Michael Salter
@mike_salter
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Professor - @UNSW | Past President - @ISSTD | Chair - |
Sydney, New South Wales
Joined September 2012
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Today we are launching the largest, nationally representative child sexual abuse perpetration survey ever undertaken. We asked 1,945 Australian men about their sexual feelings and behaviour towards childen.
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The False Memory Syndrome Foundation is officially dissolved tomorrow. It was launched 27 years ago, claiming that adults disclosing child sexual abuse were suffering from a “syndrome” of vivid false memories of abuse.
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Reading the "minor attracted persons" scholarship including the repeated claim that paedophiles are no more of a risk to children than any other adult. And apparently it's "stigmatising" to say otherwise. Truly bizarre and alarming stuff being normalised in that literature.
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Can we get a basic agreement from LGBTIQ academics that paedophilia is not "queer"? Thanks.
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How on earth did an academic who wrote papers on "cumming on or possibly even with a child" end up the trustee of a children's charity?
As a charity trustee for over a decade, it is clear to me that Mermaids must review its governance procedures following this disturbing revelation. (1/3)
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Anne Aly - I knew that I was leaving a violent relationship to lead a life of poverty. And the humiliation of walking into the Centrelink office is still with me 30 years later
#QandA
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The term "Minor Attracted Persons" was first coined on the paedophile forum Boychat in 1998 and has been promoted by pro-paedophile groups for a quarter century. It is now being laundered into academic and policy discourse using public and philanthropic funding.
Anger as Police Scotland rebrands paedophiles as 'Minor-Attracted People'
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If I tweet anything about men’s health, I never get responses from women saying they feel excluded or insulted.
Tweet about women’s health, however ...
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In 2019, Twitter quietly changed its terms of service to permit discussion about "attraction towards minors" with the proviso that "they don’t promote or glorify child sexual exploitation in any way".
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We've reached a tipping point where those academics are now intersecting with child welfare and child protection issues, and it's an entirely predictable disaster. Child safeguarding is fundamentally about boundaries, queer theory is about the dissolution of boundaries.
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A huge milestone this week for child sexual abuse survivors - South Australian law will no longer refer to the abuse of a child as a “relationship”, thanks to Grace’s tireless campaigning.
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The term "minor attracted" (instead of "paedophile") was coined on Boychat in the late 1990s. Boychat is a site for men who want to sexually abuse boys.
It was then picked up by a number of pro-paedophile groups in the 2000s (some anti-contact, some pro-contact).
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Media release from the Grace Tame Foundation:
Sexual abuse occurs in all communities and Peter Dutton has wrongly singled out First Nations peoples. Child sexual abuse should never be politicised.
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We have to start talking about child sexual abuse as a pattern of control comparable to domestic violence, rather than just a sequence of sexual acts.
Otherwise we miss the fundamental dynamics of abuse between victim and perpetrator, and the subsequent impacts on the victim.
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Folks, all memories are “recovered memories”. Think about what you had for breakfast this morning. Wow, you just “recovered” a memory. It was unavailable to consciousness and then it was available. “Recovered memories” is a nonsense category.
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No such “syndrome” exists – it is, ironically enough, a false syndrome. The organization arose to contest law reform in the United States that expanded opportunities for sexual abuse survivors to pursue civil or criminal charges, and then quickly spread to other countries.
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Make no mistake about it, there are well funded programs, clinicians and academics who want to "destigmatise" the desire to sexually abuse children. They believe that this will somehow (?) prevent child sexual abuse.
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@vanOnselenP
Spirals are probably the most common recurring motif in the artwork of trauma survivors. I have a spiral painting on my office wall given to me by a survivor.
Nobody with expertise in this area would consider such self-expression unusual in the circumstances.
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66% of federal parliamentarians have the social science degree that Tehan suggests doesn't sufficiently prepare graduates for a real job 🤣
Devaluing humanities and social science education will leave Australia worse off. Read the statement from Academy President Jane Hall.
@HumanitiesAU
@auDASSH
@CHASS_Aus
@DanTehanWannon
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The shocking number of Australian men sexually attracted to children and teens
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Much of the intellectual heft of the “false memory syndrome” movement came from FMSF-aligned academics and lawyers who were paid to defend men accused of CSA in court. The FMSF played a central role in matching accused abusers with defence lawyers and expert witnesses.
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Almost every CSA survivor that I’ve ever interviewed has discussed the destructive impact of widespread media coverage of “false memories” on their lives.
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You can't "de-stigmatise" the compulsion to sexually abuse children without normalising the sexual abuse of children.
This is a distinction without a difference, advanced by paedophiles and their allies, and by appallingly naive theoretical hair-splitters.
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This entire article describes the author masturbating to drawn child sexual abuse material.
He describes his arousal to sexual scenes featuring “very young boys”.
How was this written, reviewed or published?
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For over twenty years, tech companies have buried their heads in the sand when it comes to online paedophilia. Paedophiles need early intervention, treatment and support for behaviour change. They do not need a public forum to discuss their sexual attraction to children.
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The notion that CSA memories are particularly untrustworthy has become a widespread “common sense” that destabilizes police investigations and prosecutions, and obstructs access to healthcare and social supports.
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It is manifestly unsafe to platform unmonitored public conversations between large groups of paedophiles. The sexual desires and social inclusion of paedophiles have been prioritized by Twitter over the safety of children on the platform or in the community.
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But the legacy of their lies and distortions remain, alongside unanswered questions about media ethics and academic accountability.
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This change was pushed by forensic psychs who treat “minor attracted people” and wanted a forum for this group to discuss their issues. Child protection and abuse prevention experts were not consulted, because we would never have endorsed this change.
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This obvious conflict of interest went largely unchallenged by journalists at the time. The FMSF catalyzed a 180 degree turn in global media coverage of CSA so that, by the mid-1990s, news stories about CSA focused predominantly on the threat of false allegations.
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The overlap between bestiality and child sexual abuse is readily apparent to those of us who study child sexual abuse material. But not well known to the public.
CSAM offenders frequently access bestiality content. Some CSAM depicts animal abuse.
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Once it was successfully mobilised against trauma survivors, the notion of "false memories" has been used to undermine other truth claims by vulnerable groups, including survivors of the Stolen Generations and ethnic cleansing.
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If you are interested,
@jennykitzinger
published a fantastic book in 2004 examining media sympathy and journalistic advocacy for the “false memory” movement throughout the 1990s.
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Universities have incubated self-consciously transgressive, anti-normative writing about children's "desires" and "sexual agency" for decades, incentivising young academics in particular to take more extreme positions to carve out their own "shocking" niche in the marketplace.
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Sure is fun being lectured on child sexual abuse by a random assortment of men who read a paper/talked to a person that one time, but know more about it than the guy who studies it 10 hours a day with two books and 50 papers to his name.
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By all means, trauma practice should be scrutinized and held to the highest standards. But that scrutiny should also be extended to lobby groups of people accused of abusing children, and lawyers and academics earning hundreds of thousands of dollars defending them in court.
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I wrote this four years ago - reposting because not enough has changed
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So much wrong with the argument that accessing child sexual abuse material is an "emotional resiliency strategy" that prevents paedophiles from harming children.
Firstly, and most obviously, the argument ignores the harm to the victims in the images.
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Anyone else think that sexual violence by teenage boys might not be solved by consent education? I'm all for consent/respectful relationships curricula, but I don't think boys force girls into sex acts because they "misunderstand" consent.
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A discussion about the mass normalisation of familial child sexual abuse via incest themed content and pornography is long long long overdue.
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The field of trauma therapy is only now emerging from the culture of fear and silence engendered by the FMSF and their journalist and academic champions.
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I've transcended being sick of lockdown. I'm now sick of being sick of lockdown. A higher order of lockdown fatigue, in which one form of fatigue consumes the other, a fatigue ouroboros, if you will.
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We just spent one third of a billion dollars on a Royal Commission into child sexual abuse but now the government claims that sexual assault allegations can only ever be assessed in a court of law.
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@joshuabadge
As a gay man who works in child abuse prevention/treatment, I've had a few decades to think about this, and I believe the claim is absolutely true. Batting away critique by painting it as encouraging homophobia is the standard defence, and it's not good enough.
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I'm in the
@smh
today making the point that talking about violence, and telling boys and men to change, is not a prevention strategy. Government needs to take action at the level of policy and regulation.
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Child sexual abuse survivors deserve the greatest dignity and respect. The National Apology was an historic moment and its text should be above reproach. We deserve answers
#4corners
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This is not "any allegation" or "rumour" as it has been characterised. It's a detailed account with apparently contemporaneous evidence made by a woman who has taken her own life. This is an extremely serious matter that is not being taken seriously.
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The FMSF closes with a whimper rather than a bang. They have been inactive for many years, with almost half of their advisory board deceased, and many of those still alive in their 80s and 90s.
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Increasingly surreal to hear abstract legal principles (rule of law, presumption of innocence) asserted time and again to justify taking no further action on sexual violence, which the legal system was never designed to address in the first place.
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But we do not help paedophiles by endorsing their attempts to create an identity politics out of their condition.
And we risk child welfare by trying to "destigmatise" the desire to sexually abuse children.
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.
@Milliganreports
reminds us that Pell was repeatedly and independently accused of abuse with the same features - sudden onset, no grooming, public or semi-public places. The same abuse scenario he was charged with via
@SatPaper
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In the last year, paedophile networks on Twitter have exploded, including users who endorse contact offending, justify child sexual abuse material, and demand access to child sexual abuse dolls.
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Today, I had to report a user who states he is attracted to children, advocates for contact offending against children, and has an image of him with a child in his bio pic.
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The sleight of hand that refers to testimony of sexual violence as a "memory", and then reduces "memory" to a fallible psychological process, is an early 90s courtroom defence strategy that became gospel for a certain cadre of journalists and academics.
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We've also received an email from a Pornhub representative who claims that 118 instances of child sexual exploitation on his service does not constitute a "hot bed" of abuse. I've asked him to clarify the number of raped children that his company considers unacceptable.
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I try to avoid putting individual academics on blast here. But there is such terrible "critical" scholarship around child sexual abuse, it's hard to keep my mouth shut sometimes.
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Online discourse about porn is ridiculously one-dimensional. Adult content platforms are often romanticised by progressives. But there is no doubt that OnlyFans has facilitated the self-exploitation of children, and has very questionable financial arrangements.
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To be clear - it is not guaranteed that Twitter will release the IP address of an account when requested by law enforcement or a statutory body.
But Tasmanian police expected Grace to get that information somehow??? Totally inadequate response.
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I have no confidence whatsoever that Twitter will take action against this user, let alone refer his details to relevant child protection and law enforcement authorities.
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“There are certain people who are looking back, watching people tear each other down and go round in circles, and they’re just benefiting from it and those are the perpetrators.”
@TamePunk
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Meanwhile, Twitter’s head of product has endorsed encrypting Twitter’s DM function – what else could Twitter do to make its platform more user friendly for paedophiles?
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But "destigmatising" sexual impulses towards children:
1. Has zero public support
2. Triggers backlash against real prevention efforts
3. Legitimises discrimination against sexual minorities
4. Is THE political goal of pro-paedophile groups and
5. Removes a key barrier to abuse.
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They have no familiarity with the social benefit of stigma in setting normative boundaries and acting as a guide to acceptable behaviour. Those of us with actual public health training and an understanding of social norms recognise that stigma has a role in prevention.
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I repeat this statement every month on here: “recovered memory therapy” is not an actual therapy. Never was. The term was invented by “false memory” advocate Richard Ofshe as a pejorative label for trauma therapy.
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The attempts to conflate paedophilia with sexual orientation overlooks the paraphiliac nature of paedophilia.
Most collections of child sexual abuse material have bestiality images in them. Paedophiles are not "attracted to minors". They are sexually disordered.
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I ... am surprised ... that the focus of the press conference was on the perceived unfairness of the media. No substantive account of the night in question or his history with the complainant. The most important questions dodged or left unanswered.
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Let’s revisit a key moment in Australian history that also involved accusations of “recovered memories". In 1998, the IPA attacked the credibility of testimony of survivors of the Stolen Generation, suggesting they were suffering from “false memories”.
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It was bandied around by defence witnesses and lawyers because they are paid to discredit abuse testimony. Interesting that some journos do their promotional work for free.
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There is a LOT of child sexual abuse material on Twitter. Users publicly posting abuse images and videos. Babies being raped. I don't understand why there isn't more outrage about it. No media reporting, no editorials, no investigative journalism. Total silence. What's going on?
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About time we revisit the cultural position of sexual abuse in the 90s where:
- a singer publicly held hands with 9yo boy
- a film director married his ex-wife's child
- a rock star released an EP called "Smells Like Children"
and you were a prude for thinking something was up
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Discovered today that Mary McKillop, the first Australian canonised by the Catholic Church, was excommunicated in 1871 and turned out onto the street for reporting the sexual abuse of women and children by a priest.
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We can't accept paedophile claims and preferred terminology without question.
Paedophiles have many reasons to lie to themselves and others about their condition, their true offending history, and the extent of their sexually deviant interests.
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Watched Luc Besson's "Leon" last night and thought that only a paedophile would write that script. Then found out that Besson met his first wife when she was 12 and she had his daughter at 16.
Oh, and here's a photo of Besson on set with 12yo Natalie Portman.
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A review of criminal cases found that 80% of bestiality offenders also sexually abused children.
There is a close relationship between consumption of bestiality pornography and child sexual abuse material.
These abstract conceptual arguments obscure the reality of paraphilias.
Another thought-provoking article is "Zoophilia Is Morally Permissible" by Fira Bensto (pseudonym), which is just out in the current issue of
@JConIdeas
.
This piece challenges one of society's strongest taboos and argues for the moral permissibility of some forms of sexual
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I've written a blog post about how a prestigious methods journal published an article about masturbating to child sexual abuse material, and what this means for academia as a whole
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I feel like we are in a moment where the submerged structures of sexual violence have surfaced and become recognisable for what they are ... a rare historical conjunction that may not come again. What happens now matters.
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The problem is - there are no reliable figures on the proportion of paedophiles who are actually non-offending.
Is it 5% or 50%? We don't know and that's a problem, because we don't take risks with child safeguarding.
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By far, the most deranged Foucauldian critique of child protection is that criminalising sexual abuse constitutes children as objects of desire and makes sexual abuse more likely.
Nobody has ever argued that criminalising murder makes murder sexy and encourages murder.
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No evidence that humanities grads can't get jobs - to the contrary. 90% labor force participation by humanities/social science graduates in 2019 compared to 84.1% in science and maths.
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Expect more of this in 2023 alongside totally unevidenced claims that the "stigmatisation" of paedophilia increases the risk of child sexual abuse, that paedophilia is a sexual orientation like any other, and therefore we need to normalise paedophilia.
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Twitter responds faster to an op ed criticising their response to child abuse material than they do to actual child abuse material.
We received a response from Twitter to this column within 24 hours. Last month, it took 3+ days for Twitter's safety team to remove CSAM.
“I’m tired. I shouldn’t find photos of myself as a child being raped when I’m just scrolling through my Twitter feed.”
Why twitter needs to stop publishing
#childexploitation
material. By me,
@mike_salter
@JoshBBornstein
@PartnerSPEAK
's Natalie Walker
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Look out folks - don’t read a science fiction book or you’ll develop false memories of colonising Mars. Don’t read a book on World War II or you’ll start claiming you served.
That’s how it works right? Or is it only when women complain of sexual violence and abuse?
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They use the language of "public health" and "prevention" but they are forensic psychs/researchers with no public health or primary prevention training. They see stigma solely as a negative force that prevents paedophiles from accessing clinical treatment.
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Not a huge shock to anyone who paid attention to Foucault's views on child sexual abuse (a "bucolic pleasure" that should be decriminalised)
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It's ridiculous that I have to say this. Normal people understand this immediately. But academics like to tie ourselves up in knots and carve out little nuances and complexities so that we can strike a pose. And sometimes we wander very far from basic morality.
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I'm thoroughly enjoying James Penney's 2013 book "After Queer Theory", in which he argues that the hyper-politicisation of sexuality by queer theorists is a dead end and blunts a genuinely emancipatory politics.
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What do children and animals have in common? Why would an offender find both arousing? Vulnerability and powerlessness. That’s what appeals to the sadistic offender.
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"Prevention" advocates who claim that paedophilia is a "sexual orientation" (and that paedophiles are an oppressed "sexual minority") are at least partly to blame for the resurgence of right wing *gr**ming* discourse that conflates LGBTIQ+ people with paedophilia.
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Memory retrieval can be impaired in various ways or people can avoid retrieval due to trauma and anxiety. But a memory that is retrieved after a long time is no more/less likely to be accurate than you remembering your breakfast from this morning.
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In contrast, the suggestion that children, women or survivors of trauma and genocide are not credible witnesses to their own victimisation is commonplace, and maps directly onto existing power relations. This is politics, not "science".
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There is a reason for social taboos and stigma. Sometimes it’s good to be ashamed of our impulses and reactions. You don’t need to commodify them for a cosmo article.
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When their "destigmatising" agenda is challenged, these advocates inevitably characterise their opponents as punitive, emotional and unenlightened, while using public health language they don't really understand.
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If you experience the urge to do something anti-social - abuse children or animals, murder people, etc - you should be ashamed and seek help. And as a society, we should provide you with support not to act on those urges.
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Been thinking through the child protection implications of Covid19: presumably we will see a huge drop in abuse/neglect reports this year with kids at home and cut off from mandatory reporters - most of whom are teachers, health workers, police.
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Are you a wealthy and powerful man accused of sex offences? Well, you’re in luck! For the low low price of $$$$ an hour, you can hire academic psychologists to besmirch the complainant’s testimony using the bogus science of “false memories”!
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It's been so powerful to have
@TamePunk
speaking publicly about grooming. I know multiple people who have finally been able to put the pieces together, and understand what was done to them, after listening to her.
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