Abuse victims dismiss 'false memory' theory - Gardaí ‘must probe all abuse claims’

[karen]

> Abuse victims dismiss 'false memory' theory
> CHILD abuse victim groups have angrily rejected a claim that many former
> residents of Church-run institutions have conjured up false or exaggerated
> memories of their time in industrial schools and orphanages.
>
> The legal adviser to the British False Memory Society, Margaret Jervis,
said
> in Dublin yesterday that the therapy business was "a machine for
> manufacturing false memories" which could lead to taxpayers being ripped
off
> through the Residential Institutions Redress Board.
>
> Ms Jervis said she accepted that abuse did take place in residential
> institutions. "But there has been a trend for people with problems in
their
> adult lives to be made to think they had problems as a child, whether they
> could remember them or not."
>
> However, Ms Jervis's claim has been strongly rejected by John Kelly of
Irish
> SOCA (Survivors of Child Abuse).
>
> He said that victims began to tell their stories of abuse in the 1990s
"not
> because they had suddenly recovered long-suppressed or forgotten memories,
> but because the stigma of being abused had faded, which made it easier for
> them to come forward".
>
> Mr Kelly acknowledged that "the potential for false claims exists anywhere
> compensation is being offered," but denied he knew of any such cases.
>
> Another victim support group, One in Four, also attacked Ms Jervis. In a
> statement the group's clinical director, Thérèse Gaynor, said: "These
> ill-informed statements [by Ms Jervis] are deeply offensive to women and
men
> who have experienced sexual abuse and/or sexual violence and those
> professionals working to support them."
>
> Irish SOCA staged a protest outside the Royal Marine Hotel in Dun
Laoghaire
> yesterday where Ms Jervis addressed a press conference organised by Let
Our
> Voices Emerge (LOVE).
>
> LOVE was founded last year to represent the views of those who had
positive
> experiences in residential institutions, and to defend those falsely
accused
> of child abuse.
>
>
>
>
> Gardaí ‘must probe all abuse claims’
>
>
> GROUPS representing people falsely accused of child abuse have called for
> all allegations made to the Child Abuse Commission and the Residential
> Institutions Redress Board to be subject to garda investigation.
>
> Let Our Voices Emerge (LOVE) and the British False Memory Society (BFMS)
> argue the claims of victims are not adequately tested by the commission or
> the board and that innocent people are being wrongly accused. The groups’
> joint meeting for falsely accused people in the Royal Marine Hotel in Dun
> Laoghaire yesterday was picketed by victims who accused the organisers of
> bringing comfort to paedophiles.
>
> The venue for the closed meeting was changed from a Dublin city centre
> location at short notice after LOVE founder Florence Horsman Hogan said
she
> had received threatening phone calls.
>
> At a press conference before the meeting, BFMS legal affairs adviser
> Margaret Jervis likened unchallenged belief in widespread abuse to
> assumptions about weapons of mass destruction and hysteria over alien
> abduction.
>
> She said that the redress board’s compensation scheme was “an incentive to
> manufacture allegations” and that the “therapy system is a machine for
> manufacturing false allegations”.
>
> Ms Jervis, who said the BFMS had 40-50 members in Ireland, said only
trained
> police investigators, and not judges, lawyers or counsellors, had adequate
> expertise to assess the truth of allegations.
>
> She quoted a 1999 police inquiry into abuse claims involving residential
> youth facilities in Nova Scotia, Canada, which found that many of the
> allegations were unfounded.
>
> “All sorts of people who have got major problems in their lives, such as
> criminals, drug addicts etc, tend to gravitate towards the abuse excuse,”
> she said.
>
> “People have thought that if they have got problems in adult life, it’s
> because they had some sort of trauma in their childhood and by remembering
> this somehow they will get better,” she said.
>
> Representatives of victims’ group Alliance Victim Support also attended
the
> meeting by agreement.
>
> “If we don’t listen, we will not learn anything. Everybody is entitled to
> their opinion,” said spokesman Tom Hayes.
>
> But the hotel was picketed by about a dozen protesters from Irish
Survivors
> of Child Abuse (SOCA), which accused LOVE and the BFMS of a “false denial
> conspiracy”.
>
> Ms Horsman Hogan rejected the criticism. “It is just as wrong now for
victim
> support groups or Irish society to deny there are false allegations out
> there as it was when the childcare authorities denied it 30 years ago,”
she
> said.
>
> One in Four founder Colm O’Gorman said he did not deny there may be people
> who would attempt to exploit the compensation scheme but he said he
believed
> the redress board’s systems were robust enough to filter out false claims.
>
> http://oneinfour.org/news/news2004/victimsdismiss/
>
>