Recovered Memories

It has been disturbing to discover that the idea of "recovered memories", which I thought had been thoroughly debunked in the late 1990s, continues to thrive. A priest has recently been convicted of sexual molestation of a child decades after the supposed events based on "recovered memories", and there are apparently still support groups of folks claiming to have been ritually abused by Satanists on the basis of "recovered memories" (see http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2005/03/interview-with-kathleen-sullivan-part.html. )I am fairly certain these folks believe that they were ritually abused by a vast conspiracy of "multi-generational Satanists", but I am equally certain that the memories were planted by therapists and that the abuse claims are total horses**t. The abusers are the therapists.

I was a child abuse prosecutor in Florida in the early 1990s when I became aware that the dimwitted state "social workers" and their managers had fallen in love with the idea of repressed memories of Satanic abuse. They had even gone so far as to declare that certain foster children, who denied any such memories, were victims of such abuse and ineligible to be adopted.

I investigated the case of a set of siblings so designated in my district and determined that there was, in fact, no evidence of any kind of any abuse of the children in question. They were in foster care because of alleged sexual abuse of some older half siblings for which the parents had been imprisoned and on the basis of which parental rights had been terminated. (It was not uncommon in Florida for parental rights to be terminated on the flimsiest of evidence in the 1980s.) The only evidence of ritual abuse was the opinion of an unlicensed psychologist who specialized in ritual abuse and memory recovery and who was affiliated with a "deprogramming" facility near Miami. The opinion was predicated on a single meeting with one of the children. His denial of any memory of abuse was characterized by the "therapist" as an indicator of repressed memories. On this basis, all three siblings (who had been in separate foster homes for years and moved frequently) were declared unadoptable and slated for deprogramming.

I was outraged, as was my wife. Not knowing what else to do to help these children, we petitioned to adopt the oldest (and least adoptable by virtue of age) of the children (a move that put my job in jeopardy and resulted in my being threatened with arrest for obstruction or worse by the therapist's state trooper husband who claimed to be part of a nonexistent Satanism task force).

Meanwhile, the children were off to the deprogrammming center in Jupiter. I managed to get permission to visit the oldest child, a boy of 10, every week or so and to tour the facility some 4 hours away. He was living with a very nice foster couple who had been trained in ritual abuse and memory recovery therapy (not to perform it but to cooperate with it) but was subjected to daily interrogation and badgering about his repressed memories and, to be quite frank, blatant implantation of memories. The treatment facility featured a holding cell in which recalcitrant children were sometimes kept in restraints in total darkness for hours at a time. The program involved nothing less than torture designed to get the children to respond to their interrogators by telling them what they wanted to hear, i.e. that they had been ritually abused and were in need of the facility's long term care at the expense of the state.

I interviewed the child who told me what was happening to him. He told me that he had told the therapists what they wanted to hear so that he could get out of the facility and be adopted. He had been led to understand that the sooner he recovered his memories, the sooner he would be well enough to become part of a family.

I interviewed the "therapist" who, among other things, told me that she was aware of a vast conspiracy of "multi-generational Satanists" who had infiltrated the highest levels of the government. She asked if I had encountered them in my military and civilian government experience. She stated that the children for whom I was advocating were "too dangerous" to be adopted because such children would have been programmed to kill their adopted families.

All of this was predicated on rank pseudo-science and the rank self-interest of the deprogramming industry that sprang up. Michael Shermer, author of "Why People Believe Weird Things", and others have called the "Satanic Panic" and the recovered memory movement examples of witch crazes.

The children's guardian ad litem objected to the treatment and supported our adoption petition, but the state contested it despite our stellar "home study" and the recommendation of the social workers from an outside district (it was thankfully a conflict of interest for my own district to perform the home study). Over time, the deprogramming facility convinced the child that my wife and I were Satanists because we opposed the treatment and that he would not be safe with us. In our last conversation, the child seemed genuinely afraid of me. We dropped our petition, I quit my job, and we moved to Seattle to get as far away as possible, partly in response to threats from the trooper husband of the therapist.

The good news is that our advocacy and the pressure we had put on the agancy resulted in all three children's adoption, albeit by three different families. The state tacitly admitted that the ritual abuse allegations were bogus, but the state would not "reward"my wife and me with a personal victory in the adoption proceeding.

In the end, we were winners in my view because we managed to save the children from the lunacy of the Satanic abuse craze AND we did not have to adopt them ourselves. Moreover, I came to despise the state and my role in child welfare tyranny. From then on, I have been anti-state (and loving it). I have been an advocate for children as a court appointed special advocate, a guardian ad litem, counsel to guardians ad litem, and as a divorce mediator and attorney with an eye toward advancing the interests of children, often against the state.

Child abuse occurs, but the agency I represented was the biggest abuser of them all. More children in my district were killed or injured in state custody and foster care than were killed or injured in families to whom they had been returned. The agency expanded the definition of abuse and neglect to fit its own needs for power and funding. I found that I was advocating the best interests of the agency rather than the best interests of the child and that these almost never coincided. I pray that Florida no longer sends children to the Satanic abuse gulag, but I would not be surprised to find that they still do do. I cannot think of anything more Satanic than that.