Victims of Memory: Incest Accusations and Shattered Lives

‘I doubt whether any book of greater importance will be published in 1997.’ Anthony Storr, The Times.

In March, 1995, a Winchester father is imprisoned for eight years on the uncorroborated oral evidence of his daughter, who had recovered memories of sexual abuse while in psychiatric care; a Yorkshire father is freed, seventeen months after his arrest, when the Prosecution finally admit that his 22-year-old’s allegations against him were entirely false.

Victims of Memory examines the whole terrifying phenomenon of repressed memories: the sudden invention/recollection in adulthood of appalling sexual abuse committed by parents and relatives long, long, before, memories that have lain unnoticed at the back of the victim’s mind for decades, only to be ‘recovered’ by an enterprising analyst. The book uses real cases and real lives, here, in America and in Australia, to present all sides of the story: accusers, the accused, the retractors and the analysts in their own words.