'Memory Wars' (Five Live Rep) , The Guardian

Monday, January 28, 2002

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Monday radio - Radio review - It's all in the mind.
From The Guardian. By Elisabeth Mahoney.

It's a good thing that Radio 5 Live Reports are on during daylight hours. In darkness, their mood - a blend of excitable and brooding that melds into downright scary - would be too much. We'd need a Crimewatch-style warning not to have nightmares.

Yesterday's report, Memory Wars (Radio 5 Live), was a fine case in point. An impressively wide-ranging investigation, the programme took on the vexed issue of False Memory Syndrome. While James Silver's approach was clearly slated against those who cite FMS as a defence against claims that they have abused children (Silver's last word on the topic was that FMS is "a syndrome that officially doesn't even exist"), the impression created was one of tingling fear.

Take your eye off the ball, the programme seemed to menace from the shadows, and you'll either find yourself with a traumatic memory that nobody believes, or an accusation of deep wrong-doing against you. But it remained an astute, thorough piece of journalism, talking to victims whose stories have been trampled on by the Philadelphia-based False Memory Syndrome Foundation, and to some of the key players in that organisation.

The brother of one accused man described the FSMF as "a lobbying group for perpetrators"; one of the co-founders of the group was quoted in a paedophile magazine as urging paedophiles to "make the claim that paedophilia is an acceptable part of God's will for love." His wife, also quoted, had the idea of a long-term scientific study of relationships between "one hundred 12-year-old boys [with] loving paedophiles". The couple claim these comments were taken out of context. You do wonder what the context could have been.

(The Guardian, January 28th 2002)

Posted by James Silver - On Monday, January 28, 2002

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