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	Repressed Memory: Issue Still Argued By Dianne Williamson Telegram & Gazette September 14, 2009 http://www.telegram.com/article/20090913/COLUMN01/909130386/1003/NEWS03 Sixteen years ago I wrote a series of columns about “repressed memory” and the scores of adults who were coming forward in the ’80s and ’90s to accuse a family member of sexually abusing them as a child. I wrote about a local woman named Karen, who said she remembered when eating a peppermint that she had brushed her teeth with mint toothpaste after her grandfather sexually abused her when she was 10. I spoke to a 34-year-old wife and mother who said she had recently recalled being raped in a cemetery by a family friend when she was 13. I also wrote about the skeptics, such as the professor from Clark University who was accused of abuse by his own daughter, and who became an outspoken advocate for a group of nonbelievers called The False Memory Syndrome Foundation. “People identify quite strongly with one side or another,” said the Clark professor. “Trying to get the two sides together is like getting the Arabs and Israelis to talk to each other.” Not much has changed since then, except that the raging debate over repressed memory has moved from the therapist’s couch to the highest court in Massachusetts. I can’t help but wonder, though: If the issue has gone unresolved among psychologists and scientists for two decades, how can a group of judges be expected to sort it out? On Thursday, the lawyer for defrocked priest Paul R. Shanley challenged his client’s rape conviction on the grounds that repressed memory is “junk science” and that prosecutors should not have been allowed to present evidence the victim buried memories of abuse for 20 years. “No one’s trying to prove that repressed memory doesn’t exist,” lawyer Robert Shaw Jr. said in an interview Friday, after arguing his appeal before the state Supreme Judicial Court. “But it’s the burden of government and those who say it exists to demonstrate that it does.” One of the central figures in the clergy sex abuse scandal, Shanley was convicted in 2005 after a 27-year-old man testified that the priest molested him when he was between 6 and 11 years old. The former altar boy tearfully told the jury that Shanley abused him in the pews, rectory and confessional, but that he didn’t remember the abuse until 2002, when he learned of an article in The Boston Globe about accusations against Shanley by other men. Prosecutors originally charged Shanley with sexually abusing four men when they were kids in Newton in the 1980s. Three of the men were later dropped from the case; all four said they had recovered memories of the abuse years later. The controversy is both fascinating and troubling, with both sides offering compelling arguments that repressed memory is either a valid phenomenon or bunk. Believers say that sexual abuse is real and widespread, that alleged victims couldn’t possibly make up such specific memories, and that people frequently suffer amnesia after childhood trauma. Speaking of memories, I still recall Karen’s palpable anguish when she recounted the alleged abuse by her grandfather: “Who would want to live with something so horrific?” she asked. “Why would I possibly make it up?” In the Shanley case, his victim received a $500,000 settlement from the Boston archdiocese. Shaw and other skeptics argue that the theory of repressed memory is no longer generally accepted by the scientific community and that “false memories” can be planted by therapists. Nearly 100 psychiatrists, psychologists and scientists have submitted a brief claiming that repressed memory is “one of the most pernicious bits of folklore ever to infect” the mental health field. “It’s not a demonstrated phenomenon,” Mr. Shaw said in the interview. “When we talk about admitting repressed memory in court to deprive someone of their liberty, that’s a very different situation than a clinician who sees something in a clinical setting and wants to give it a label.” So now the SJC is charged with deciding whether one of the most notorious figures in the clergy sex abuse scandal deserves a new trial, and perhaps whether repressed memory will be accepted at future trials. When even the experts have been at odds for 20 years, that’s some burden. Contact: dwilliamson@telegram.com
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