CALIFORNIA
Voice from the Desert
Joey Piscitelli
I am going to be speaking on a public panel on behalf of childhood victims of sexual abuse at the San Francisco Justice Summit on April 23, 1014. The panel is debating the fairness of convicting an accused perpetrator based on the mere recollection of the incident by an alleged victim. The panel will be discussing the issue of the reliability of “memories of childhood sexual abuse”. I am opposing the memory experts and defense attorneys who claim that memories of being raped, or sexually abused as a child are not credible. Many of the defense attorneys, memory experts, and support groups for accused sex offenders are stating that alleged victims of rape and sex abuse, especially children, are not able to accurately recall their past – especially a supposed traumatic incident.
Some neurological scientists who study brain activity and memory, claim that the recollection of a repressed memory is totally undependable. They further state that even normal recalled memories of childhood sex abuse, which were not blocked out and repressed, aren’t valid memories either. These experts who defend accused perpetrators state that any memories of childhood experiences are tainted, exaggerated, embellished and imagined, and cannot be relied upon at all to convict an accused offender. They go on to explain that in a case where there is a claim for PTSD, the condition itself will render the memory invalid, because the victim has a damaged brain by virtue of having a traumatic disorder.The memory experts for the defense also state that many alleged victims actually believe their tainted memories, and theses memories are called “false memories”.
I was asked to speak at the conference because I had previously sued the Roman Catholic Church and a priest for child sex abuse in a jury trial in the S. F. Bay Area. The defense for the cleric in that case claimed that my memory was a “false memory”. They stated that my memory was fabricated, and I may have actually believed that my false memories of the sex abuse were real – or I was lying. In the past several years, many highly publicized cases of childhood sex abuse have been brought to the forefront in the media. This has sparked a lot of public debate over the validity of childhood memories, no matter if the memories were constant, recalled, or repressed.
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