Thanks to the organisation JUSTICE from PSYCHOTHERAPY for this Briefing, which they used in their lobbying action
Psychotherapeutic Involvement in the Investigation,
Disclosure and Prosecution of Childhood Abuse
What is wrong with psychotherapeutic investigation of
childhood abuse?
Contentious, unproven and seriously flawed theories
regarding repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse
are practised in certain types of psychotherapy. Yet,
astonishingly, there are no credible codes of practice or
ethical guidance documents that prescribe the way in
which psychotherapeutic investigations, underpinned by
these theories of child abuse, are carried out in practice.
Therefore, people who have child abuse allegations made
against them have little chance of challenging the theories,
practices and methods, as there is no effective legal
framework for complaints, or recourse to ombudsman
redress. Organisations representing psychotherapists may
have rules and regulations but they do not deal properly
with complaints of misdiagnoses of childhood abuse, in
fact they tend to deny that wrongful diagnoses occur. It is
to be hoped that recent proposals for a code of conduct
and register of therapists will address the particular
problems caused by ‘recovered memory’ practitioners.
Between the late 1980s and the present day, a
considerable number of parents have been falsely accused
of sexual abuse by their adult children who believed they
had ‘recovered’ memories of serious childhood abuse
previously unknown to them or anyone else. (Many care
home workers suffered similar accusations from adults,
also claiming to have ‘recovered’ memories of being
abused when they were children in care homes.) The
theories concerning ‘memory repression’, and the
practices precipitating this dangerous outcome, were
widely used in NHS child and adolescent and adult mental
health services and social services departments. Little
action, if any, was taken to review training and practice or
question the outcomes and results. Besides the official
agencies, these practices were used in private
consultations by trained and untrained therapists as well
as in the less formal setting of group-therapy sessions
conducted by self-help organisations. These flawed
methods have little scientific foundation beyond the
beliefs of their practitioners, who are free of proper public
and political scrutiny and provide no meaningful evidence
of an operational approach or the consequences of their
mistakes and erroneous perceptions.
The flaws include:
o A presumption of abuse histories in disturbed
adults and children.
o A presumption of guilt in the accused.
o Suggestive counselling techniques.
o A failure of investigative objectivity.
o Reliance on questionable indicators of abuse.
Therapy with adults or children, who are thought to have
suffered child abuse, is problematic because many
therapists will automatically assume the child or adult has
been abused. Therefore, one of the main dangers
evidentially is that an untrue story will become rehearsed
and resilient through not being subjected to thorough
questioning and the child or adult will be encouraged to
confabulate in the belief that further hidden experiences
will be revealed.
The psychotherapy community has failed to develop
adequate procedures to sift true from false allegations of
abuse. Past experience has demonstrated that unless the
totality of the historical development of sexual abuse
investigation using certain psychotherapeutic theories and
practices is examined, errors will be regarded as isolated
and atypical.
In parallel with the erroneous diagnoses of Munchausen
Syndrome by Proxy and ‘cot death murder’ in suspected
cases of physical abuse of children, psychotherapists
misdiagnose childhood sexual abuse regularly.
Truths that have not been incorporated into
psychotherapeutic investigative systems include these.
o People do lie about child sexual abuse for all sorts
of reasons and therefore to ‘always believe the
accuser’ is dangerous.
o Children and adults may come to state and believe
false sexual abuse histories through explicit or
implicit suggestion and incentives.
o Genuine sexual abuse is reported in entirety and
not through gradual or progressive disclosure.
o The history of the source of an allegation and the
influences on it and an inquiry into alternative
explanations are necessary to weigh up its prima
facie reliability.
The injustices caused by ‘recovered memory’ therapy
– ‘convictions’ and ‘sentences’
When counsellors solicit atrocity stories, they undermine
their vulnerable clients’ mental reserves and by
encouraging them to delve deeper and deeper to ‘recover
memories’ of even more hideous and bizarre abuse the
results can be shattering. Suicide attempts, some
successful, occur.
In the areas of counselling involving ‘recovered memory’
therapy, people are often diagnosed as having suffered
childhood abuse as a result of a therapist’s assumptions,
when they are really suffering from psychological or
physical illness. Here, there are many counsellors who
work to induce imagined fears and anxieties in their
client’s past. This makes their patients doubt, then reject,
their trusted memories. Such manufactured social and
personal amnesia is the oxygen of ‘recovered memory’
therapy, where people can escape into the madness of
mistaken memories and false beliefs. This assault on
memory is conducted by counsellors who have their
charges take on an abused victim past that is palpably
untrue and a history at odds with what they have
previously accepted and knew to be true.
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The psychotherapist plays on childhood uncertainties in
the cloudier areas of the psyche, mingling these with
present day worries, to promote the idea of a deeply
buried traumatised past. These can be mined from the
abundant seam of people who on having a hurt
acknowledged, and although it is unconnected with
childhood abuse, use it to make false accusations of child
abuse to settle a score. There are also large numbers of
people disposed to believing falsehoods suggested by
counsellors from self-help groups, or believing their own
concocted false allegations. A person’s displaced anger or
self-deception, often brought on by psychological worries,
is fertile soil for false allegations of child abuse. Anxious
clients are told by some therapists, that if they think they
were abused, then they were. This is an invitation to
falsify events within a reinvented past. Here dreams and
flashbacks are accepted as evidentially safe with
insufficient, considered judgement applied to them. Yet,
‘recovered memory’ therapy has been commended at
conferences aimed at educating child sexual abuse
investigators from the police, social services and health
professions.
Some counsellors may urge their client’s siblings to
believe abuse happened to them as well and that they also
have a hidden past that they have repressed.
Consequently, a father can find two or more daughters
accusing him and reviling him in a way that contradicts all
his past relations with them. In some cases the patient,
during her mental turmoil and under relentless pressure
and perhaps through hypnosis, will ‘remember’ that
members of the extended family, or neighbours, or
babysitters and childminders, or even strangers, abused
her. At this point some therapists may at last conclude that
their ‘client’ is exhibiting signs of profound delusion but
others will take it as a clue that she has been the victim of
organised ritual abuse, perhaps even ‘satanic’.
It is not just families that have lost young children,
wrongly removed by the family courts as a result of
incorrect medical diagnosis of child physical abuse, or
families suffering from a member’s wrongful criminal
conviction for child sexual abuse, that are being
destroyed. Families and relationships are also wrecked
through the loss of adult children who denounce their
parents as child sexual abusers and sever contact with
them following an incorrect ‘recovered memory’
diagnosis of child abuse. These parents, although not
subject to criminal charges, are nevertheless ‘convicted’
and then ‘sentenced’ and ‘punished’, including
defamation, by their adult children accusers, often with
the approval and complicity of their accuser’s
psychotherapist. Loss of contact, often with grandchildren
as well, is their ‘sentence-punishment’. Questioning their
accuser and the therapist about the allegations against
them is made virtually impossible. This is another part of
the ‘sentence-punishment’. Since their ‘conviction’,
’sentence’ and ‘punishment’ have occurred outside the
legal system, this leaves them with little or no recourse to
justice from that source.
The plight of these older parents is perplexing, with
mental, physical and marital breakdown not uncommon. It
can be compared in part to the even worse situation of
parents of young children who have no means of appeal to
the family courts against wrongful family court
judgements removing their children. The secrecy,
surrounding these judgements, compares with the client-
therapist confidentiality, used as a shield to prevent any
enquiries into the psychotherapeutic consultations that led
to the false allegations against the older parents. For fear
of making a tragic situation worse, few would seek
redress for defamation in the civil courts. So, waiting for a
possible (but unlikely) retraction is the defamed person’s
only slender hope.
Psychotherapists involved in ‘recovered memory’ therapy
are unlikely to be investigated or censured for any serious
misdiagnoses they make in this area of mental health. This
contrasts with investigations of misdiagnoses in the field
of physical health, where procedures, checks and balances
can be more likely to bring the clinician to account.
Recently the public have become aware of growing
disquiet over certain cases where false allegations of child
abuse, both sexual and physical, have lead to injustices
resulting in wrongful imprisonments. The jailing and trials
of innocent mothers accused of cot-death murder, and the
removal of children by the family courts from parents
wrongly diagnosed as suffering from Munchausen
Syndrome by Proxy or other illnesses, have shocked much
of the country. However, those caught up in ‘recovered
memory’ cases are not receiving similar high profile
attention and concern.
Psychotherapy in the criminal justice system
When criminal or family court investigations occur as a
result of allegations of child abuse arising in a
psychotherapeutic setting, it is difficult for the accused
person’s legal team to challenge the reliability of the
allegations. They can point to the questionable quality and
content of the training and knowledge base of the
psychotherapists. However, the courts and authorities fail
to show serious concern over the personal agendas and
belief systems of these psychotherapists and their
influence on some police and social services
investigations. There are few ways of properly examining
psychotherapists’ pre-trial therapy sessions with the
accuser, or their motives as ‘expert witnesses’ in the
criminal and family courts.
The therapeutic use of techniques of memory creation and
inflation of false beliefs is evident in many trials. In the
absence of forensic evidence, police and social workers
condone situations where therapists act as investigators
and encourage clients to create ‘therapeutic narratives’ as
evidence of child abuse. Child play therapy methods,
including ‘anatomically-correct’ dolls, are used to elicit
‘disclosures’ of abuse from very young children. ‘Expert’
testimony is given to juries lacking the professional
knowledge to question it. A psychotherapeutic milieu
affects the conduct of most child abuse trials. It is now
almost standard fare in the courts for evidence of abuse to
be proffered implicitly through claims about effects, such
as lack of self-esteem, drug and alcohol excesses, or an
eating disorder. Rarely is there any questioning of likely
causation. It is taken as read that sexual abuse does cause
a myriad of delayed psychological problems. Yet there is
no reliable evidence to support this, only clinical
speculation and unthinking belief.
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For those who really have been abused, giving testimony
in court is a harrowing experience. However, pretend
‘victims’ tell lies under oath at trials. The prosecution
teams are often helped by ‘victim support’ activists and
sometimes by ‘child abuse’ lawyers. They coach the
complainants in exhibiting low self-esteem and on how to
use emotional resources to advantage, in order to be as
convincing ‘victims’ as possible. The complainants can be
guaranteed to show upset, programmed to disgust,
hoodwink and soften up the jury, as they ‘relive their
childhood trauma’. The judges and counsels have to
empathise with this, for fear of being seen to be
insensitive. While giving testimony at trials, police
officers sometimes speak of ‘their client’ instead of the
complainant, and praise the psychotherapeutic ‘help’ the
complainant ‘required’. In the absence of any external
proof to corroborate the charges, the jury has to rely
heavily on the authenticity of the witness’s emotional
demeanour as ‘evidence’.
The following is a quote by non-practising barrister, Lee
Moore, of the Association of Child Abuse Lawyers,
criticising cross-examination, “The goal is to control and
entrap the witness, which mirrors the grooming process
paedophiles use to ensnare their victims”. Likening
defence counsels to paedophiles is an attempt to
undermine the cross-examination of complainants’
testimony, and the need for proven evidence, and thus
achieve convictions that are not be hampered by accepted
safeguards to justice.
Many legal reforms, introduced under the aegis of
‘empathy with the victim’, involve sweeping attacks on
traditional legal rights and protections, such as the right to
be presumed innocent until proved guilty, the right to
have evidence corroborated, the right to confront one’s
accusers, and the right to ‘equality of arms’, that is, not to
be tried under significantly less advantageous conditions
than those enjoyed by one’s accuser (for example naming
the defendant while giving anonymity to the
complainant). Other protections have gone, such as
restrictions on the use of hearsay evidence and
(sometimes) the right to consult the expert of one’s
choice. Other concerns are, calling the accused the
perpetrator instead of the defendant and calling the
accuser the victim rather than the complainant, while there
is bias in favour of prosecution witnesses in vulnerable
witness protection.
What needs to be done?
In the words of Earl Howe, Shadow Spokesman on Health
in the House of Lords and Deputy Chairman of the All
Party Group for Abuse Investigations, addressing the
2004 AGM of the British False Memory Society; “The
unwanted consequences of making a complaint in
psychotherapy have never, I think, been properly
addressed; and I believe this needs to be done now, by an
independent body.”
Clearly, there is a need for the entire psychotherapeutic
process to be reviewed as to its efficacy and safety as a
childhood abuse disclosure method. The All Party Group
for Abuse Investigations under its Chair, Claire Curtis-
Thomas MP, is aware that the errors and failings of
psychotherapy used in child abuse investigation have
resulted in the most terrible injustices.
A Royal Commission is therefore recommended to
examine the following serious concerns.
1. Psychotherapists’ ability to distinguish genuine cases
of abuse from false ones, to provide objective
investigation and to weigh the evidential reliability of
a client’s or patient’s allegations.
2. Psychotherapists, practising ‘recovered memory’
therapy, using client-therapist or patient-therapist
confidentiality to prevent scrutiny of their practices
and methods.
3. The lack of any legal requirement for
psychotherapists to provide third parties (usually
parents), who have been affected by allegations made
by a client or patient (usually a daughter), with a
detailed record of the consultations. (This is
particularly important in identifying whether ‘leading
questions’ have been asked and would bring
psychotherapists into line with the GMC’s
requirements on note taking for psychiatrists and
psychologists.)
4. The absence of public and political accountability
and a proper legal framework to regulate the
practices of counsellors and therapists. (There is no
one properly constituted controlling body. Instead
there are various representative bodies, reflecting the
differences between competing beliefs, theories and
practices, unable to achieve an agreed code of ethics
and identifiable standards of training, supervision,
assessment and examination.)
5. The role of psychotherapists as ‘expert witnesses’ in
the criminal and family courts and the part played by
psychotherapists in criminal investigations of child
abuse in the disclosure of abuse.
6. There is no duty of care to a third party in ‘recovered
memory’ cases. Hence, falsely accused people are
unable to obtain legal redress from their accuser’s
psychotherapist or health authority, such as the
situation that prevented former Scottish National
Party deputy leader, Jim Fairlie, from suing the
healthcare trust that employed his daughter’s
consultant psychiatrist.
Conclusions: A Royal Commission should consider
these recommendations.
1. Therapists, health professionals and, when involved,
social services and police, should have a ‘duty of
care’ to a third party who is accused in a case
involving therapeutic disclosure of child sexual
abuse.
2. As there is extensive disagreement among
psychotherapists over the validity of ‘recovered
memory’, no case should be brought to court where
the evidence of child abuse is based solely on
allegations disclosed thought therapeutic treatment.
Alternative, compelling evidence should be required.
3. Regulation of psychotherapists and counsellors
similar to that applied to the medical profession.
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