Page 173 - The Social Animal

Social Cognition 155

Clearly, some of the items on this list would apply to most of
us— whether or not we experienced anything resembling sexual
abuse. Furthermore, as John Kihlstom has pointed out, there is no
66
scientific evidence of a specific link between child sexual abuse and
any of these kinds of checklist items. What are we to make of a sit-
uation where thousands of adults assert that they were sexually
abused as children, repressed the memory of abuse, and now, after
reading this book, seem to remember the abuse? On one hand, we
have a desire to take each of these incidents seriously. If such a thing
did take place, it is indeed tragic, and our hearts go out to the peo-
ple who had such traumatic experiences. But what if the memory is
false? In the absence of any corroborating evidence, should the per-
son confront and prosecute the accused family member? Thousands
of people have done just that—and many families have been torn
apart by these accusations. As you might imagine, when people are
67
accused of such actions some 30 years after the alleged fact, it is usu-
ally impossible for them to prove their innocence.
False memory has been a highly controversial issue in contem-
porary psychology. Some professional psychologists have been will-
ing to take these accounts at face value. But most cognitive scientists,
based on their research on memory, believe that, in the absence of
any corroborating evidence to suggest abuse, it would be wrong to
accuse the suspected family member of having committed this seri-
ous crime. In addition to the scientific research we have mentioned,
researchers point to evidence from everyday life indicating that many
of these recovered “memories” of abuse, when carefully examined,
turn out to be either flat-out wrong or extremely unlikely. For exam-
ple, in some instances, several siblings sleeping in the same room
where the events allegedly occurred swore they never took place; oc-
casionally, the accused perpetrator was hundreds of miles away (e.g.,
serving in the military) when the series of events allegedly occurred.
In many instances, people who acquire such memories in therapy
have come to realize on their own, years later, that the events never
actually occurred—and they retract their accusations. Sometimes,
68
where there should be clear evidence, it is conspicuous by its absence.
For example, as mentioned above, some people have recovered the
vivid “memory” of having been forced to participate in a series of sa-
tanic rituals in which they killed and ate babies and buried their re-
mains. Some of these memories are precise about where the bodies
were buried. But thorough, systematic searches by law enforcement