Part 4 of 4        
        I am sure that many of you remember that there were statements of
        an increase in wife beating on Super Bowl Sunday. Well there is
        not! Those statements were found to be false. They were also known
        to be false by the people who made them, but it did create a
        climate of fear in which certain people could demanda increased
        funding for certain advocacy groups.
        Several years ago, it might have been true that very few
        accusations of abuse were false.
        There has been so much encouragement for the people to come forth
        and report abuse. That is the case with tremendous media coverage
        such as Roseanne Barr who remembered being abused when she was 6
        months old. But this rash of, out of woodwork and me too cases,
        has caused an increase in false accusations. Some of the accusers
        are extremely convincing. They've been through therapy, they have
        told their tale many times, often in a frenzy of group sessions,
        where the members come up with more  and more extreme memories.
        They  very likely beleive that they are describing things that
        really happened, they can be very passionate and very convincing,
        and their therapists believe them. But I have a question for the
        therapists. Modern science has no infallible way to tell whether a
        recovered memory reflects actual historical events or not.
        Therapists can't tell either. If you as a therapist beleive all
        your patients, then at least some of them who were not abused as
        children, through your efforts will come to beleive that they were.
        Then they will suffer all the effects of abuse, and the question
        then becomes.. Who is the abuser? I say in this case, it is the
        therapist. Should in any case the therapist, in all conciousness
        take such an emormous risk? And is it fair to say; I can always
        tell if it's true? because nobody cna.
        Therapists are no more infallible than anybody else, and even if
        therapists make that claim, the question becomes..How do you know
        you were alway right in the past?
        What evidence do you have?
        The technology of lie detection even if it was perfect could only
        tell if the person honestly beleives what he or she is saying. A
        lie detector can never be a time machine to tell us if the past
        actually happened the way we beleive it did. There's nothing
        internal to the telling of the stroy that indicates whether that
        story is a historically accurate description of a past external
        event, or if it's an accurately remembered dream with no grounding
        in reality or a recurring honest belief that was injected by
        somebody else.
        All thse do is reflect a reality of belief that isn't always
        historical reality. All it is, is a belief of a memory that is
        filtered through our own psychological system.
        For example may people believe that lightning comes down from the
        sky and they claim to see it happen, but lightning usually goes
        from the ground up to the sky, which is why lightning rods work,
        and you couldn't see which end was first because lightning bolts
        are too fast for the human eye to resolve which end is first and
        which end was second.
        So there are other influences to what we've been told, that effect
        what we believe.
        I'm also not sure whether the issue of accusation of child abuse
        has been stolen be certain advocacy groups. Most often the
        complainant is a woman and most often the accused is a man. But
        there are very many men who recover memories of abuse in therapy as
        well and many of the accused persons are wrong.
        WE CAN'T LOSE SIGHT OF WHO SUFFERS WHEN THE ACCUSATIONS ARE WRONG.
        IT'S NOT JUST THE ACCUSED BUT IT'S THE ENTIRE FAMILY THAT SUFFERS
        AND FAMILIES HAVE WOMEN AND MEN IN THEM.
        NOR CAN WE GORGET THE ACCUSER WHO AT LEAST SOME OF THE TIME COMES
        INTO THERAPY WITH A PROBLEM, AND COMES OUT OF THERAPY WITH AN
        ENTIRELY DIFFERENT PROBLEM, believing that he or she was abused as
        a child. At least as many women as men are suffering from false
        accusations of childhood sexual abuse. The survivor movement in the
        United States is a billion dollar industry. The "Courage to Heal"
        and it's clones make a fortune. They offer checklists from which
        readers, can guess, "maybe I was abused as a child?" even though
        you don't really suspect it until you read the book and you don't
        know for sure until you've paid for your therapy. But what about
        the women and men who were abused as children and never forgotten
        and suffered for years because of it.  It cheapens their suffering
        to invent hordes of others who have been repeatedly abused by
        managed to stay completely unaware til they were adults when the
        therapist prodded them into coming to beleive they were assaulted
        as children.
        Many of our adult problems require hard solutions and we all know
        it is very hard work to be a contributing member of a complex
        society. It's too simple-minded to adapt a parent baching abuse
        excuse idea that, if anything is wrong with me, my parents must
        have screwed up somehow.
        I am the author of my own destiny, my parents may have given me the
        typewriter but it is in my own hands to write the rest of my life
        story.
        I think it's high time to begin to dismantle this tower of
        psycho-babble that is underwriting some of the most grievous harms
        that we have seen in a long time.
                                      End
        File as ianbegg.txt
... There are no free women until there are free men.....
___ Blue Wave/QWK v2.12
--- Maximus 2.02
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