[lbo-talk] Feminism and the False Memory Syndrome

[Jesse Lemisch]

As I have explained, this is not McMartin pre-school, with children being
instructed in their memories by hideous shrinks -- really James, can't you
tell the difference? Why do you keep talking about manipulable little
children, when what we're dealing with is not manipulable little children?
This is a woman in her sixties. Try it yourself: try to recall an event 40
years ago, and watch the layers of the onion peel off. especially it you
tell the story to a third party. Anybody who does oral history knows this
phenomenon. There's nothing mysterious, paranoid, etc. Once again, I believe
I am hearing what are essentially what Christoper Hitchens called (iin
another context) "zoo noises," from people who haven't condescnded to read
the book. And why keep inventing the notion that my side of the argument
involves absolute certainty that every testimony along these lines is
totally 100% true. Nobody has been saying that, and doubtless some blacks on
their way to a lynching denied they had whistled at the white woman, etc. So
you are constructing a straw argument.

Again, apply the argument you are making to blacks under segregation, and
you will see how this position reduces to the worst kind of bigotry. I don't
know whether we are still hearing this knid of argument from MR: maybe
Yoshie has decided to cut loose from some of this extreme stuff?

It's awful, after the many positive ways in which feminism has made our
lives better, to see thriving bigotry of this sort.

Jesse Lemisch
----- Original Message -----
From: "James Heartfield" <Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk>
To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org>
Sent: Saturday, October 21, 2006 3:19 PM
Subject: [lbo-talk] Feminism and the False Memory Syndrome


> I hate to disagree quite so forcefully with Jesse, but I really think the
> arguments being put here are very weak indeed, and potentially very
> dangerous, too.
>
> Jesse says 'This stuff is nohthing more than a tarted up defense of
bigotry,
> very
> archaic', as if Yoshie or I were arguing from a perspective that is
ignorant
> of or precedes the impact of feminist critiques of the policing of sex
> crimes.
>
> But really it is Jesse who is behind the times. The impact of the child
sex
> abuse panics is now itself history; we have seen the terrible impact on
> people's lives that false accusations have had; and we are wiser about the
> errors that were committed in the name of 'listening to the victim'.
>
> In Nottingham, the Orkneys, the McMartin pre-school case, we have seen how
> over-zealous social workers and health workers deceived themselves that
they
> were hearing allegations of abuse, when plainly they were not. These were
> the subject of a recent BBC documentary, 'When Satan Came to Town', which
> features recordings of the interviewing techniques that were used to take
> children from their families for years, and put their parents in prison.
> Those children today are grown up, and express their hatred for the social
> services violently.
>
> Jesse says "This is all quite preposterous, and takes place in a social
> vacuum." Jesse wants to look at the constraints on victims testimony in
its
> social context, but is unwilling to see the panic over child abuse in its
> social context. Successive appeals and High Court judgements in recent
years
> have freed parents in the UK, like Trupti Patel and Sally Clark, who were
> unjustly imprisoned because courts were predisposed to believe that
parents
> were more likely to have injured their children than was in fact the case.
>
> Jesse thinks that testimony alone is sufficient to jail someone, anywhere
> other than Pakistan. But it is just absurd to think that no woman has ever
> given false testimony of rape. The protections afforded defendants, like
the
> presumption of innocence, are there because of the preponderance of power
> that the state holds. There is nothing radical of progressive about
> undermining the rights of defendants.
>
> Jesse continues:
>
> "speaking as historian I want to assure you that historians come to
> reasonable
> conclusions about causality etc. with less than perfect information. The
> standards being invoked here would eliminate historical judgement about
just
> about everthing."
>
> I am sorry, but this is not history, it is biography. Historical events
are
> by no means unambiguous, but normally leave rather more confirming
evidence
> than the testimony of one person. There is of course a species of
historical
> biography that dwells on rubbishing the personal lives of public figures,
> but no historian takes that kind of Kitty Kelley stuff too seriously.
>
> I'm off on holiday tomorrow, so I'll have to bow out of this argument. No
> doubt I have the wrong end of the stick, anyway and wiser minds than mine
> will prevail.
>
>
>
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