MSM Dips Its Toes - SRA

Not an issue, today, of course

*****

May 25th, 2015

Ritual Sexual Abuse: The Anatomy of a Panic, pt 1

"Analysis

David Aaronovitch of The Times traces the powerful intellectual influences behind what he sees as one of the most important cultural shifts of the past 40 years: from a society in which accusations of sexual abuse were wrongly ignored to one in which the falsely accused were crushed by a system where the mantra was "victims must be believed".

In the first of two programmes, Aaronovitch will examine the role played by unproven psychoanalytic theories which, from the 1980s, spread from the world of therapists in Canada and the USA to social work, medicine and then to law enforcement in Britain.

From the NSPCC to academia it was believed that children were being sexually abused in group Satanic rituals, which involved murder and animal sacrifice. The programme will explore how these bizarre ideas took hold, how they were related to mistaken psychotherapeutic practices, and how they resonate still.

The programme will look at the influences of four books which played a key role in influencing the intellectual and cultural climate. These are Sybil, Michelle Remembers, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and The Courage to Heal.

Producer: Hannah Barnes

Contributors: 

Rosie Waterhouse - Investigative Journalist; Head of MA in investigative journalism at City University

Debbie Nathan - Investigative Journalist and Author

Tim Tate - Television Producer and Director

Sue Hampson - Former counsellor, and now Director of Safe to Say Trauma Informed Training and Consultancy

Roma Hart - Former Multiple Personality Disorder patient, who has retracted claims she was abused in childhood."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05vx63j

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The first of mine and @hannahsbee 's two Analysis programmes anatomising the Satanic Child Abuse scare is on @BBCRadio4 tonight at 8.

— David Aaronovitch (@DAaronovitch) May 25, 2015

(Embedded Tweet - click date)

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June 1st, 2015

Ritual Sexual Abuse: The Anatomy of a Panic, pt 2 

"David Aaronovitch of The Times traces the powerful intellectual influences behind what he sees as one of the most important cultural shifts of the past 40 years: from a society in which accusations of sexual abuse were wrongly ignored to one in which the falsely accused were crushed by a system where the mantra was "victims must be believed".

In the second of two programmes, Aaronovitch re-examines the role played by unproven psychoanalytic theories which, from the 1980s, spread from the world of therapists in Canada and the USA to social work, medicine and then to law enforcement in Britain.

The programme explores the parallels between the belief in ritual abuse with some of the claims being made today about VIP paedophile rings and group murder.

Some of the mistakes of the past - such as the false accusations made against parents in the Orkneys and Rochdale of satanic abuse - have been acknowledged. But, Aaronovitch argues, without a profound understanding of how and why such moral panics arise we are unlikely to avoid similar mistakes in the future. And when such mistakes recur we risk an over-reaction and a return to a culture of denial."

Producer: Hannah Barnes

Contributors:

Rosie Waterhouse - Investigative Journalist; Head of MA in investigative journalism at City University

Debbie Nathan - Investigative Journalist and Author

Tim Tate - Television Producer and Director

Sue Hampson - Former counsellor, and now Director of Safe to Say Trauma Informed Training and Consultancy

Dr Sarah Nelson - Research Associate at the University of Edinburgh

Professor Richard McNally - Professor of Psychology at Harvard University

Anonymous case study.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05wxx6

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How do panics arise? How did belief in satanic abuse become widespread? For @BBC_Analysis @DAaronovitch investigates: http://t.co/h148b6bevp

— BBC Radio 4 (@BBCRadio4) June 1, 2015

@DAaronovitch @BBC_Analysis Disappointing. 2 busy avoiding ire of #ChildAbuseIndustry to level proper criticisms. Will encourage proSRAMists

— SAFF (@SAFFtweets) June 1, 2015

@DAaronovitch You will soon learn that indulging SRA 'academics' will be seen as weakness by their attack-dogs in the victim imposter lobby.

— SAFF (@SAFFtweets) June 1, 2015

(Embedded Tweet - click date)

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Wednesday, June 3 2015 at 7:30PM /19 March 2013

The Satanic ritual abuse myth, false memories and weird beliefs: Anatomy of a 20-year investigation

"Abstract

Lurid tales of children being sexually abused, of animals being ritually slaughtered and babies being bred for sacrifice, in bizarre black magic ceremonies, by cults of devil worshipping Satanists first surfaced in America in the early 1980s. The allegations of what became known as Satanic ritual abuse soon spread to Britain, Australia and New Zealand in the late 1980s and early 1990s. At the same time, belief in this apparently new and especially depraved form of child abuse was reinforced and said to be corroborated by another new phenomenon, or fashion, in the field of adult psychotherapy, psychology and psychiatry – the recovered memory movement. On conference circuits and in literature, this movement, led by both medically qualified professionals and untrained therapists, promoted the theory that adults can be helped to recover long-buried “repressed” memories of childhood sexual abuse, in some cases Satanic ritual abuse, and that as a consequence of that abuse those patients suffer from Dissociative Identity Disorder, formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder.

This talk explores the origins and spread of the myth of Satanic ritual abuse. As early as 1994 a UK government-funded investigation concluded there was no evidence Satanic ritual abuse existed. Yet despite the continuing absence of evidence, anywhere in the world, a minority of child care professionals, including police officers and social workers, and adult psychotherapists, psychologists and psychiatrists, persist in the belief that Satanic ritual abuse exists. Conferences are still being held around the world.

This talk will chart the progress of my ongoing investigation over 22 years which has examined allegations of the Satanic ritual abuse of children and asked ‘where’s the evidence’?

In the course of the investigation I explored the controversy over the extreme and polarised recovered-versus-false memory debate – still one of the most divisive issues in adult psychotherapy, psychology and psychiatry today. As an illustration of the damage caused by zealots who believed in Satanic ritual abuse and in their ability to “help” a patient recover the memories, I will relate the tragic story of the life and untimely death of Carol Felstead, alias Myers.

Finally, this talk will explore how the myth of Satanic ritual abuse can be considered in the context of the field of anomalistic psychology, the wonderful whacky world of weird beliefs, for example how people can come to believe they have been abducted by aliens. Some of these UFO “experiencers” also believe they were also victims of Satanic ritual abuse. Part of the purpose of my research, ultimately for a PhD by Prior Publication, is to try to understand how and why people can come to believe bizarre, appalling, weird things happened in the total absence of evidence."

http://greenwich.skepticsinthepub.org/Event.aspx/2252/Satanic-Abuse-Multiple-Personalities-False-Memories-and-Weird-Beliefs-Anatomy-of-a-25Year-Investigation

http://www.gold.ac.uk/calendar/?id=5562

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More to follow

The Naïve Literalism With Which Claims Of Historic Abuse Are Received Also Needs To Change

January 2014

Return to Salem

"Bijan Ebrahimi, a keen gardener – a quiet, disabled man whose only joys in life came from his horticultural interests and his cat – took pictures of local youths as they attacked his plants and intended to hand the photographs to police as evidence. But instead officers were called when he was seen with the camera and he was led away for questioning as residents chanted ‘paedo, paedo’. Officers realized their mistake at the police station and he was released, but rumours had already begun circulating that he was a child abuser and two days later he was beaten unconscious, dragged into the street and set on fire. (Daily Telegraph 3.11.13)

The proliferation of historic allegations of sexual abuse following the outbreak of a scandal about the late Jimmy Savile in October 2012 is extraordinary, even by the standard of historic abuse claims. These originated in the USA in the 1980s, and have continued relentlessly ever since in English-speaking countries round the world. The abiding theme of these claims is one of childhood innocence violated, and trust betrayed. The public reaction to the revelation of such abuse is, predictably, one of shock and outrage, coupled with a demand for retribution and reparation.

When American feminist campaigners began to draw attention to the gross minimizing (as they saw it) of the problems of rape and intra-familial sexual abuse in the 1970s and 1980s, they used the technique of personal testimony. In the nineteenth century, this was a popular device deployed both by the antislavery movement, and by Christian revivalist movements, to promote their cause. Such ‘speaking out’ is characterized by highly emotive and graphic content, designed to shock the listener into horrified acceptance.

This rhetorical technique was not without its critics, sensitive to what nowadays we would call the pornography of misery. In 1855, a reviewer for The Athenaeum of John Brown’s Slave Life in Georgia remarked: ‘we scarcely see how the public is to be instructed by repetitious accounts so piteous and so harrowing’.

In 1971, a social worker named Florence Rush electrified the NYRF Rape Conference with her account of childhood molestation. This was second wave feminism’s equivalent to Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a Dream’ speech, though what Rush described was more of a nightmare.

She concluded: sexual abuse of children...is an unspoken but prominent factor in socializing and preparing the female to accept a subordinate role: to feel guilty, ashamed, and to tolerate through fear, the power exercised over her by men.

Rush’s speech proved enormously influential on a generation of activists, who portrayed the nuclear family as a toxic arena of male-on-female abuse. The feminist construction of sexual violence also drew on trends in psychiatry, putting victims of rape and incest on a par with Holocaust survivors and victims of torture. They actively promoted the idea of rape as psychic trauma, causing a kind of disintegration of the self, with ensuing lifelong problems. Anti-Vietnam war activists, and the German psychiatrist William Niederland, persuaded the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual Committee to introduce the concept of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in 1978. Feminist thinkers like the psychiatrist Judith Herman appropriated this concept over the next decade.

The practical problem US feminists faced was how to reconcile their claim that rape and sexual abuse were widespread, with an apparent dearth of traumatised victims. With evangelical zeal, they set about promoting a collective story. ‘Speak-outs’ on rape and incest resulted in the publication of memoirs like Kiss Daddy Goodnight (1978). Feminists urged the therapeutic professions to identify and treat victims, and the wider population to identify victims in need of help, with the aid of television and other media. Researchers claimed that one in three women were sexually abused as children. By the 1980s, Harrington notes, first person survivor testimonies were ubiquitous and stylised – as, indeed, they remain today. The recovery movement’s Bible is a lengthy self-help manual written by two teachers of creative writing, a poet, Ellen Bass, and her student, Laura Davis, in 1988: The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse. Neither of its authors had any background in science or psychology. They developed the book as a result of creative writing classes and self-help workshops that they organized. It is interspersed with seemingly firsthand accounts of abuse, often in lurid and disturbing detail. How much of these accounts is really ‘creative writing’ is a matter for speculation.

The book starts with a list of examples of abuse, followed by the assurance: ‘If you are unable to remember any specific instances likes the ones mentioned above but still have a feeling that something abusive happened to you, it probably did.’ A section headed BUT I DON’T HAVE ANY MEMORIES says comfortingly: ‘…you are not alone. Many women don’t have memories, and some never get memories. This doesn’t mean they weren’t abused.’ A chapter headed BELIEVING IT HAPPENED states:

 ‘To heal from child sexual abuse you must believe that you were a victim, that the abuse really did take place (italics added).’

This insistence on belief, as the precondition for healing, echoes evangelical Christian tradition. It even accepts the reality of Satanic abuse: ‘Society has got to stop denying.’ The process by which multiple memories emerge over time appears from one survivor’s account:

'The more I worked on the abuse, the more I remembered. First I remembered my brother, and then my grand-father. About six months after that I remembered my father. And then about a year later, I remembered my mother. I remembered the ‘easiest’ first and the ‘hardest’ last. Even though it was traumatic for me to realize that everyone in my family abused me, there was something reassuring about it…. My life suddenly made sense.'

This book spawned imitations worldwide. It has been roundly criticised as virulently anti-men, for encouraging false memories, and doing more harm than good. The popularized notion of recovered memory led to an outbreak of accusations by adult daughters against their parents, alleging often horrific childhood abuse. This in turn generated a rash of lawsuits, as well as bizarre accusations of Satanic ritual abuse of children at day-care nurseries, some of which resulted in successful prosecutions. To explain the delay that often ensued before accusations surfaced, psychiatrists argued that the trauma of childhood abuse led to amnesia, or dissociative memories, or even the outlandish notion of multiple personality disorder.

A counter-movement emerged, asserting that so-called recovered memories were in fact false memories implanted by ideologically driven therapists in vulnerable and suggestible clients. A variant on this hypothesis was that women sought therapy to confirm their wish to believe in prior abuse.

In 2003 Richard McNally, a Harvard professor of Psychology, conclusively demonstrated that trauma does not result in repressed memory or amnesia. ‘What we have here is a set of theories in search of a phenomenon,’ he wrote. He also demonstrated how easy it is to create false memories of horrific trauma. As the ‘strange saga of satanic ritual abuse’ shows, McNally’s work remains the gold standard in this area. His colleague, Susan Clancy, was pilloried after she did laboratory research to test the susceptibility to false-memory creation of those who said they had been sexually abused.

Clancy was then invited to undertake research on the validity of memories in those who believed that they had been abducted by aliens. Her conclusion: ‘Do our beliefs have narrative truth? Do they provide us with meaning and value? When people believe they were abducted by aliens, does this help them to understand perplexing or upsetting aspects of their lives? If so, the explanation is likely to be persuasive, satisfying, and resistant to argument (italics in original).’ A key function of such ‘magical beliefs,’ she argues, is the way in which they absolve people of responsibility for personal distress.

Later, Clancy wrote The Trauma Myth, which sparked further controversy. In it, she reiterates what many commentators had already accepted, that much child sexual abuse does not involve the use of force or violence, making the imposition of a PTSD framework inappropriate. The attraction of the trauma model has more to do with the horrified reactions of those receiving accounts of abuse, than with the experiences of those who have been abused. Instead, listeners project their own feelings of moral and even psychological revulsion onto victims.

It’s disturbing to think that in the UK justice system, the trauma model still holds primacy in sexual abuse cases: it is treated as the received wisdom on the subject. This needs to change, and change urgently. The naïve literalism with which claims of historic abuse are received also needs to change. Casting out inner demons is the proper province of the confessional or the consulting room, and not of our criminal courts.

Barbara Hewson is a barrister practising in Lincoln’s Inn"

http://www.salisburyreview.com/Hewson.html

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Monday, November 24, 2014 

Retro Report: The Film That Birthed Multiple Personality Disorder 

"Sybil," which sold 6 million copies, led to the official recognition of multiple personality disorder by the DSM and sparked thousands of diagnoses of the disorder in the 1980s.

But the techniques Dr. Wilbur used to elicit her patient's testimony were questionable, and today, multiple personality disorder, now called dissociative identity disorder, is no longer a legitimate diagnosis.

http://www.thetakeaway.org/story/retro-report-sybil-and-multiple-personality-disorder

NOV. 23, 2014

Debate Persists Over Diagnosing Mental Health Disorders, Long After ‘Sybil’ 

"Overwhelmingly, those receiving a diagnosis of the disorder have been women. They typically had rough childhoods. A pattern to their stories — Ms. Mason fell squarely within it — was that they endured horrific physical and sexual abuse when they were little
More than a few claimed to have been the victims of torture at the hands of satanic cults.

In many cases, their memories were brought to the surface through hypnotism or with injections of so-called truth serums like sodium pentothal. But were those recollections real?"

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/24/us/debate-persists-over-diagnosing-mental-health-disorders-long-after-sybil.html

Please Meet Dr. Joyanna Silberg - USA Establishment Disinformer, Zealot, Child 'Saver' And Child 'Protection' Industry Profiteer

Dr. [Psychology/Psychotherapy] Joyanna Silberg, 
senior consultant for child and adolescent trauma, 
Trauma Disorders Program at Sheppard Pratt, Baltimore, Md.

*****

October 16, 2013 - 11:20 AM

Child Trauma Expert [a biased expert is no worthy expert at all]: Pro-Pedophilia [sic] Groups Are ‘Grooming’ Public to Accept Adult-Child Sex

"Pedophilia advocacy groups, including the tax-exempt B4U-ACT founded by a convicted sex offender, are trying to “groom the public” into accepting adult-child sexual relationships, child trauma expert [sic] Dr. Joyanna Silberg told CNSNews.com.

“There is no legitimate scientific work that could justify the action of an adult with a child in a sexual relationship, because by definition [there is your mistake of circular reasoning] a child cannot consent,” [sic] said Silberg, executive vice president of the Leadership Council on Child Abuse and Interpersonal Violence.

“If you look at their backchannel communications [?],” Silberg continued, “they have clearly stated... that the B4U-ACT public persona is to kind of seduce [?] or groom the public into their way of thinking so that they can act. But they don’t say that on their public websites.”

Silberg, whose organization has debunked studies [where?, is that the totality of your 'debunking'? - you want a debunking of your 'debunking'?, see below.] claiming that sexual relations with adults do not harm children, added that “there is zero likelihood of [B4U-ACT] having an impact” on the sixth edition of the American Psychological Association’s (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), which declassified homosexuality as a mental disorder in 1973, and called any comparisons between the two as “completely ridiculous. [care to say why?]”

http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/alissa-tabirian/child-trauma-expert-pro-pedophilia-groups-are-grooming-public-accept

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Rind And Tromovitch  

"A study published in The Scientific Review of Mental Health Practice attempted to replicate the Rind study, correcting for methodological and statistical problems identified by Dallam and others.

It supported some of the Rind findings, both with respect to the percentage of variance in later psychological outcomes accounted for by sexual abuse and in relation to the finding that there was a gender difference in the experience of child sexual abuse, such that females reported more negative effects [of what, though?].

However it also acknowledged the limitations of the findings (college student sample, self-report data [same as for most 'victim' studies), and did not endorse Rind's recommendation to abandon the use of the term 'child sexual abuse' in cases of apparent consent in favor of the term 'adult-child sex'. [we prefer MSAc/CSAc - Minor Sexual Activity/Child Sexual Activity]

In their conclusion, the authors address the objection that Rind's work and their own would give support to those who deny that child sexual abuse can cause harm [from what, though?]: "The authors of the current research would hesitate to support such a general statement.

Instead, our results, and the results of the Rind et al. meta-analysis, can be interpreted as providing a hopeful and positive message to therapists, parents, and children. Child sexual abuse does not necessarily lead to long-term harm."[44]"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rind_et_al._controversy

[44] = Ulrich, Heather; Randolph Mickey, Acheson Shawn (2005-06). "Child Sexual Abuse: A Replication of the Meta-analytic Examination of Child Sexual Abuse by Rind, Tromovitch, and Bauserman (1998)". The Scientific Review of Mental Health Practice

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rind_et_al._controversy

http://www.mhamic.org/rind

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Rind

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Joyanna Silberg, Ph.D, Senior Consultant for Child and Adolescent Trauma

"Dr. Silberg is the Senior Consultant for Child and Adolescent Trauma at Sheppard Pratt Health System. Dr. Silberg is internationally known as a pioneering expert in the study of dissociative disorders and complex trauma in children and adolescents. She has edited and authored many works on these topics, including her classic book [June 1996], The Dissociative Child. Her new book, The Child Survivor: Healing Developmental Trauma and Dissociation was released in 2012. Her private psychotherapy practice specializes in children and adolescents suffering from posttraumatic and dissociative symptoms and disorders. Her private forensic practice specializes in child sexual abuse. She is Executive Vice President of the Leadership Council on Child Abuse and Interpersonal Violence. More information about Dr. Silberg’s expertise is available at www.thechildsurvivor.com."

http://www.traumaatsp.org/treatment_team.htm

*****

April 20, 2009

Dissociation and the Dissociative Disorders: DSM-V and Beyond 

http://www.amazon.com/Dissociation-Dissociative-Disorders-DSM-V-Beyond/dp/0415957850
  
December 8, 2010

Dissociation in Traumatized Children and Adolescents: Theory and Clinical Interventions

http://www.amazon.com/Dissociation-Traumatized-Children-Adolescents-Interventions/dp/0415877490

Dissociation (psychology)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociation_%28psychology%29

Dissociative identity disorder

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociative_identity_disorder

Dissociative Identity Disorder (Multiple Personality Disorder)

http://www.psychologytoday.com/conditions/dissociative-identity-disorder-multiple-personality-disorder

Dissociative Identity Disorder (Multiple Personality Disorder)

http://www.webmd.com/mental-health/dissociative-identity-disorder-multiple-personality-disorder

Dissociative Identity Disorder

http://www.medicinenet.com/dissociative_identity_disorder/article.htm

Sybil (book)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_%28book%29

Real 'Sybil' Admits Multiple Personalities Were Fake

http://www.npr.org/2011/10/20/141514464/real-sybil-admits-multiple-personalities-were-fake

“Sybil Exposed”: Memory, lies and therapy

http://www.salon.com/2011/10/16/sybil_exposed_memory_lies_and_therapy 

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More to follow.