The Trauma Myth: The Truth about the Sexual Abuse of Children a flawed book

The Trauma Myth: The Truth about the Sexual Abuse of Children - and Its Aftermath reviewed by Philip M. Coons
excerpts:

"Clancy's polemic against the trauma theory of clinicians and researchers who seek to understand and treat sexual abuse victims as adults has produced a flawed book."

"Beginning in the mid-1990s, Susan Clancy, now a psychology associate at Harvard, interviewed over 200 adults about memory and childhood sexual abuse experiences. Two-thirds of her interviewees were women. She solicited her subjects through a newspaper ad in the Boston Globe and other Boston-area newspapers. Unfortunately she does not completely describe her methodology, and her sample appears to have been biased."

"Not a clinician herself, Clancy takes a narrow diagnostic view of trauma, the one found in the 2000 edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. According to the DSM, a diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder requires that an individual's response to a traumatic event involve "intense fear, helplessness, or horror." She seems to have missed the note explaining that in children discomfort "may be expressed by disorganized or agitated."

"Clancy and others have found that it is not uncommon for victims to forget the sexual abuse. Despite her findings, however, Clancy attacks the idea of what she calls repressed memory. She incorrectly observes that the more traumatic the sexual abuse events are, the less likely the victim will be to forget. This mistaken opinion has previously been refuted by Lenore Terr's elegant studies involving traumatized children. Jennifer Freyd, in her 1998 book, Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Child hood Abuse, takes a much wider view of the effects of trauma on children and cogently explains how sexual abuse leads to distrust, shame and guilt in children and adults. She also explains how and why children may forget their sexual abuse experiences and later recover their memories in adulthood behavior."

"Although Clancy includes excerpts from some of her interviews, her book contains no figures or tables tabulating her findings; nor does she present many of the results from the experimental clinical interviews and rating scales that she used. Thus far, Clancy's study on the effects of childhood sexual abuse has not appeared in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.Clancy argues that current prevention and treatment methods based on the trauma model do not work, but she appears to be mistaken. David Finkelhor's 2008 book Childhood Victimization: Violence, Crime, and Abuse in the Lives of Young People, which she lists in chapter notes, mentions that childhood sexual abuse has declined dramatically since the mid-1990s, and just recently a massive new federal study, the National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect, showed a 38 percent drop in the number of sexually abused children since 1993." http://www.christiancentury.org/article.lasso?id=8378