THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH IS TREATING A CRIME THAT IS MORE THAN A CENTURY OLD WITH KIDS GLOVES

THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH IS TREATING A CRIME THAT IS MORE THAN A CENTURY OLD WITH KIDS GLOVES  ..  CAN YOU IMAGINE THIS RECENT LAME PUBLICATION

2014 SEXUAL ABUSES IN ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH

Friday, January 16, 2014

 

Church wants to model 'best practice' on fighting abuse, Vatican says

 

John L. Allen Jr.  |  Jan. 16, 2014NCR Today

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Facing a virtually unprecedented examination of its record on child sexual abuse by a U.N. panel, a senior Vatican official today asserted that the Catholic church wants to be "an example of best practice" in the prevention of abuse.

Italian Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Vatican's representative to the United Nations in Geneva, spoke this morning to the Committee on the Convention of the Rights of the Child, a 1989 United Nations treaty which the Vatican ratified in 1990.

Although the U.N. panel has no power to compel the Vatican to do anything, its body of experts is expected to make recommendations after the day-long hearing. In effect, today marks the first time senior Vatican officials have appeared before an independent body to defend the church's handling of the abuse scandals that have erupted over the past decade.

The seriousness with which the Vatican is taking the process is reflected in the fact that it dispatched not only Tomasi but also Maltese Bishop Charles Scicluna, who served for ten years as the Vatican's top sex abuse prosecutor and is widely seen as a leading reformer.

Concern for potential fallout from the hearing was also reflected in the fact that the Vatican released a Q&A with Tomasi and a lengthy statement by Jesuit Fr. Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman.

Stay up to date with all things Pope Francis: Sign up for email alerts from our Francis Chronicles blog.

In his prepared remarks to the U.N. panel, Tomasi painted a picture of a church committed to change.

"The Holy See has delineated policies and procedures designed to help eliminate abuse and to collaborate with state authorities to fight against this crime," he said.

"The Holy See is also committed to listen carefully to victims of abuse and to address the impact such situations have on survivors of abuse and their families," Tomasi said.

Tomasi argued that the Vatican has adopted strong anti-abuse measures for personnel under its direct supervision, citing the fact that a former papal ambassador in the Dominican Republic accused of abuse, Polish Archbishop Jozef Wesolowski, is facing a criminal procedure before a Vatican tribunal.

Moreover, Tomasi said, the Vatican has also encouraged bishops and local churches around the world to adopt similar measures, pointing among other things to the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People of the American bishops.

Such measures, Tomasi claimed, "will help eliminate the occurrence of child sexual abuse by clergy and other church personnel."

Tomasi also said that Francis is committed to reform, pointing to the recent creation of a new papal commission to fight abuse.

In his statement, Lombardi insisted that Francis has a special love for children and that "the Holy See is a promoter … of an immense current throughout the world of love and service for the well-being of children."

Lombardi said the Vatican is committed to "full availability to collaborate" with the U.N. panel, but also said that some questions submitted in advance by the body "seem to assume that bishops or religious superiors act as representatives or delegates of the pope," an assumption that Lombardi said "lacks any foundation."

Since the beginning of the abuse crisis, critics and attorneys for victims have occasionally tried to trace responsibility to the Vatican, but officials have insisted that bishops and other leaders in the church are not "employees" of the pope and thus Rome is not responsible for how they handled abuse cases.

Judging by commentary ahead of today's session, that's an argument that won't play well with at least some victims.

"Many of us who were abused by an assistant pastor looked to the pastor to make things right, then the bishop, then the Vatican," said Barbara Blaine of the Survivors Network for Those Abused by Priests.

"No one fixed the problem. What authority in the world can hold the Vatican accountable?"

(Follow John Allen on Twitter: @JohnLAllenJr)

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Can memories of early childhood abuse be forgotten and then recovered later in life? Criminal accusations based on recovered memories pose complex questions for the legal system and stir heated debate among psychologists. In this essay written for Encarta Encyclopedia, psychologist Henry L. Roediger, III, of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, examines the evidence on both sides of the issue.

Recovered Memories and False Memories

By Henry L. Roediger, III

One of the most controversial issues to arise in psychology and in legal circles in the 1980s and 1990s concerned the recovery of memories of early childhood abuse. Consider the case of George Franklin. In 1990 he was tried in Redwood City, California, for the murder of an eight-year-old girl, Susan K. Nason. She had been murdered more than 20 years earlier on September 22, 1969. Authorities had suspected Franklin at the time of the murder, but they never had sufficient evidence to charge him with the crime, much less to convict him.

Twenty years later, however, Franklin’s daughter, Eileen, brought forth new evidence based on her recovered memory of the event, and this memory was used to prosecute George Franklin. Eileen reported that she had a dramatic flashback of an experience that had apparently been repressed (banished to an unconscious state) for the intervening years. She suddenly had remembered her father murdering her friend Susie Nason. Eileen said she had been a witness to the original crime. In an article on this case and others like it, American psychologist Elizabeth Loftus reported on how Eileen’s memory was revived: Eileen’s memory did not come back all at once. She claimed that her first flashback came one afternoon in January 1989, when she was playing with her two-year old son, Aaron, and her five-year-old daughter, Jessica. At one moment, Jessica looked up and asked her mother a question like “Isn’t that right, Mommy?” A memory of Susie Nason suddenly came back. Eileen recalled the look of betrayal in Susie’s eyes just before the murder. Later, more fragments would return, until Eileen had a rich and detailed memory of the scene. She remembered her father sexually assaulting Susie in the back of the van. She remembered that Susie was struggling as she said, “No, don’t,” and “Stop.” She remembered her father saying “Now Susie,” and she even mimicked his precise intonation. Next, her memory took the three of them outside the van, where she saw her father with his hands raised above his head with a rock in them. She remembered screaming. She remembered walking back to where Susie lay, covered with blood, the silver ring on her finger smashed.

Once Eileen came forward with this new evidence, George Franklin was charged with the murder. The case hinged critically on the believability and reliability of Eileen’s recovered memory. Witnesses for the prosecution and defense debated whether such a memory could be reliable. Although many details were included, most of these were available in news stories about the murder. Had Eileen remembered the events, or had she picked them up from old newspapers? In the end, the jury accepted the new evidence, deliberating less than one day before convicting George Franklin of murder in the first degree. He was imprisoned until 1995, when a higher court overturned his original conviction.

This case may sound unique, but hundreds more like it have been filed in the United States, Canada, Australia, England, and other countries. In the typical case, an adult woman, often one being treated by some form of psychotherapy, recovers a memory of being abused as a child. Usually the alleged perpetrator is a male adult who had been in some supervisory role (a father, an uncle, a teacher, or a camp counselor). The usual claim is that the abuse occurred in childhood, was repressed for many years, and then was recovered with vivid details in therapy.

These perplexing cases produce complex issues for both psychologists who study memory and for the legal system. Is it possible for a memory of a highly emotional event to become repressed for years and then recovered, intact, with no loss or alteration? Should people be tried and convicted on this kind of evidence? Most crimes, except for murder, are subject to statutes of limitations, laws that set a time limit on filing criminal charges. Traditionally, the time period within which charges may be filed begins from the time the crime was committed. However, many states and Canadian provinces have changed their statutes of limitations to allow victims to file charges within three years of the recovery of the memory of the event, rather than within three years of the event itself. As a result, in many cases involving recovered memories, the accusation occurs 20 to 30 years after the alleged commission of the crime.

Is it fair to charge the alleged perpetrator with a crime that is supposed to have happened so many years ago? How does one defend oneself against this kind of charge? How can one prove that nothing happened? Juries have convicted people based almost entirely on the evidence of recovered memory. Their assumption seems to be: If the event did not really happen, how could it be retrieved?

The questions raised by repressed, recovered, or false memories provoke passionate debate among psychologists. Some psychologists believe that cases of repressed and recovered memories do occur, no matter how remarkable they may seem. There are a few cases on record in which there is good documentation of a crime having been committed, the victim forgetting the crime, and then the memory of the crime being recovered at a later point. In these cases, the crime can be verified. Of course, if the victim was a small child when the crime was committed, this outcome may not be too surprising. One standard finding of developmental psychology is that children’s memories improve on most types of tests as they become older. So the fact that children may forget events, even dramatic ones, may not be too remarkable. Furthermore, some case studies do lead to the conclusion that the forgetting and recovery of traumatic events is possible.

On the other side, many psychologists believe that many, perhaps even most, cases of alleged recovered memories are actually cases of false memories, which are caused by a variety of processes known to cause memory distortion. Remembering is a constructive process and open to many influences that can create illusions of remembering. Strong suggestions—from a therapist, from self-help books, or from reading about similar cases—can help implant false memories in an individual. In addition, suggestive questioning techniques can strongly influence how events are remembered. Many laboratory experiments have suggested that, in principle, these techniques can cause a person to recall events inaccurately and even to “remember” an event that never happened. In general, the longer the interval between the event and the effort to recall it, the more suggestible is memory. Therefore, attempts to recollect events that happened in the distant past may be especially prone to fabrication. The Encarta Encyclopedia article on Memory describes research on how people can retrieve false memories.

In some forms of psychotherapy, hypnotic suggestion is used as an aid to memory retrieval. The idea is that if people are hypnotized and the suggestion is made to go back and “relive” a past event, people will be able to remember the event very well. However, much research on hypnosis and memory has generally discredited this idea. People who can be hypnotized are, by definition, highly suggestible, and many studies have shown that false memories can be implanted during hypnosis.

Some researchers believe that changes in the legal system might actually have led to an increase in reports of recovered memories. Why? Suppose a person was sexually abused as a child, and the person has remembered this event clearly throughout his or her entire life. As an adult, the person can no longer pursue the perpetrator by legal means because the statute of limitations has expired. However, if the same person claims to have recovered the memory recently, then the alleged perpetrator can still be charged. Therefore, the victim may elect to “recover” a memory of abuse even though the memory was never really forgotten or repressed. Of course, it is impossible to say how frequently this kind of case emerges in the court system.

During the 1980s and early 1990s, many people like George Franklin were convicted of crimes based only (or primarily) on recovered memories. However, some of these convictions were overturned later by higher courts, as more psychological research brought to light the fragility and suggestibility of memory. In more recent years, some of the alleged perpetrators have turned the tables and sued therapists for implanting false memories of abuse in their loved ones. In fact, several therapists have been convicted in either civil or criminal cases for using therapeutic techniques that seem to do more harm than good and for turning one family member against another.

False memories do occur, but can false memories be implanted for an event as traumatic as sexual abuse? Some researchers have shown that it is possible to implant at least mildly traumatic memories in young adults—memories of events that were supposed to have happened in childhood. In a 1995 experiment, University of Washington researchers Elizabeth Loftus and Jacqueline Pickrell asked adult subjects to recall details of childhood events that had been recounted to the researchers by the subjects’ parents or older relatives. But the researchers also reminded the subjects about an event that never happened (to the relatives’ knowledge), such as getting lost in a shopping mall as a child. Remarkably, 25 percent of subjects claimed to remember something about the fictitious event. Some continued to remember additional details of the false event with each retelling. For example, one subject remembered being frightened and crying and described the appearance of the man who rescued him.

In a similar experiment conducted in 1995, Ira Hyman and his colleagues at Western Washington University found that adults could be induced to falsely remember knocking over a punch bowl at a wedding they attended as a child, ruining the clothes of the parents of the bride. When first told of the false incident, all subjects denied its occurrence. However, after subsequent interviews with the researchers and repeated attempts to remember the event, 25 percent of subjects came to believe that it really did happen. Thus, repeatedly imagining events can lead one to believe that the events actually occurred, an outcome dubbed imagination inflation. The story of Jean Piaget’s kidnapping, described in the accompanying Encarta article on Memory, is an example of a memory from a traumatic childhood event that never happened.

The issues surrounding repressed, recovered, and false memories are thorny and controversial ones. Most research psychologists worry that recovered memories may involve more fiction than fact. However, it is usually impossible to know the veracity of the memory for any particular case. The recovered memory may be true, or it may be false. Without additional evidence, it is difficult to argue convincingly in either direction. Over the years courts have become more stringent about the evidence required to convict someone based on recovered memories. Because such memories can be fraught with error, a conviction based on recovered memories usually requires corroborating evidence of some sort. Psychologists, lawyers, therapists, and others continue to debate the accuracy and use of recovered memories.

About the author: 

Henry L. Roediger, III, is James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychology at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. His research focuses on human memory, especially retrieval processes and false memories.

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