It felt like I was living in two worlds. There was one world which was a daylight world and another dark world (though I’m not saying that everything bad happened in darkness because it didn’t)....

My body was a Pandora’s box of aches and pains. When Grandpa died all the ailments came jumping out. I was forever twitching and shaking. I had a persistent sore throat and had difficulty swallowing...

The witch-hunt narrative is now the conventional wisdom about these cases. That view is so widely endorsed and firmly entrenched that so widely endorsed and firmly entrenched that there would seem to be nothing left...

All I wanted to do was hide away from the world, but I still had a role to play. I had to be ‘Girl A’ – the key witness in the trial that finally saw...

I have to find a place to hideAn island in the seaSurrounded by a racing tideWhere I can live with me

Some alters are what Dr Ross describes in Multiple Personality Disorder as ‘fragments’. which are ‘relatively limited psychic states that express only one feeling, hold one memory, or carry out a limited task in the...

He pulled my skirt up. I began to worry. Everyone knew he had broken in girls before and I didn’t want it to happen to me. I said, ‘No. Get off, please.’ He pulled me...

Treating Abuse Today 3(4) pp. 26-33While Pamela Freyd was speaking to us on the record about her organization, another development was in the making in the Freyd family. Since Pamela and her husband, Peter Freyd,...

False Memory” for Errors in Memory for Details, Journal: Ethics & Behavior 14(3) pages 201-233, 2004

It is hard to bring paedophile rings to justice. Thankfully it does happen. Perhaps the most horrific recent case came before the High Court in Edinburgh in June 2007. It involved a mother who stood...

One year later the society claimed victory in another case which again did not fit within the parameters of the syndrome, nor did the court find on the issue. Fiona Reay, a 33 year old...

Treating Abuse Today 3(4) pp. 26-33TAT: I see the agenda. But let’s go back: one of the contentions the therapeutic community has about the Foundation’s professed scientific credibility is your use of the term “syndrome.”...

It is acknowledged that father-daughter incest occurs on a large scale in the United States. Sexual abuse has now been included in child abuse legislation. A conservative estimate is that more than 1 million women...

I remembered during puberty, through the anorexic mists of intermittent menstrual cycles, that man, my father, lifting Shirley’s nightdress over her head and asking her in his mocking way to choose what colour condom she...

Early relational trauma results from the fact that we are often given more to experience in this life than we can bear to experience consciously. This problem has been around since the beginning of time,...

The BFMSS [British False Memory Syndrome Society]The founder of the ‘false memory’ movement in Britain is an accused father. Two of his adult daughters say that Roger Scotford sexually abused them in childhood. He denied...

It is worth — given the passage of time — recalling the basic architecture of the Crisis: 121 children from many different and largely unrelated families had been taken into the care of Cleveland County...

Ritually abusive groups also convince children that something evil has been put inside them. For example, a child is made to believe he or she has a “black heart” – seeing the abuser holding an...

One hundred twenty-nine women with previously documented histories of sexual victimization in childhood were interviewed and asked detailed questions about their abuse histories to answer the question “Do people actually forget traumatic events such as...

Like Jocelyn, Survivors often think: * That’s just the way I am * I’m not lovable, that’s why I keep having disastrous relationships * I’m not very clever, that’s why I didn’t do well at...

It is often said that Vietnam was the first television war. By the same token, Cleveland was the first war over the protection of children to be fought not in the courts, but in the...

It is a myth that rape is an inevitable part of conflict . . . There is nothing inevitable about it. It is a weapon of war aimed at civilians. It has nothing to do...

A child of God, special possession.

Survivors are damaged to different degrees by their experiences. This does not depend on what happened physically. A Survivor who has been raped will not necessarily be more damaged than a Survivor who has been...

…Cleveland was the first war over the protection of children to be fought not in the courts, but in the media…Given that most of the hearings took place out of sight of the press, the...

I am saying that very clearly. In some cases, evidence was not put in the court. In other cases, agreements were made between lawyers not to put the case to the court at all, particularly...

While many experts insisted that children seldom lie about sexual abuse, others claimed that young children often failed to distinguish between fact and fiction and might be susceptible to suggestion and pressure on the part...

I can’t get myself to say what happened next. I cannot cope with even thinking about this let alone living with it.””It is so degrading and I try to forget, it hurts so much because...

But nothing in my previous work had prepared me for the experience of reinvestigating Cleveland. It is worth — given the passage of time — recalling the basic architecture of the Crisis: 121 children from...

When we began researching the film on behalf of Channel 4, which had commissioned and paid for it, the response from individual child protection workers inside and outside Cleveland was universally positive. Everyone we met...

It was after a Frontline television documentary screened in the US in 1995 that the Freyds’ public profile as aggrieved parents provoked another rupture within the Freyd family, when William Freyd made public his own...

I should meet many people who do not know anyone personally who has been raped or molested as a child. But I can’t remember seeing a newspaper without a rape or molestation charge in it...

Mind Your Language in the Presence of PatriachsQ. When is rape not rape? A. When it is your father or stepfather.

I would like to turn in my skin and change it for a new epidermis. It feels as if I will never be able to rinse the sadness from my soul. All the while I...

Eating disorders are prevalent among women who were sexually abused as children. They seem to have components of other symptoms such as obsessions, compulsions, avoidance of food, and anxiety, and they primarily include a distorted...

I am disgusted that I was often taken into their bed and told to do things to both of them. The things a decent parent wouldn’t think of. I didn’t know that having sex with...

witch hunts” in the 1980s. There were big mistakes made in how some cases were handled, particularly in the earliest years. But even in those years there were cases such as those of Frank Fuster...

Cheryl’s growing awareness of her emotional difficulties was leading her to research multiple personality. As she had learned more about dissociation, she realised just how severe the abuse had been and how much she had...

There was nothing you could be sure about, it was all lies, and it was all done to mess with minds because the control and the power trip was so important to them, as well...

In all the interviews I have done, I cannot remember one offender who did not admit privately to more victims than those for whom he had been caught. On the contrary, most offenders had been...

The witch-hunt narrative is a really popular story that goes like this: Lots of people were falsely convicted of child sexual abuse in the 1980s and early 1990s. And they were all victims of a...

Death Penalty” for child rape irrespective of the degree of offence or homicide , and rigorous penalty for child molestation, would serve as an excellent deterrent mechanismDebates on Human Rights to the perpetrator of the...