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Affidavit of Daniel Brown, Ph.D. Re: Testimony to
the Judiciary Committee
1. I am a licensed psychologist in the Commonwealth
of Massachusetts. I have a private practice in
psychology and am on the faculty of Harvard Medical
School and Simmons School of Social Work. I have
been qualified as an expert witness in numerous
courts in various states and internationally, and
have never been disqualified as an expert witness.
My areas of expertise include psychological
assessment and psycho-pathology, the assessment and
treatment of psychological trauma and memory for
trauma. I am the senior author of Memory, Trauma
Treatment, and the Law (Norton, 1999), which was
the recipient of the 1999 Manfred Guttmacher Award
for the “outstanding contribution to forensic
psychiatry” given jointly by the American
Psychiatric Association and the American Academy of
Psychiatry and the Law. I served as a consultant
and expert witness to the prosecutor’s office of the
International War Crimes Tribunal for the
Prosecution of War Criminals of the Former
Yugoslavia, and helped establish a standard of
admissible evidence for victims testifying about
their memories for war atrocities–a standard that
was upheld upon appeal. I am the senior author of a
monograph, “Recovered Memories: The Current Weight
of the Evidence in Science and in the Courts” in The
1999 Journal of Psychiatry and Law, which
reviews the current scientific evidence regarding
substantial forgetting and later recover of
childhood sexual abuse memories after many years. I
have served as an expert witness in a number of
Frye-Daubert hearings in different states about
the scientific status of repressed memories, and
also served as an expert witness before the Grand
Jury in Middlesex County regarding alleged recovered
memories of childhood abuse in the Shanley
criminal cases before the court.
2. Carefully designed scientific survey studies show
that around 30% of girls and about 5% of boys in the
general population in this culture report being
sexually abused by age 18. Comparable figures show
similar prevalence rates in Europe, although in both
culture males tend to under-report.
3. Studies show that approximately 70% of abused
children fail to disclosure, only partial disclose,
or delay disclosure of sexual abuse, even when they
have a clear memory for the abuse.
4. About 40% of victims of childhood sexual abuse
fail to report the abuse when interviewed several
decades after the alleged abuse. Several factors
account for the reporting failure: 1)
Misappraisal of the abuse or its consequences
(retaining a continuous memory for the abuse but
failing to understand it as abuse and/or failing to
understand its long-term consequences. In one
20-year prospective study on the accuracy of
long-term memory for childhood sexual abuse, about a
third of survivors of court substantiated cases of
childhood sexual abuse never understood the abuse as
abuse even after nearly twenty years; 2) Failure
to make the causal connection. Some survivors of
childhood sexual abuse maintain a continuous memory
for the abuse from childhood into adulthood, but
never make a link between the childhood sexual abuse
and specific adult life problems and emotional
difficulties; 3) Cognitive avoidance of the
emotional discomfort associated with disclosure or
its anticipated consequences. About 20-30% of
individuals maintain a continuous memory for the
childhood sexual abuse over decades by avoid
thinking about it; and 3) Dissociative amnesia,
i.e the abuse memory being blocked or otherwise
inaccessible for an extended period of time.
Scientific studies on the mechanisms of reporting
failures have shown that some victims genuinely
block or dissociate the abuse memory so that it is
unavailable to them sometimes for years, and
therefore could not serve as a cause of action
against the alleged sexual offender. These studies
also show that the mechanisms of dissociation are
different from normal forgetting. Such victims are
at a disadvantage in the courts with respect to the
statute of limitations.
5. A total of 89 scientific research studies (about
two-thirds of which have been peer reviewed) have
been conducted since 1989 specifically on the issue
of substantial forgetting and subsequent recovered
of memories of childhood sexual abuse. All 89
studies show that a clinically significant group of
victims of childhood sexual abuse will completely or
partially forget the abuse for decades and later
recover the sexual abuse memories after an extended
period of forgetting. Progressive methodological
improvements across these 89 studies allows for an
estimate of the error rate. Accounting for error
rate, it is possible to give a reasonable estimate
that approximately 16% of victims of childhood
sexual abuse in the general population will
completely forget the abuse for years and later
recover the memories. Another 20-30% will remember
something about it but will forget important
aspects of the abuse over the years. This base-rate
of complete forgetting is higher in clinical
populations–ranging around 30% in outpatient samples
and ranging from 50-70% in inpatient samples.
Dissociative amnesia or repressed memory is a
genuine phenomenon recognized within the relevant
scientific community across all types of
traumatization including childhood sexual abuse, and
dissociative amnesia is included in the diagnostic
manual, DSM-IV.
6.
Scientific studies on predictors of which victims of
childhood sexual abuse are more likely to completely
dissociate or repress the memory for the abuse have
shown that the strong predictors are: 1) a normal
dissociative coping style; and 2) betrayal trauma,
i.e. occurrence of abuse as part of a fiduciary
relationship. Other, less consistent predictors are:
age at time of the abuse, multiple abuse, degree of
force or threat used during the abuse, and degree of
reality-distortion at the time of the abuse.
7.
A half dozen scientific surveys of health
professionals conducted in the past decade
demonstrate that dissociative amnesia for childhood
sexual abuse is a phenomenon that is generally
accepted within the relevant scientific community,
with about 88% of randomly surveyed health
professionals endorsing the existence of repressed
memories or dissociative amnesia, and only a vocal
minority (12%) of professionals not accepting the
validity of the phenomenon.
8. Scientific surveys on the accuracy of
recovered memories for childhood sexual abuse have
shown that recovered memories generally are as
accurate as continuous memories for childhood sexual
abuse, for the gist of plot-relevant and emotionally
meaningful aspects of sexually abusive incidents,
whereas peripheral details are not well retained for
either recovered or continuous memories for abuse or
for non-abuse experiences. The fact of recovering
memories of childhood sexual abuse per se
after many years does not imply inaccuracy of the
memory for abuse. Accuracy. as a dimension of
memory, is relatively unrelated to recovery,
provided that the conditions of memory recovery or
not unduly suggestive.
9. Prospective studies comparing
demographically-matched non-abused and sexually
abused children over twenty-year periods have
allowed us to understand what adult psychiatric
conditions and problems are and are not causally
associated with childhood sexual abuse. These
studies show that childhood sexual abuse is causally
associated with the emergence of conduct and
somatization disorders, anxiety and depressive
symptoms, and addictive behaviors in adolescence,
and with the emergence of certain DSM
diagnosable psychiatric conditions in adulthood,
such as depressive disorders, anxiety disorders,
somatization disorders, dissociative disorders,
posttraumatic stress disorders, addictive behaviors,
and sexual desire disorders. Childhood sexual abuse
is also causally associated with adult-life
relational disturbances, such as traumatic bonding,
risk for boundary-comprising relationships, and
struggles with power distribution in relationships,
e.g difficulty with authority relationships, as well
as with chronic mistrust about relationships. Some
victims of childhood sexual abuse are significantly
less likely than non-abused children to form healthy
same-age peer and intimate relationships in later
years. Victims of childhood sexual abuse are more
likely than non-victims to have multiple, co-morbid
psychiatric diagnoses in adulthood. A dissociative
coping style in childhood is a strong predictor of
the development of more severe and multiple forms
of psychiatric conditions in adulthood. While of
long-term effects of childhood sexual abuse vary in
severity and form across victims, there is no
question that there is significant long-term damage
for a portion of victims.
Respectfully Submitted,
Daniel Brown, Ph.D., ABPH
Signed this 10th day
of January, 2006.
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