"This book is also interesting and nuanced on the subject of 'recovered memory'”
Editor: Ros Burnett
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780198723301
Price: £75
This book is a collection of essays by legal, scientific, academic and journalistic contributors looking at wrongful allegations of sex abuse. “Wrongful allegations” are defined to include all allegations which are factually untrue, ranging from the deliberately malicious to those which are honestly made but in reality mistaken or exaggerated. While stating that any attempt to assess the prevalence of wrongful allegations would be “wildly speculative”, the book nonetheless claims to highlight a range of factors “which make it more likely that the true prevalence of wrongful abuse allegations is much greater than is typically claimed in discourse on child abuse and rape”.
The “satanic panic”
I approached this book—and the often emotive debate surrounding it—as a lawyer who represents genuine victims of sexual abuse, but who also represented children wrongly implicated in the “satanic panic” of the early 1990s (on reaching adulthood, some of those children
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