Our will to protect the welfare and fate of our children is deep and fierce.
It brings out the caring best in people — a sense of sacrifice, an
intense desire to offer them a better life.
But this same primal impulse can also bring out the worst in us —
hysterical panics about the latest threat to our children. At the low
end, such perceived threats might include fast-food obesity or violent
video games. At the high end, we worry our children will fall victim to
drug pushers or child molesters.
These are authentic worries because incest and sexual abuse are as real
as drugs. But given the complexities of the human mind and the mechanics
of memory, sex-abuse anxieties have also resulted in witch-hunts and horrific
miscarriages of justice.
Memory is a tetchy subject. Even people who would not claim to have a
good memory are quite confident of what they do remember. For the past
30 years, however, psychologists have shown what an imperfect instrument
memory is.
In particular, work by researchers such as Victoria University psychologist
Maryanne Garry has demonstrated how easy it is in a therapeutic setting
to implant false ideas into a person’s mind — which are then
fervently taken to be accurate recollections.
A simple line of questioning can establish in visual memory that a blue
sports car was white or that a bald man had hair on his head. Whole episodes
that never happened, such as getting lost in a shopping mall, can be manufactured
from ideas implanted in a young person’s mind.
Early childhood is a particularly treacherous area for memory. Many of
us “remember” childhood events not from direct experience but
from stories told to us later, including anecdotes that might have been
about a friend or sibling. The child’s request, “Mummy, tell
me about the time I spilled the paints,” might create images permanently
embedded in the mind as early memories of spilling the paints, when, in
fact, they are later, story-induced imaginings.
This tendency for us so confidently to believe in memory (a process we
see in others but have trouble recognising in ourselves) produced episodes
of unspeakable ugliness in the sex-abuse panics and memory wars of the
1980s and 90s.
In a typical scenario a young woman went to a therapist for depression
or anorexia. The therapist had adopted the ideology that many common psychological
malaises were caused by repressed memories of sexual abuse.
(The very idea goes counter to what is known about memory of trauma: people
who have experienced real trauma have trouble forgetting, not remembering
it.)
Using a process of suggestion and leading questions, the patient was convinced
that her real problem was a terrible childhood event, usually incest or
rape by a friend or neighbour.
This fabricated memory, often developed in the most lurid detail, then
became the single explanation of all the patient’s present failures
and problems.
Recovered memory therapy, as it was known, destroyed families and lives
in the English-speaking world (the fad, oddly, never caught on in continental
Europe, Latin America or the rest of the world). The victim-survivor,
backed by a support group of fellow victims, would confront her stunned
parents, demand they be jailed or sue them. Grandmothers were cut off
from grandchildren and families blown to pieces.
I saw cases of this here in New Zealand. In one instance a woman in her
30s with a history of borderline psychosis had, with the help of a therapist,
at last recovered memories of the “real cause” of her problem
— her parents. A quiet, pleasant North Island couple, they had supposedly
forced their daughter to be gang-raped in front of them when she was a
child. On the therapist’s advice, the daughter cut them off and denied
contact with the grandchildren, leaving them bewildered and utterly heartbroken.
Which brings us to a twist in the Peter Ellis case, a stunning interview
carried by Radio New Zealand. Nathan, as he was named, is a 22-year-old
Christchurch resident who had been at the Civic Creche for a short time
in 1985. He, too, now claims that Peter Ellis had abused him.
It wasn’t until he was 16 that he told his parents about this, although
you’d think his mother, who was also interviewed, would have realised
it, since she now claims that as a small child he ran from the room when
Peter Ellis’s face appeared on television.
And how does Nathan know he was abused? At “about 14” he noticed
that he would “freak out” if a girl kissed him, and that he
couldn't handle and was “uncomfortable” in sports changing rooms.
Socialising with girls “scared the heck out of me” to the point
where “I knew there was something wrong.”
He also apparently knew more about sex than a normal 14-year-old should
have known. The explanation in his mind is that he remembers lurid details
of things that happened to him in the few weeks that he was at the Civic
Creche in 1985. He also now understands why he has nightmares and wakes
up in the night to vomit.
There is a problem, however. According to Gaye Davidson, the supervisor
of the creche at that time, Ellis made his first appearance at the creche
in August 1986, assigned to it on a community service scheme. (Davidson
rejects the idea that Ellis ever hung around the creche in the previous
year.)
Given the intense publicity swirling about the Peter Ellis case in the
1990s, it is no surprise whatsoever that a troubled young man should come
forward with such fantastic allegations. Nor is it surprising that the
police have refused to pursue the case on his behalf.
What is astonishing is that Radio New Zealand would give him 40 minutes
to share with the nation the genesis of his problems — those dreadful
experiences at age 4 at a creche that did not then have Ellis on its staff.
There is no doubting Nathan’s sincerity, however turbid or confused
his memories might be. But how curious that he was allowed to go on National
Radio to express his sense of injury and hatred of Ellis, virtually without
serious challenge. The memory wars are not over yet.
