Psychotherapeutic Involvement In Child Protection Investigation

Thanks to the organisation JUSTICE from PSYCHOTHERAPY for this Briefing, which they used in their lobbying action

Psychotherapeutic Involvement in the Investigation, Disclosure and Prosecution of Childhood Abuse What is wrong with psychotherapeutic investigation of childhood abuse? Contentious, unproven and seriously flawed theories regarding repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse are practised in certain types of psychotherapy. Yet, astonishingly, there are no credible codes of practice or ethical guidance documents that prescribe the way in which psychotherapeutic investigations, underpinned by these theories of child abuse, are carried out in practice. Therefore, people who have child abuse allegations made against them have little chance of challenging the theories, practices and methods, as there is no effective legal framework for complaints, or recourse to ombudsman redress. Organisations representing psychotherapists may have rules and regulations but they do not deal properly with complaints of misdiagnoses of childhood abuse, in fact they tend to deny that wrongful diagnoses occur. It is to be hoped that recent proposals for a code of conduct and register of therapists will address the particular problems caused by ‘recovered memory’ practitioners. Between the late 1980s and the present day, a considerable number of parents have been falsely accused of sexual abuse by their adult children who believed they had ‘recovered’ memories of serious childhood abuse previously unknown to them or anyone else. (Many care home workers suffered similar accusations from adults, also claiming to have ‘recovered’ memories of being abused when they were children in care homes.) The theories concerning ‘memory repression’, and the practices precipitating this dangerous outcome, were widely used in NHS child and adolescent and adult mental health services and social services departments. Little action, if any, was taken to review training and practice or question the outcomes and results. Besides the official agencies, these practices were used in private consultations by trained and untrained therapists as well as in the less formal setting of group-therapy sessions conducted by self-help organisations. These flawed methods have little scientific foundation beyond the beliefs of their practitioners, who are free of proper public and political scrutiny and provide no meaningful evidence of an operational approach or the consequences of their mistakes and erroneous perceptions. The flaws include: o A presumption of abuse histories in disturbed adults and children. o A presumption of guilt in the accused. o Suggestive counselling techniques. o A failure of investigative objectivity. o Reliance on questionable indicators of abuse. Therapy with adults or children, who are thought to have suffered child abuse, is problematic because many therapists will automatically assume the child or adult has been abused. Therefore, one of the main dangers evidentially is that an untrue story will become rehearsed

and resilient through not being subjected to thorough questioning and the child or adult will be encouraged to confabulate in the belief that further hidden experiences will be revealed. The psychotherapy community has failed to develop adequate procedures to sift true from false allegations of abuse. Past experience has demonstrated that unless the totality of the historical development of sexual abuse investigation using certain psychotherapeutic theories and practices is examined, errors will be regarded as isolated and atypical. In parallel with the erroneous diagnoses of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy and ‘cot death murder’ in suspected cases of physical abuse of children, psychotherapists misdiagnose childhood sexual abuse regularly. Truths that have not been incorporated into psychotherapeutic investigative systems include these. o People do lie about child sexual abuse for all sorts of reasons and therefore to ‘always believe the accuser’ is dangerous. o Children and adults may come to state and believe false sexual abuse histories through explicit or implicit suggestion and incentives. o Genuine sexual abuse is reported in entirety and not through gradual or progressive disclosure. o The history of the source of an allegation and the influences on it and an inquiry into alternative explanations are necessary to weigh up its prima facie reliability. The injustices caused by ‘recovered memory’ therapy – ‘convictions’ and ‘sentences’ When counsellors solicit atrocity stories, they undermine their vulnerable clients’ mental reserves and by encouraging them to delve deeper and deeper to ‘recover memories’ of even more hideous and bizarre abuse the results can be shattering. Suicide attempts, some successful, occur. In the areas of counselling involving ‘recovered memory’ therapy, people are often diagnosed as having suffered childhood abuse as a result of a therapist’s assumptions, when they are really suffering from psychological or physical illness. Here, there are many counsellors who work to induce imagined fears and anxieties in their client’s past. This makes their patients doubt, then reject, their trusted memories. Such manufactured social and personal amnesia is the oxygen of ‘recovered memory’ therapy, where people can escape into the madness of mistaken memories and false beliefs. This assault on memory is conducted by counsellors who have their charges take on an abused victim past that is palpably untrue and a history at odds with what they have previously accepted and knew to be true. 2

The psychotherapist plays on childhood uncertainties in the cloudier areas of the psyche, mingling these with present day worries, to promote the idea of a deeply buried traumatised past. These can be mined from the abundant seam of people who on having a hurt acknowledged, and although it is unconnected with childhood abuse, use it to make false accusations of child abuse to settle a score. There are also large numbers of people disposed to believing falsehoods suggested by counsellors from self-help groups, or believing their own concocted false allegations. A person’s displaced anger or self-deception, often brought on by psychological worries, is fertile soil for false allegations of child abuse. Anxious clients are told by some therapists, that if they think they were abused, then they were. This is an invitation to falsify events within a reinvented past. Here dreams and flashbacks are accepted as evidentially safe with insufficient, considered judgement applied to them. Yet, ‘recovered memory’ therapy has been commended at conferences aimed at educating child sexual abuse investigators from the police, social services and health professions. Some counsellors may urge their client’s siblings to believe abuse happened to them as well and that they also have a hidden past that they have repressed. Consequently, a father can find two or more daughters accusing him and reviling him in a way that contradicts all his past relations with them. In some cases the patient, during her mental turmoil and under relentless pressure and perhaps through hypnosis, will ‘remember’ that members of the extended family, or neighbours, or babysitters and childminders, or even strangers, abused her. At this point some therapists may at last conclude that their ‘client’ is exhibiting signs of profound delusion but others will take it as a clue that she has been the victim of organised ritual abuse, perhaps even ‘satanic’. It is not just families that have lost young children, wrongly removed by the family courts as a result of incorrect medical diagnosis of child physical abuse, or families suffering from a member’s wrongful criminal conviction for child sexual abuse, that are being destroyed. Families and relationships are also wrecked through the loss of adult children who denounce their parents as child sexual abusers and sever contact with them following an incorrect ‘recovered memory’ diagnosis of child abuse. These parents, although not subject to criminal charges, are nevertheless ‘convicted’ and then ‘sentenced’ and ‘punished’, including defamation, by their adult children accusers, often with the approval and complicity of their accuser’s psychotherapist. Loss of contact, often with grandchildren as well, is their ‘sentence-punishment’. Questioning their accuser and the therapist about the allegations against them is made virtually impossible. This is another part of the ‘sentence-punishment’. Since their ‘conviction’, ’sentence’ and ‘punishment’ have occurred outside the legal system, this leaves them with little or no recourse to justice from that source. The plight of these older parents is perplexing, with mental, physical and marital breakdown not uncommon. It can be compared in part to the even worse situation of parents of young children who have no means of appeal to the family courts against wrongful family court

judgements removing their children. The secrecy, surrounding these judgements, compares with the clienttherapist confidentiality, used as a shield to prevent any enquiries into the psychotherapeutic consultations that led to the false allegations against the older parents. For fear of making a tragic situation worse, few would seek redress for defamation in the civil courts. So, waiting for a possible (but unlikely) retraction is the defamed person’s only slender hope. Psychotherapists involved in ‘recovered memory’ therapy are unlikely to be investigated or censured for any serious misdiagnoses they make in this area of mental health. This contrasts with investigations of misdiagnoses in the field of physical health, where procedures, checks and balances can be more likely to bring the clinician to account. Recently the public have become aware of growing disquiet over certain cases where false allegations of child abuse, both sexual and physical, have lead to injustices resulting in wrongful imprisonments. The jailing and trials of innocent mothers accused of cot-death murder, and the removal of children by the family courts from parents wrongly diagnosed as suffering from Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy or other illnesses, have shocked much of the country. However, those caught up in ‘recovered memory’ cases are not receiving similar high profile attention and concern. Psychotherapy in the criminal justice system When criminal or family court investigations occur as a result of allegations of child abuse arising in a psychotherapeutic setting, it is difficult for the accused person’s legal team to challenge the reliability of the allegations. They can point to the questionable quality and content of the training and knowledge base of the psychotherapists. However, the courts and authorities fail to show serious concern over the personal agendas and belief systems of these psychotherapists and their influence on some police and social services investigations. There are few ways of properly examining psychotherapists’ pre-trial therapy sessions with the accuser, or their motives as ‘expert witnesses’ in the criminal and family courts. The therapeutic use of techniques of memory creation and inflation of false beliefs is evident in many trials. In the absence of forensic evidence, police and social workers condone situations where therapists act as investigators and encourage clients to create ‘therapeutic narratives’ as evidence of child abuse. Child play therapy methods, including ‘anatomically-correct’ dolls, are used to elicit ‘disclosures’ of abuse from very young children. ‘Expert’ testimony is given to juries lacking the professional knowledge to question it. A psychotherapeutic milieu affects the conduct of most child abuse trials. It is now almost standard fare in the courts for evidence of abuse to be proffered implicitly through claims about effects, such as lack of self-esteem, drug and alcohol excesses, or an eating disorder. Rarely is there any questioning of likely causation. It is taken as read that sexual abuse does cause a myriad of delayed psychological problems. Yet there is no reliable evidence to support this, only clinical speculation and unthinking belief. 3

For those who really have been abused, giving testimony in court is a harrowing experience. However, pretend ‘victims’ tell lies under oath at trials. The prosecution teams are often helped by ‘victim support’ activists and sometimes by ‘child abuse’ lawyers. They coach the complainants in exhibiting low self-esteem and on how to use emotional resources to advantage, in order to be as convincing ‘victims’ as possible. The complainants can be guaranteed to show upset, programmed to disgust, hoodwink and soften up the jury, as they ‘relive their childhood trauma’. The judges and counsels have to empathise with this, for fear of being seen to be insensitive. While giving testimony at trials, police officers sometimes speak of ‘their client’ instead of the complainant, and praise the psychotherapeutic ‘help’ the complainant ‘required’. In the absence of any external proof to corroborate the charges, the jury has to rely heavily on the authenticity of the witness’s emotional demeanour as ‘evidence’. The following is a quote by non-practising barrister, Lee Moore, of the Association of Child Abuse Lawyers, criticising cross-examination, “The goal is to control and entrap the witness, which mirrors the grooming process paedophiles use to ensnare their victims”. Likening defence counsels to paedophiles is an attempt to undermine the cross-examination of complainants’ testimony, and the need for proven evidence, and thus achieve convictions that are not be hampered by accepted safeguards to justice. Many legal reforms, introduced under the aegis of ‘empathy with the victim’, involve sweeping attacks on traditional legal rights and protections, such as the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty, the right to have evidence corroborated, the right to confront one’s accusers, and the right to ‘equality of arms’, that is, not to be tried under significantly less advantageous conditions than those enjoyed by one’s accuser (for example naming the defendant while giving anonymity to the complainant). Other protections have gone, such as restrictions on the use of hearsay evidence and (sometimes) the right to consult the expert of one’s choice. Other concerns are, calling the accused the perpetrator instead of the defendant and calling the accuser the victim rather than the complainant, while there is bias in favour of prosecution witnesses in vulnerable witness protection.

psychotherapy used in child abuse investigation have resulted in the most terrible injustices. A Royal Commission is therefore recommended to examine the following serious concerns. 1.

Psychotherapists’ ability to distinguish genuine cases of abuse from false ones, to provide objective investigation and to weigh the evidential reliability of a client’s or patient’s allegations.

2.

Psychotherapists, practising ‘recovered memory’ therapy, using client-therapist or patient-therapist confidentiality to prevent scrutiny of their practices and methods.

3. The lack of any legal requirement for psychotherapists to provide third parties (usually parents), who have been affected by allegations made by a client or patient (usually a daughter), with a detailed record of the consultations. (This is particularly important in identifying whether ‘leading questions’ have been asked and would bring psychotherapists into line with the GMC’s requirements on note taking for psychiatrists and psychologists.) 4.

The absence of public and political accountability and a proper legal framework to regulate the practices of counsellors and therapists. (There is no one properly constituted controlling body. Instead there are various representative bodies, reflecting the differences between competing beliefs, theories and practices, unable to achieve an agreed code of ethics and identifiable standards of training, supervision, assessment and examination.)

5.

The role of psychotherapists as ‘expert witnesses’ in the criminal and family courts and the part played by psychotherapists in criminal investigations of child abuse in the disclosure of abuse.

6.

There is no duty of care to a third party in ‘recovered memory’ cases. Hence, falsely accused people are unable to obtain legal redress from their accuser’s psychotherapist or health authority, such as the situation that prevented former Scottish National Party deputy leader, Jim Fairlie, from suing the healthcare trust that employed his daughter’s consultant psychiatrist.

What needs to be done?

Conclusions: A Royal Commission should consider these recommendations.

In the words of Earl Howe, Shadow Spokesman on Health in the House of Lords and Deputy Chairman of the All Party Group for Abuse Investigations, addressing the 2004 AGM of the British False Memory Society; “The unwanted consequences of making a complaint in psychotherapy have never, I think, been properly addressed; and I believe this needs to be done now, by an independent body.”

1.

Therapists, health professionals and, when involved, social services and police, should have a ‘duty of care’ to a third party who is accused in a case involving therapeutic disclosure of child sexual abuse.

2.

As there is extensive disagreement among psychotherapists over the validity of ‘recovered memory’, no case should be brought to court where the evidence of child abuse is based solely on allegations disclosed thought therapeutic treatment. Alternative, compelling evidence should be required.

3.

Regulation of psychotherapists and counsellors similar to that applied to the medical profession.

Clearly, there is a need for the entire psychotherapeutic process to be reviewed as to its efficacy and safety as a childhood abuse disclosure method. The All Party Group for Abuse Investigations under its Chair, Claire CurtisThomas MP, is aware that the errors and failings of

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