Court Battle Over Repressed Memories of Child Sexual Abuse

By Patrick Noaker

http://www.indystar.com/article/20090821/NEWS02/908210340/Priest+abuse+hearing+hinges+on+decades-old+memory

We are off to Indianapolis, Indiana to argue the case for the right of those survivors who have, out of self preservation, repressed the horrors of their abuse and later recovered those memories. At times, when an event is too painful to bear, a person’s mind will play a trick and remove any memory of the event from the person’s mind. This leaves gaps in the person’s memory that are difficult to explain. This condition is commonly called a repressed memory. Sometimes these memories return later in life when something queues the memory, other times the memory never returns. When a memory returns, that is called a recovered memory. For more information see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repressed_memory or http://www.jimhopper.com/memory/.

This issue is definitely one of the top issues that defendants are focusing on while defending sexual abuse lawsuits. Despite decades of scientific research and almost a thousand scientific studies supporting repressed memories in diverse trauma victims such as combat vets, holocaust survivors, car accident victims, Cambodian refugees, and victims of childhood abuses , there are still those who refuse to accept repressed memory. For the most part, most of the controversy about repressed memory is not about whether it happens, most of the controversy is about what causes it. This is true of most medical and psychiatric conditions. We don’t know what causes most illnesses.

Generally, people who are not exposed to trauma victims are unaware how painful the recovery of memories of childhood sexual abuse are. At times, those unfamiliar with trauma symptoms write off the loss and recovery of traumatic memories as an attempt by the trauma victim to “pull one over” so to speak. Nothing could be further from the truth. In most cases, the recovery of memories of childhood sexual abuse causes incredible pain. Are these memories real? How could this have happened? If these memories are real, what else am I not remembering about my childhood? How do I tell my parents that their pastor was a child molester?

Often the recovered memories carry with them an incredible wave of emotions of fear, anger, and anxiety. It is not uncommon for a person who recently recovered memories of sexual abuse to completely fall apart and even require inpatient hospitalization. Even after stabilizing, if the survivor pursues legal action, he or she is torn to shreds and made to feel that he or she are somehow defective and crazy.

Fortunately, there are some incredibly courageous survivors who have bravely pursued legal action against his or her perpetrator and those who protected him. One of those survivors has made it possible for us to fight for the right for access to the courts. He will be right there with me in court and I couldn’t be more proud to stand side-by-side with him in this battle.