their story is not confused - and - unless deliberately manipulated - neither are their memories. The confusions that people have talked about above are from people who have not been helped to unravel their trauma, so you are seeing someone who is confused and therefore cannot access clear memories. Successful trauma therapy requires that unravelling/unpicking process - so again everyday experience is not comparable. FMS is a shallow and inaccurate construct based on wishful thinking and sloppy observation.
Posted by Liopleurodon (# 4836) on
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Some thoughts on this: the reason why it's possible for someone to memorise the Qu'ran if they really want to is the amount of focus put into doing that. It's not that they read the Qu'ran and all the information zoomed itself into their brains and there it was, ready to be picked up again. They focused on short passages, went over and over the same thing, paid as much attention as they could, and gradually built up their knowledge. By contrast: I read all the time, usually in the region of 100-120 books a year. It's not unusual for me to see a book on someone else's shelf and think "yes, I've read that but I can't remember a damn thing about it." Others stay with me, of course, but it's not the case that if I searched my brain hard enough I'd find information about that book. It's not there.
Likewise, if you remember your way home after a long absence it's probably because you've made that journey many times before. Repetition helps. Actively doing helps. Would you remember the way to that bloke's house where you went to pick up the bike he was selling 20 years ago? Probably not, unless you're particularly good at this stuff or you have a reason to remember.
The reason why I think that memory is fallible is not that I've been led astray by horrible scientists. I know damn well that mine is fallible. L. is in the next room. She's walked past several times. We've chatted. I've looked directly at her. Now that she's not in my line of vision, do I have the faintest idea what she's wearing today? Nope. Presumably clothes, and presumably clothes that were ordinary enough that I didn't pay any attention to them whatsoever. If you lined up 200 ordinary-looking people and asked me to pick out the 100 or so people I've walked past so far today, I doubt I'd do any better than pure chance. I even created a false memory in the last 24 hours. I realised that I needed to buy milk, and in that moment I imagined the effort of going into the shop, buying the milk and putting it in the fridge. Somehow when I thought about it later, I thought I'd actually done that instead of imagining it and was genuinely surprised to discover that there was still no milk. My memory is messing up all the time - not just about interpretations, but about really basic and bland factual information. So is everyone else's.
Posted by itsarumdo (# 18174) on
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I'd also add that memory is unreliable when we are not particularly emotionally connected to the information. So the part of the brain that deals with memory (the "mammalian" midbrain) also deals with emotions.
As Dave W said, my memory of the journal name was sloppy - because I am not particularly interested in collecting journal references. In a trauma situation, the fight flight hyperaroused attention becomes VERY interested in any detail that constitutes a potential mortal threat, or any detail that presents a possible escape route. Thus, memories are different according to their emotional content. Therefore I have poor and ill-defined memories of everyday events in my life, but very clear memories of peak events.
Peak can be "awesome" (as in a view of a sunset I had in Africa in one particular place 30 years ago, or a set of trees I sat in when I was about 7 years old) or hyperaroused (as in a man wearing a black leather coat who attempted to mug me about 20 years ago). These incidents had strong emotional overtones for various reasons, so the memory is clear with a lot of detail. Similarly, I mentioned Krishnamurti - if an "altered state" of background presence is cultivated, then every experience generates a crystal clear memory. Most people are not in this state most of the time.
The textual memory is retained through repetition, so it is probably partly a hindbrain/cerebellar memory - the cerebellum likes to "remember" repetition and rhythm.
[ 22. January 2016, 11:45: Message edited by: itsarumdo ]
Posted by itsarumdo (# 18174) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Liopleurodon:
..... I even created a false memory in the last 24 hours. I realised that I needed to buy milk, and in that moment I imagined the effort of going into the shop, buying the milk and putting it in the fridge. Somehow when I thought about it later, I thought I'd actually done that instead of imagining it and was genuinely surprised to discover that there was still no milk. My memory is messing up all the time - not just about interpretations, but about really basic and bland factual information. So is everyone else's.
The only time I had an experience anything like that was when I had a very realistic dream of a whole day in the office, and then spent most of the next day unpicking the dream from reality as I found people did not recall specific conversations. If your memory is getting so mixed up with your imagination, that is probably another side effect of the anxiety and probably also of the medication, and maybe also exhaustion. Depending on the cause, something like that is reversible in anything between a couple of months and a couple of years - there are lots of modalities that can help - e.g. SensoriMotor Psychotherapy, Somatic Experiencing, or probably anyone who has EMDR training to at least level 4 are a few examples. None of this is available in the NHS for any except the most extreme cases, so it's not cheap. Counselling would usually make this worse, and CBT would normally give self-management tools but not a resolution. I've probably stepped over the house guidelines here, but what I'm saying is that - whatever you may have been told, anxiety is reversible and you have options other than lifetime medication.
Posted by Dave W. (# 8765) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by itsarumdo:
As Dave W said, my memory of the journal name was sloppy - because I am not particularly interested in collecting journal references.
I said you were sloppy; I didn't say anything about your memory.
In any case, this is another bad example for you. You said you were posting references "because this is important." And I don't believe you were recalling the reference from memory, because it's ridiculous to suppose you correctly remembered the volume, issue number, and page number of the article, but then misremembered the title of the academic journal The Psychologist as Psychology Today, a magazine for the general public.
Posted by itsarumdo (# 18174) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Dave W.:
quote:
Originally posted by itsarumdo:
As Dave W said, my memory of the journal name was sloppy - because I am not particularly interested in collecting journal references.
I said you were sloppy; I didn't say anything about your memory.
In any case, this is another bad example for you. You said you were posting references "because this is important." And I don't believe you were recalling the reference from memory, because it's ridiculous to suppose you correctly remembered the volume, issue number, and page number of the article, but then misremembered the title of the academic journal The Psychologist as Psychology Today, a magazine for the general public.
I have a PDF/photocopy with page/year/number but the journal doesn't put its name on every page - only every other page (see other page). And I am frankly bored by journal reference requests. Boredom results in poor attention and poor memory. Good memory arises from genuine curiosity, love of the subject, and other stronger emotional cues.
You consistently seem more interested in shooting the messenger, Dave - because you don't like what I'm saying about FMS - than the OP. So thanks for the fish.
Posted by Liopleurodon (# 4836) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by itsarumdo:
quote:
Originally posted by Liopleurodon:
..... I even created a false memory in the last 24 hours. I realised that I needed to buy milk, and in that moment I imagined the effort of going into the shop, buying the milk and putting it in the fridge. Somehow when I thought about it later, I thought I'd actually done that instead of imagining it and was genuinely surprised to discover that there was still no milk. My memory is messing up all the time - not just about interpretations, but about really basic and bland factual information. So is everyone else's.
The only time I had an experience anything like that was when I had a very realistic dream of a whole day in the office, and then spent most of the next day unpicking the dream from reality as I found people did not recall specific conversations. If your memory is getting so mixed up with your imagination, that is probably another side effect of the anxiety and probably also of the medication, and maybe also exhaustion. Depending on the cause, something like that is reversible in anything between a couple of months and a couple of years - there are lots of modalities that can help - e.g. SensoriMotor Psychotherapy, Somatic Experiencing, or probably anyone who has EMDR training to at least level 4 are a few examples. None of this is available in the NHS for any except the most extreme cases, so it's not cheap. Counselling would usually make this worse, and CBT would normally give self-management tools but not a resolution. I've probably stepped over the house guidelines here, but what I'm saying is that - whatever you may have been told, anxiety is reversible and you have options other than lifetime medication.
Yes you've crossed a line. My medication has saved my life. Never comment on it or try to give me medical advice again.
Nor is my experience with memory rare. I told several colleagues what I'd done with the milk memory and they all laughed and said they do similar things often.
Posted by Liopleurodon (# 4836) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by itsarumdo:
I'd also add that memory is unreliable when we are not particularly emotionally connected to the information. So the part of the brain that deals with memory (the "mammalian" midbrain) also deals with emotions.
As Dave W said, my memory of the journal name was sloppy - because I am not particularly interested in collecting journal references. In a trauma situation, the fight flight hyperaroused attention becomes VERY interested in any detail that constitutes a potential mortal threat, or any detail that presents a possible escape route. Thus, memories are different according to their emotional content. Therefore I have poor and ill-defined memories of everyday events in my life, but very clear memories of peak events.
Peak can be "awesome" (as in a view of a sunset I had in Africa in one particular place 30 years ago, or a set of trees I sat in when I was about 7 years old) or hyperaroused (as in a man wearing a black leather coat who attempted to mug me about 20 years ago). These incidents had strong emotional overtones for various reasons, so the memory is clear with a lot of detail. Similarly, I mentioned Krishnamurti - if an "altered state" of background presence is cultivated, then every experience generates a crystal clear memory. Most people are not in this state most of the time.
The textual memory is retained through repetition, so it is probably partly a hindbrain/cerebellar memory - the cerebellum likes to "remember" repetition and rhythm.
Recall in stressful situations has been studied extensively. What scientists have found is that in the following situation, for example, attentional memory is badly impaired: Mr A threatens Mr B with a gun. When Mr B thinks about the event later, he remembers the gun pointing at him, very vividly, as you'd expect. But because his attention was focused on the gun, his memory of other details is poor. He may not remember Mr A's face, his clothing, his hair colour, what was going on in the background, or anything much beyond the gun. The trouble is that his brain may fill in the other details to make a coherent picture, so that he thinks he remembers these things, but he actually doesn't, and when his memory is checked against the facts it's all over the place. This is why eye witness testimony can be horribly unreliable. What the brain thinks is important to focus on in these moments - the gun - is not the most important matter to a criminal investigation. "Okay, he had a gun. But what did this man look like? What was he wearing? Where did he go? Did you catch a glimpse of his car?" are probably more important issues when it comes to catching the right perp.
And yet Mr B might be quite traumatised. He might have PTSD flashbacks, dreams, intrusive thoughts. Each time his memory could be completely wrong in a factual sense. Vivid does NOT mean accurate. The scientific evidence is very clear on this point.
Posted by Gwai (# 11076) on
:
Everyone,
Please watch your words here. Don't give medical advice, and if you know you are crossing a line, don't do it.
Also, remember to be careful what you share on here. Anything you post is up for comment.
Gwai,
Purgatory Host
[ 22. January 2016, 13:48: Message edited by: Gwai ]
Posted by Dave W. (# 8765) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by itsarumdo:
And I am frankly bored by journal reference requests. Boredom results in poor attention and poor memory. Good memory arises from genuine curiosity, love of the subject, and other stronger emotional cues.
Oh please - you volunteered that letter, unprompted by anyone, "because this is important."
quote:
You consistently seem more interested in shooting the messenger, Dave - because you don't like what I'm saying about FMS - than the OP. So thanks for the fish.
Hey, everyone's entitled to their own opinion. Barring further references to my posts, I'm unlikely to comment to your continued opining.
Posted by itsarumdo (# 18174) on
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My sincere apologies - I get increasingly frustrated on this topic, and that was predictable. Really it's probably better if I don't get into these conversations in the first place.
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on
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Originally posted by itsarumdo:
quote:
Memory of events and interpretation are closely linked. The usual claptrap sprouted by populist science is that memory is fallible - but actually, it is the interpretation that is potentially fallible.
What is "populist" science? The studies of memory I've read and observed demonstrate memory is much less complete, accurate and fixed than we would like to assume. Those studies overlap and repeat the same data across multiple scientific disciplines. And this is why I accept them. They are repeatable despite the beliefs of the participants.
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on
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Liopleurodon
Just that.
And no contest.
You do realise, of course, that there's something else going on.
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