Letters to the Editor
alarajrogers
Published Letters: 447 Editor's Choice: 87
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False memories
[Read the article: The DHS's Brian Doyle: Not just perverted. Stupid, too]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The ability to implant false memories in human beings, even by accident, has been well proven. It does no good for the cause of those who crusade against child molesters to say that it is impossible to implant false memories, firstly because it's not true, secondly because false memories are *as harmful* as actual crimes committed against people (but are not committed by the people they think the crime was committed by), and thirdly because there is no shortage of men and women who were raped and abused as children, *and remember it.*
I have talked to people who speak about having repressed memories, and it turned out in their case that the memory wasn't repressed at all, but its emotional content was. So they could remember being brutally physically abused but couldn't remember a thing about how they felt about it. *That* makes sense. I have memories, myself, that have no emotional content, but are as if I was watching a movie. But come on, how do you forget being raped? It's the kind of thing that most people can't forget even if they want to. At best you could convince yourself it didn't really happen or it must have been a dream because you can't handle the pain of knowing someone you love did that to you, or you may detach and remember it as if it happened to someone else and you were just watching, but you're not going to actually, literally, *forget* it and then remember years later. Given that experimenters have made people remember mildly traumatic childhood experiences such as being lost in a shopping mall that never happened, that people coerced into making false confessions often believe, at the time, that they must have done it because everyone thinks they did, and that you can get eyewitnesses who just watched a movie to report in detail on something that didn't happen in it by asking leading questions, it's hard to see how anyone could dispute that people can have false memories implanted, particularly if therapeutic treatments like hypnosis are involved. (I mean, no evidence was *ever* found of the Satanic cults that supposedly abused and murdered children in the hundreds in the 70's, yet the people reporting that stuff swore it happened at the time.)
There are far, far too many people who were abused and *remember* it to cloud the issue with people who magically remembered it twenty years later after hypnosis. People need to be given the courage to come forward and own their own memories, they don't need to have incompetent therapists actually *give* them PTSD by convincing them of abuse that never happened. Part of the reason you don't hear so much about false memory anymore is that therapists have come to understand the risk and have stopped doing the things that implant false memories, so the people who come forth nowadays are generally people who have known all along of their abuse and just needed to build up the strength to say something.
As for thought crime... yes, it can be a slippery slope, but we accept such stings with drugs and prostitution as well, and neither are as harmful as child molestation. Intent *does* matter; people can be prosecuted for demonstrating intent to commit murder whether or not anyone actually died or even got hurt. So you can prosecute someone for the intent to commit child molestation or the intent to consume child porn whether or not they actually do it, so long as the evidence is rock solid that they really would have done it and weren't just idly musing about it.
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The problem isn't the question...
[Read the article: Excuse me. Is this a business pitch or an OB/GYN appointment?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]... the problem is that equivalent questions are not asked of men.
Also, that it was his *first* question. It's more important to have a sound business model than to have a contingency plan for what if one of you has a personal crisis. But after the business model seems ok and the VC is about ready to sign the check, there *are* certainly questions he could legitimately ask.
Ask a woman of child-bearing age what her contingencies are if she should get pregnant. Ask a *man* who's married what *his* contingencies are should his wife become pregnant, because odds are she's doing a lot of unpaid support work to help him. Ask any married person if their spouse understands and is supportive of the workload involved in being an entrepreneur, because a new business consumes all of your time and rarely gives back money, and a spouse who isn't on board with that may well force the person to either quit the business or lose the marriage, and a divorce can screw up the concentration and focus on business of either a man or a woman. Ask a father with a stay-at-home wife what his child care contingencies are in case something happens to his wife. Ask a mother with a stay-at-home husband the same thing (if she doesn't have a stay-at-home husband then she probably already has the day care question solved.)
These are perfectly legitimate questions I'd want answers to before I gave someone several hundred thousand dollars. But they must be asked of men as well as women, because you're going to lose your several hundred thousand dollars just as surely if the business owner is a man whose wife divorces him because he has no time to be her companion, let alone help out around the house, and as a result he becomes depressed and can't focus on his business, as if the business owner is a woman who becomes pregnant and can't get child care. In fact the woman is more likely to have thought about the issue.