ACLU - Child Victims Act, Recovered Memory, DID/Abuse, ritual abuse

from http://ritualabuse.us

"The NYCLU, like the ACLU, is an institution that makes the world a worse place for children."

"It is concluded that the weight of the evidence should allow the recovered memory victim to come before the court."

"This study establishes, once and for all, the linkage between early severe abuse and dissociative identity disorder."

"Civil Liberties" and Uncivil Lies: What the New York Civil Liberties Union and the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights Have in Common - An Agenda to Keep Child Predator Identities Secret By Marci A. Hamilton 3/19/2009 Yesterday, March 18, the New York Assembly Rules Committee passed the Child Victims Act (Assembly Bill A02596/Senate Bill S02568), which will extend the criminal and civil statute of limitations for child sex abuse by five years. It will also open a one-year window of opportunity for child sex abuse victims to go to court even if their statute of limitations already had expired. The next stop is the full Assembly and then on to the Senate....

If this bill is passed, as it looks like it will be, the result will be that parents in New York will know many more names of perpetrators at the end of next year than they do today. When California enacted such a window in 2003, by comparison, 300 new perpetrators were publicly named....The New York Civil Liberties Union's Disappointing Anti-Child Victim Position - and Why It Is So Unpersuasive - Meanwhile, the New York Civil Liberties Union apparently does not want New York citizens to learn the identities of perpetrators, because they are the defendants the NYCLU would represent. They are taking the side of the perpetrators, making the patently ridiculous argument that it is not "fair" for those who preyed on children to be named decades after their abuse occurred, because memories are faulty. Once again, the truth has taken a hit from a group intent on misinforming the public for its own ends. The NYCLU appears to be ignorant of the vast literature on child sex abuse over the last couple of decades, and has not accurately informed legislators or anyone else about how the burdens of proof are apportioned in such cases. In fact, when the statute of limitations window is opened, and the statute's term is extended, the plaintiff still bears the initial burden of proof and if the plaintiff has no corroborating evidence, then the case is over. It is rare that a defendant has to defend himself or herself against claims that are solely the result of the victim's story, or the result of "faulty memories." In the overwhelming majority of cases, instead, there are markers of abuse that can corroborate a victim's story. While the crime itself occurs usually with no one else there, child sex abuse victims display common characteristics that can be traced to the abuse, such as falling grades, depression, sexual confusion, and substance abuse. There is also evidence to be adduced about the availability of the victim to the perpetrator. For example, did the perpetrator call the child out of class on a regular basis for private "counseling" sessions? With respect to organizations, there are also employee files that often prove that the organization knew about the perpetrator's dangerous predisposition toward children, but did nothing. That is true of the Catholic Church, with its "secret archives," which so often provide all the information anyone would need to know the hierarchy's role in crafting the unsafe conditions that led to the abuse. Some of the most important corroborating evidence, though, comes from the fact that most abusers have multiple -- and even, in some cases, hundreds -- of victims....

The NYCLU, like the ACLU, is an institution that makes the world a worse place for children. The NYCLU and ACLU rarely, if ever, take the position of the child, unless the issue is free speech in public schools. Whether the issue is the medical neglect of children in faith-healing homes, or the abuse of children in polygamous families, or the failure to educate children in Amish or Mennonite communities, they choose the religious parents to the detriment of the helpless children. It is a record that all those in the emerging civil rights movement for children have come to know well, and to be deeply disappointed by. The truth is that the NYCLU and ACLU seem incapable of factoring the rights of children into the mix. The ACLU might as well be called the Adult Civil Liberties Union. These organizations' knee-jerk reaction to the Child Victims Act is not only dangerous to children and families, but also based on outdated, inaccurate information about the reality of childhood sexual abuse.
http://writ.news.findlaw.com/hamilton/20090319.html



Recovered Memory and the Daubert Criteria : Recovered Memory as Professionally Tested, Peer Reviewed, and Accepted in the Relevant Scientific Community - Constance Dalenberg - Alliant International University California School of Professional Psychology - Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, Vol. 7, No. 4, 274-310 (2006) DOI: 10.1177/1524838006294572 Research during the past two decades has firmly established the reliability of the phenomenon of recovered memory. This review first highlights the strongest evidence for the phenomenon itself and discusses the survey, experimental, and biological evidence for the varying mechanisms that may underlie the phenomenon. Routes to traumatic amnesia from dissociative detachment (loss of emotional content leading to loss of factual content) and from dissociative compartmentalization (failure in integration) are discussed. Next, an argument is made that false memory is a largely orthogonal concept to recovered memory; the possibility of one phenomena is largely irrelevant to the potential for the other. Furthermore, some aspects of the false memory research offer supportive data for the recovered memory researcher. Finally, the issue of error rates in making the Daubert case is explored. It is concluded that the weight of the evidence should allow the recovered memory victim to come before the court. http://tva.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/7/4/274


Objective documentation of child abuse and dissociation in 12 murderers with Dissociative Identity Disorder. Lewis, D.O., Yeager, C.A., Swica, Y., Pincus, J.H., & Lewis, M. (1997). American Journal of Psychiatry, 154, 1703-1710. RESULTS: Signs and symptoms of dissociative identity disorder in childhood and adulthood were corroborated independently and from several sources in all 12 cases; objective evidence of severe abuse was obtained in 11 cases. The subjects had amnesia for most of the abuse and underreported it. Marked changes in writing style and/or signatures were documented in 10 cases. CONCLUSIONS: This study establishes, once and for all, the linkage between early severe abuse and dissociative identity disorder. Further, the data demonstrate that the disorder can be distinguished from malingering and from other disorders. The study shows that it is possible, with great effort, to obtain objective evidence of both the symptoms of dissociative identity disorder and the abuse that engenders it. http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/154/12/1703


Cult and Ritual Abuse - James Randall Noblitt - Chapter 6 - Empirical Evidence of Ritual Abuse http://books.google.com/books?id=zJkTTpfyJ-8C&printsec=frontcover#PPA55,M1


Psychometric measures of trauma among psychiatric patients reporting ritual abuse - Noblitt- Psychol Rep. 1995 Dec;77(3 Pt 1):743-7. The present investigation compared psychometric measures of trauma, the MMPI-2 PK and PS scales, in a group of patients reporting ritual abuse and another group with no such accounts of ritual abuse. Comparisons were statistically significant with mean PK and PS scores of 86.3 and 85.8, respectively, for the 34 reporting ritual abuse and 58.3 and 58.7 for the 31 not reporting ritual abuse. Further, 91% of the patients alleging ritual abuse had scores on at least one of the two scales within the clinical range, i.e., T score > or = 65. It was concluded that patients reporting histories of ritual abuse also showed significantly elevated scores on these scales and their scores were higher than those obtained for a sample of patients not reporting ritual abuse. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8559911



The Body Keeps The Score: Memory & the Evolving Psychobiology of Post Traumatic Stress
by Bessel van der Kolk first published in the Harvard Review of Psychiatry, 1994, 1(5), 253-265.
http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/Homepage/Class/Psy394U/Bower/03%20Emot,%20Trauma,Mem/Body%20keeps%20the%20score.%20Kolk%20.pdf


Dissociation & the Fragmentary Nature of Traumatic Memories: Overview & Exploratory Study
Bessel A. van der Kolk & Rita Fisler - Journal of Traumatic Stress, 1995, 8(4), 505-525. http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/users/peterson/psy430s2001/Van%20der%20Kolk%20Fragmentary%20Nature%20of%20Traumatic%20Memory%20J%20Traumatic%20Stress%201995.pdf