"The Psychologist", 'False Memory Syndrome', Academic freedom and censorship

Memory and the law – more suppression of debate at the BPS.

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David Pilgrim and Ashley Conway post…

Recently we submitted an article to The Psychologist (appended below in full). Its title reflected a serious current political context in the wake of the release of the Epstein files. The argument we pursued was well referenced, reflecting the research we had completed for our book length critique of the false memory movement, about to appear this year and cited in the piece. 

The decision to submit the article would have one of two outcomes. First, it might have been published, which we thought important given the contention of the false memory debate in psychology and its implications for the victims of crime, especially children. Second, and more likely it would be rejected, given that The Psychologist rarely allows articles which are critical of the BPS. In this case the existing policy position on memory and the law still reflects the cynical view about victim testimony, and jury decision making, in cases of contested claims of abuse from the past. 

Not surprisingly then, the piece was rejected and so we pressed the editor Jon Sutton to tell us why, but he gave no detail except to say that he had had it reviewed and it would not ‘fit’ in The Psychologist. We pressed him for all the feedback offered by the reviewer or reviewers he had used (the norm in academic journals) but he refused saying this:

The Psychologist is a magazine. We [sic] state this clearly and repeatedly, and have done for many years. As editor, I make the final decisions on content, and I do so with consideration, consultation, and accountability (to a representative body of BPS members in the Psychologist and Digest Editorial Advisory Committee, and ultimately to the Trustees). We [sic] have publicly available policies and protocols.

I absolutely understand that rejection can hurt. I’m sorry if my handling of your submission did not adequately take into account your feelings. But I’m really keen to keep this professional. So I ask you, please, do not copy me into your own continued discussions and personal criticism of me. If you do so, I believe I would be justified, with my manager’s approval, in blocking your email addresses.

Best wishes 

Jon

The allusion to criticism of him was to this from a message from DP to AC, which was copied deliberately to Sutton to be transparent about our disdain for his rejection. We were trying to model what the BPS and its apparatchiks clearly fail to do routinely: be open and complete about our thoughts about the decision. This is what DP said to AC about the editor and his decision, to his face rather than behind his back: 

“First, he [Sutton] shows clear bias on this matter (we have the receipts about the lionisation of Loftus and his denial that the BPS was aligned with the British False Memory Society). Second, if that bias were not related to major public policy questions about child protection and our new post-Epstein context of reflection we could move on. However, we cannot move on because that external context embeds the views of both us and Sutton, and so we have a shared responsibility to engage in a serious discussion about, what we consider to be, the partisan faux-science of the false memory movement.

Sutton blocking that discussion unilaterally was not wise but he did it, because he could (a motif of power). It aligns with the adolescent ‘no debate’ position common now in immature identity politics, which in my view have infected the discourse now dominant in The Psychologist. Debates are never over they are only blocked or ignored for a while.”

The allusion from Sutton about our feelings was seemingly odd (we were not hurt but angry at Sutton fronting the inadequate policy on memory and the law in such a glib manner). However, he is an invidious position. He works for the BPS, so he has a conflict of interest, when and if submissions criticise the status quo in the Society, which implicitly our submission did. If he were to be replaced as editor, any newcomer would be in the same bind.

With regard to the current BPS position, the fact of the matter is that once the balanced stance on memory and the law from John Morton and others in the 1990s was superseded by a group led by Martin Conway, containing current or imminent members of the scientific advisory group of the British False Memory Society (BFMS), then everything changed. This was policy capture in the BPS, insinuating the campaigning position of the BFMS (no doubt to the glee of those in latter). All balancing arguments and evidence from clinicians working with trauma and in child protection work, as well as more wary experimentalist was now excluded in the BPS policy. As a result, it remains tunnel visioned and indifferent to wider questions about victims. We laid out our position about that alignment between the BFMS and the BPS in a previous publication (Conway, A. and Pilgrim,(2022). The policy alignment of the British False Memory Society and the British Psychological Society. Journal of Trauma & Dissociation. Mar-Apr;23(2):165-176.)  In a prior email to us, which we can cite, Sutton flatly denied the truth of that alignment. 

That is the political context of the tetchy exchange between us and Sutton. Readers of this blog are now given the rejected piece in full. They can make their own judgment about its academic worthiness and whether the readership of The Psychologist might have benefitted from its publication rather than its rejection:

THE EPSTEIN FILES: TIME TO RETHINK THE FALSE MEMORY DEFENCE?

David Pilgrim and Ashley Conway

False memories have been discussed previously in The Psychologist in a particular way, related to the plausibility of victimhood (Wright et al., 2006; French, 2018; Brewin and Andrews, 2017). In the recent context of the partially released ‘Epstein files’, a fresh controversy has arisen about the credibility of the recall of the rich and powerful, related to their past actions and inactions. The previous focus was promoted by a leading public intellectual, Elizabeth Loftus (Loftus and Ketcham, 1995; cf. Conway, A. and Pilgrim, 2026), who found loyal supporters within one part of British psychology (e.g. Blank et al., 2020; Conway, M. 2012). However, some other leading memory researchers, using a wider lens, were cautious about the narrow claims of this group (e.g. Baddley et al., 2025; Brewin, et al., 2020). 

The loyal group, including Loftus herself, were longstanding members of the scientific advisory board of the British False Memory Society (BFMS) (Felstead and French, 2021). They and their equivalents in the US False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF) advanced three interlocking claims:

1 False memories can be implanted in unsuspecting clients during forms of psychological therapy that are trauma-preoccupied and technically biased towards hypnosis and guided imagery. This leads to the reporting of unfounded recovered memories, involving alleged past abuse or crimes. Accordingly, both accusers and the accused are shared victims of wrong-headed psychotherapeutic norms.

2 Recovered repressed memories are an unscientific myth. Genuine cases of abuse are not forgotten by their victims. ‘Recovered memory therapy’ thus creates miscarriages of justice.

3 In ‘recovered memory therapy’ the concept of dissociation is a sleight of hand to re-vindicate the discredited unscientific psychoanalytical notion of repression. 

By contrast, clinical and survivor researchers have responded to those points thus:

1 People report recovered memories before entering therapy or they may have never even been in therapy (Cheit 2014, 2023; Goodman-Delahunty et al, 2017; Smith et al.2000). 

2 Directive efforts to implant memories are at odds with the norms of mainstream models of psychotherapy (cognitive-behavioural, psychodynamic, existential or person-centred). Exploring historical trauma is good practice in mental health work and is not a form of covert persuasion, because childhood adversity is a strong predictor of adult mental health problems, independent of diagnosis (Hillberg et al 2011). There is no evidence that there exists a practicum of ‘recovered memory therapy’, nor does it have a recognised training institute; it is thus a ‘straw man’. Academic doubts about what happens in therapy are based on surveyed therapists’ beliefs in relation to the possibility of recovered memories in the wake of real trauma, implying a link to widespread manipulative ‘recovered memory therapy’ in practice (Otgaar et al 2022). However, those sceptical experimentalists have no clinical knowledge of relating to victims of trauma and its complexities. They unwisely reject clinical research for its assumed inferiority, compared to experimental psychology (cf. Barker et al, 2023). 

3 Dissociation is accepted by a wide range of clinicians who have no commitment to a psychoanalytical approach to their work. Disrupted and delayed recall are common in trauma victims. Dissociative phenomena are now well established and part of the routine focus of mental health practitioners, as well as being part of standard psychiatric nomenclatures, such as ICD and DSM, whereas the putative ‘false memory syndrome’ is notably missing from them (Lowenstein, 2018; Ross, 2022; cf. Otgaar et al 2019).

Tunnel vision and the four scenarios of false memories

A feature of the false memory movement has been its tunnel vision about one scenario: a person recalls something that in fact did not happen. However, logically if human recall is inefficient generally in life, which common sense tells us that it can be, but not always, then surely all scenarios are worth addressing in an open-minded way. The fact that in the original ‘lost in the mall’ study, most of the subjects were not duped, shows that memory frailty implies caution but not nihilism (Brewin et al, 2020). This point is reinforced if we take a wider lens on false memories, when comparing the four cells Table 1, which all in their own way provide examples of false memories.

Table 1. Four scenarios of false memories          

 AccuserAccused
False Positive“I was abused” but this is not true
False memory		“I committed a crime” but this is not true (false confession) False memory
False Negative“I was not abused” but this is not true
False memory		“I did not commit a crime” but this is not true
False memory

Those supporting the false memory movement were overwhelmingly preoccupied with the top left cell in Table 1. The top right cell is intriguing but not connected to claims about therapeutic manipulation (Gudjonsson, 2018). Moreover, in the spirit of scientific equipoise, interest should have been expressed for completeness in the bottom two cells. Indeed, prospective studies of medically recorded abuse in childhood have demonstrated that victims may have no later memory at all of what happened to them (Williams, 1994). We return later to the importance of the bottom right cell in a post-Epstein context.

Legitimation and de-legitimation of the false memory movement

Pope (1997) was an early critic of the rhetorical over-claiming from the false memory movement. Such doubts about the empirical credibility of the false memory defence were also rehearsed by Blizzard and Shaw (2019).  Despite such appeals for critical self-reflection and restraint, from the 1990s onwards Elizabeth Loftus persisted in her public role in several high-profile cases, including her work for the defence teams of, amongst others, Ted Bundy, Bill Cosby, Michael Jackson, Robert Durst, O.J. Simpson, Harvey Weinstein and Ghislaine Maxwell (see later). 

Three other factors are relevant in relation to that pattern of the ‘punching down’ role of the false memory defence (with the rich and powerful looking to it as a potential source of judicial exoneration). The first is that its success rate has been lacklustre; most of the accused were then found guilty of serious crimes entailing sexual or non-sexual violence or lost appeals when already convicted. 

The second is that much of the work using the defence was not related to celebrities or notorious clergy (such as the paedophile priest Paul Shanley) but disputes about firms using asbestos. The defence was used to cast doubt on the temporal link between a person with industrial disease and those who employed them (Hoult, 2023). 

The third is that the use of findings from the psychological laboratory to query any human testimony, based on historical recall in court, is not analogous to the use of say DNA laboratory testing, which is of shared interest to both defence and prosecution teams in a court context.  A technique is applied to the circumstances and specifics of a case in focus. With the false memory test there is a different logic and role for an expert witness. All that is offered is a generic doubt, based upon distal closed systems findings, provided selectively in the interests of the defence case. This doubt-casting is dubious because it entails the ecological fallacy, creating a spurious scientific confidence and biased reasoning (Uher, 2021; Smedslund, 2016; Adolph, 2019).  Accordingly, judges in both the UK and the USA have at times ruled out the views of false memory expert witnesses because of that diffuse and generic doubt-casting and its consequent lack of case-specific situated relevance.

Evidence of biased personal interest

The bias in the false memory movement, and the punching down effect it has created, mainly undermined its legitimacy. But there was more; in addition, the bias against those complaining of their victimisation came at times from some on the scientific advisory boards of the FMSF and BFMS, who were clearly self-interested. Four stand out cases exemplify this point. These are relevant, because when bias in scientific research is evident (as in this case) our routine caution about ad hominem reasoning can be bracketed quite legitimately (Walton, 1998). 

The first was Ralph Underwager a developmental psychologist who defended ‘intergenerational sex’ as harmless and God given in an interview in the Dutch paedophile magazine Paidika (Geraci, 1993). He was an early authoritative member of the FMSF scientific advisory board.  During the 1980s he had led the campaign group VOCAL (Victims of Child Abuse Legislation), which argued that left wing social workers routinely removed children from good Christian families.  This anticipated the campaigning stance of the FMSF during 1990s and after that respectable parents claiming their innocence were self-evidently innocent. 

The second was a cognitive psychologist Dan B. Wright, who sexually harassed junior female colleagues. He has been a central figure in researching dubious recovered memories (Wright et al., 2018) and was on the advisory board of the BFMS. He claimed no memory of the accusations against him from the testimonies of ten separate complainants, which was then reported by journalists in Florida and then Nevada when he moved employment (Hargrave, 2022; Longhi, 2022).

The third was Mike Pendergrast, a popular science writer whose daughters were to complain about his sexualised conduct towards them, and he blamed their absurd claims on ‘hysterical’ therapists. He was a regular contributor to the FMSF newsletter and though not a psychologist sat on its scientific advisory board.

The fourth was a public intellectual and psychology graduate, Karl Sabbagh, a BFMS advisory board member, who groomed a 14-year-old girl online. In 2019, the police intervened to prevent intended sexual contact. The married 77-year-old was prosecuted, imprisoned and placed on the sex offenders register for life (see ‘Paedophile Karl Sabbagh, author and film maker, jailed for grooming child’ Oxford Mail September 22nd, 2019). Ten years prior to his fall from grace Sabbagh produced a book promoting the false memory argument (Sabbagh, 2009). With resonances of the Underwager position, Sabbagh argued that paedophilia was a moral panic, with evidence being lacking about its harm (see Pilgrim, 2018). 

Sabbagh and Wright were removed from the advisory board of the BFMS by its Director, Kevin Felstead, after journalists informed him of their crimes or misdemeanours (Delahunty, 2023). Sabbagh was thus still on the board while in prison. Felstead denied any contact with Wright over his ten-year presence in the organisation, indicating its lack of meaningful functioning. 

Past and recent uses of the false memory defence

The false memory movement began to accrue criticisms from its inception, (e.g.  van der Kolk et al., 2001; Freyd, 1998, 1996; Cheit, 2023, 2014; Crook,2022;  Hoult 2023, 1998). By the time Epstein’s rich and powerful network came into view (including politicians, rock stars, stellar academics and royalty), the false memory movement was in decline; hence the closure of the FMSF in 2019 and the BFMS in 2022, though the latter had been barely functioning for a decade. 

Nonetheless, the high-profile defence role of Elizabeth Loftus persisted, now in relation to Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s partner in crime. This trial in 2021/22 was par for the course, the false memory defence cut no ice, and Maxwell is now serving a 20-year prison sentence for her role in the trafficking of female minors and their sexual victimisation by Epstein and his friends and contacts. At times she participated directly in the abuse of the girls, who were as young as 14 years. 

A close friend of Epstein and Maxwell (the then Prince Andrew, Duke of York) was involved in a relevant negotiation. After his interview on Newsnight in 2019 (September 19th), he reached an out of court settlement with Virginia Giuffre, one of many victims of Epstein’s and Maxwell’s sexual exploitation. He paid her a reported figure of £12 million in 2022. He said on camera, “I have no recollection of ever meeting this lady, none whatsoever.” Shown a photograph of him with her, when she was 17 years of age, accompanied by Ghislaine Maxwell, he denied any recollection still and lamented that his team of investigators had not been able to establish that it was a fake (his only explanation for his innocence).  

However, despite his seeming perplexity about a non-event in his life, in February 2022 he paid ‘the lady’, Virginia Giuffre, millions of pounds, while continuing to claim innocence of any wrongdoing.   Prior to his out of court settlement, his defence team were exploring the use of the false memory defence to undermine the credibility of Giuffre’s claims (Oppenheim, 2022). Giuffre went on to commit suicide in 2025.

This scenario was given more context when the Epstein files included photographs showing him on the floor crouched over an impassive young female. For legal reasons, news outlets continued to report his strenuous denial of any wrongdoing, but the mainstream mass media, the public, the King and parliamentarians were all to adopt their own criticisms and sanctions against him in advance of any police action or court prosecution. (His subsequent arrest was not in relation to alleged sexual misconduct but about exploring evidence of financial misconduct in a public office.) 

The Mountbatten-Windsor case is an example to be placed in the bottom right cell of Table 1.  The same is true in relation to the disgraced UK ambassador to the US, Peter Mandelson, another associate of Epstein, who found himself unable to recall frequent email contact with him, after his conviction for sexual offences. He also could not remember Epstein giving him the large sum of $75,000 in 2003/4.  Mandelson was arrested in relation to financial misconduct in a public office within a week of his old friend and business colleague.

Another example to be considered in the bottom right cell of Table 1 is the sole suspect in the rape and murder of Martine Vik Magnussen in 2008. The Yemeni prince Farouk Abdulhak fled to his home country and awaits extradition to the UK. At first claiming his innocence, in 2023 he subsequently, admitted responsibility for the crime note as a recovered memory, emerging from the haze of a past affected by sexual and emotional arousal, drink and drugs (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-65033048). 

These cases raise important ethical and psychological questions about the relationship, from context to context in open systems, between recall, self-deceit, motivated self-interest and interpersonal dissimulation. That complexity cannot be clarified by studying decontextualised trivial events, with duped subjects in the psychological laboratory. Such reductionism offers us no understanding of the complexities of what has come to light about the toxic mix of patriarchy, financial corruption and probable manipulations by the security services of more than one nation. At this point psychology has reached the limits of its disciplinary ‘skill set’ and might well need to look elsewhere for help to make sense of distorted recall. The discredited elite actors in Epstein’s network, two of whom created a political crisis in the UK in early 2026, highlight why an open-minded memory researcher should not limit their interest to the top left-hand cell of Table 1.  

If psychologists are to regain any credibility for their contribution to memory science in judicial settings, then all four cells should surely be of interest.  Journalistic and political interest now is less about accusers claiming that something happened when it did not (e.g. Abramsky 2004). Instead, the media storm and political fallout of the Epstein files have shifted the focus to how powerful figures can seemingly forget their central role in scurrilous events in the past. That shift from the plausibility of the victim to the plausibility of perpetrator began with the emergence of the #MeToo movement and was then amplified with the partial release of the Epstein files, with more implications in the offing at the time of writing.

Conclusion

The political ambiguity about the impact of the false memory movement on mainstream academic opinion invites our historical interest, to prompt proper research in a post-Epstein context. Science and justice are not only served within the domain of individual cases, with contested accounts of accused and accusers. They are also served by a serious examination of a partisan social movement, which has claimed an unwarranted pre-eminent scientific authority and queried, and even belittled, the judgments of ordinary people.

We have argued above that the false memory movement invites that critical attention. It may be best approached by an interdisciplinary investigation involving serious academic historians, philosophers, lawyers and sociologists. To date psychology, as a single siloed discipline, has failed to establish its own a consensus appraisal and has thus not resolved ‘the memory wars’, in its midst.

References

Abramsky, S. (2004). Memory and manipulation: the trials of Elizabeth Loftus, defender of the wrongly accused. Orange County Weekly September 9th. hhtp://doi.org/10.1177/21582440231173915eekly.com/features/features/memory-  

Adolph, K. E. (2019).  Ecological validity: mistaking the lab for real life. In R. Sternberg (Ed.) My Biggest Research Mistake: Adventures and Misadventures in Psychological Research pp 187–190. New York: Sage.

Andrews, B. and Brewin, C. (2024). Lost in the mall?: Interrogating judgements of false memory. Applied Cognitive Psychology , 38, no. 6: e70012.

Baddley, A., Eysenck, M.W. and Anderson, M.C. (2025). Memory (4th Edition). London: Routledge

Barker, C., Taggart, D., Gonzalez, M., Quail, S., Eglinton, R., Ford, S. and Tantam, W. (2023). The truth project- paper two- using staff training and consultation to inculcate a testimonial sensibility in non-specialist staff teams working with survivors of child sexual abuse. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 14, 1177622-5.

Blank, H., Otgaar, H.  Nash, R.A, Patihis, L. and Rubínová, E. (2020). Special issue to honour James Ost’s contribution to memory psychology. Memory, 28:1, 1.

Blizard, R. and Shaw, M (2019). Lost-in-the-mall: False memory or false defense? Journal of Child Custody, 16:1, 20-41.

Brewin, C. R., Andrews, B., and Mickes, L. (2020). Regaining consensus on the reliability of memory. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 29 (2), 121–125.

Brewin, C.R. and Andrews, B. (2017). False memories of childhood abuse. The Psychologist June 7th.

Cheit, R. (2023). https://www.recoveredmemory.org/case-archive

Cheit, R. (2014). The Witch-Hunt Narrative: Politics, Psychology and the Sexual Abuse of Children. Oxford: Oxford University Press 

Conway, A. and Pilgrim, D. (2026). Witness for the Prosecution: Resisting the False Memory Movement Oxford: Karnac.

Conway, M. (2012). Ten things the law and others should know about human memory. In L. Nadel and W.P. Sinnott-Armstrong (Eds.) Memory and Law Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Crook, L. (2022). False Memories: The Deception that Silenced Millions New York: TM Publishing: LLC.

Delahunty, S. (2021). Charity reports itself after Third Sector alerts it to sex-offender advisory panel member. Third SectorFebruary 3rd.

Felstead, K. and French, C (2021). Dr James Ost’s contributions to the work of the British False Memory Society. Memory, 30, 6, 669-677.

French, C. (2018). Reaching ‘Brenda from the chip shop’: scientific literacy. The Psychologist March, 45.

Freyd, J. J. (1998). Science in the memory debate. Ethics & Behavior, 8(2), 101–113. 

Freyd, J.J. (1996). Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse. Cambridge, MA: Harvard. 

Geraci, J. (1993). Interview: Hollida Wakefield & Ralph Underwager Paidika # 9, 2-12.

Goodman-Delahunty, J, Nolan, M A and van Gijn-Grosvenor, E L. (2017). Empirical guidance on the effects of child sexual abuse on memory and complainants’ evidence. Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, Sydney: Australia.

Gudjonsson, G.H. (2018). The Psychology of False Confessions: Forty Years of Research and Practice London: Wiley.

Hargrave, R. (2023). Expert faces axe from charity advisory board over historical sexual harassment claims Third Sector May 23rd   

Hillberg, T., Hamilton-Giachritsis, C. and Dixon, L. (2011). Review of meta-analyses on the association between child sexual abuse and adult mental health difficulties: a systematic approach. Trauma Violence & Abuse, 12, 1, 38-49; 

Hoult, J. (2023). Using experts’ casework demographics to evaluate expert witness credibility:  An empirical case study of the 1970-2020 legal casework of Elizabeth F. Loftus, Ph.D.  (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4502988, retrieved December 2nd 2024)

Hoult, J. (1998). Silencing the victim: The politics of discrediting child abuse survivors. Ethics & Behavior 8 (2):125 – 140.

Longhi, L. (2022). UNLV professor had prior investigation for sexual harassment  Las Vegas Review Journal August 26th                                 

Loftus, E. and Ketcham, K. (1995). The myth of repressed memory: False memories and allegations of sexual abuse. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin.

Loewenstein, R.J. (2018). Dissociation debates: everything you know is wrong. Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience 20, 3, 229-242 

Oppenheim, M. (2022). The accusations of victim-blaming and gaslighting plaguing Prince Andrew | The Independent, January 18th.

Otgaar, H., Mangiulli, I., Riesthuis, P., Dodier, O.and Patihis, L. (2022). Changing beliefs in repressed memory and dissociative amnesia. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 36(6), 1234–1250.

Otgaar, H, Howe ML, Patihis L, Merckelbach H, Lynn, S.J., Lilienfeld, S.O. and Loftus, E.F. (2019). The return of the repressed: the persistent and problematic claims of long-forgotten trauma. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 14(6), 1072-1095.

Pilgrim, D. (2018). Child Sexual Abuse: Moral Panic or State of Denial? London: Routledge.

Pope, K.S. (1997). Memory, abuse, and science: questioning claims about the False Memory Syndrome epidemic. American Psychologist. 51, 9, 957–74.

Ross, C. (2022). False memory researchers misunderstand repression, dissociation and Freud. Journal of Child Sexual Abuse, 31(4):488-502.

Sabbagh, K. (2009).  Remembering Our Childhood: How Memory Betrays Us Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Smedslund, J. (2016). Why psychology cannot be an empirical science. Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science 50, 2, 185-95.

Smith D. W., Letourneau E. J., Saunders B. E., Kilpatrick D. G., Resnick H. S. and Best C. L. (2000). Delay in disclosure of childhood rape: Results from a national survey. Child Abuse & Neglect, 24, 273–287. 

Uher, J. (2021). Psychology’s status as a science. Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 55, 212-224

van der Kolk, B.A., Hopper, J.W. and Osterman J.E. (2001). Exploring the nature of traumatic memory: Combining clinical knowledge with laboratory methods Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment and Trauma 4, 9-31.

Walton, D.H. (1998). Ad Hominem Arguments. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.

Whitfield, C.L. (2001). False memory defense: using disinformation and junk science in and out of court. Journal of Child Sexual Abuse 9, 3, 53-78. 

Williams, L. M. (1994). Recall of childhood trauma: A prospective study of women’s memories of child sexual abuse. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 62(6), 1167–1176.

Wright, D., Ost, J. and French, C. (2006).  Recovered and false memories The Psychologist June 18th.

"The Psychologist", 'False Memory Syndrome', Academic freedom and censorship, Gender, Identity Politics, Memory and the Law Group

TWO TYPES OF IDEOLOGICAL CAPTURE IN THE BPS

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David Pilgrim posts…..

Recently, the social justice obsession of the BPS (especially promoted by the editor of The Psychologist) has been the focus of a piece in the conservative newspaper the Daily Telegraph. Several disaffected psychologists were quoted, including one from a co-founder of this blog, Pat Harvey. She made a point of noting her left leaning values, which the piece (February 4th 2026) dutifully reported (https://archive.ph/owqF1) [Note: this link may not work if you are using a VPN].

As a case study in the mess that many organisations now encounter, the piece does a good job; the BPS is by no means unique.  This mess deserves proper analysis. There is no point in replicating the infantile binary reasoning of identity politics (IP) (‘you are either for or against us’), when making sense of them (Dutton, 2020). Calling it all left wing ‘wokery’ (which you subscribe to or resist) is understandable but a simplification. 

This is a complex scenario for two reasons. First, at the turn of this century, the Western left had to face its major strategic failures. The Soviet Union collapsed, demonstrating that authoritarian vanguardism did not deliver either political equality or personal freedom. Moreover, its alternative, social democracy, by and large was incorporated into neoliberalism (with some push back in Scandinavia and Scotland). For example, Blairism in the UK went further in its public policies than Margaret Thatcher ever dreamed of. IP and neoliberalism then ensured that radical individualism was valorised and fetishised.

The second point follows. Given the new individualism and strategic failure of political progressiveness, the left adopted an alternative tactic by focusing on the politics of recognition, as structuralist accounts were displaced by poststructuralism (Honneth, 1995; Butler, 1999). Some on the left spotted a weakness immediately. This shift to poststructuralist accounts  would (a) focus on individual rather than collective grievances and (b) partisan identities would be divisive, setting sub-groups in society against one another. In my book Identity Politics: Where Did It All Go Wrong?, I draw attention to such wise warnings from old lefties like Eric Hobsbawn in Britain and Nancy Fraser in the USA (Fraser, 1999).  IP has become a lazy strategic shortcut for the left and for the reasons these two writers predicted, they have failed. The right spotted an open goal, and IP has become a large target, difficult to miss for, say, the columnists and reporters of the Daily Telegraph or Daily Mail.

Decolonisation as a restricted form of historiography?

IP has not been just about this lazy short cut on the left. It has also played into the hands of authoritarian traditionalism on the right. For example, religious conservatism dwells on arrogant identitarianism (Fekete, 2016; François and Godwin, 2008) (the latter term as a synonym for identity politics is used by some academic analysts). The religious right in the USA is a clear example, as are the feudal norms of radical Islam (Hochschild, 2016; Diamond, 1998; Allen, 1996). The Brexit debacle reflected the rise of right-wing identity-focused concerns (culminating quite probably in Reform becoming our next government) (Sobolewska and Ford, 2020).

Right- and left-wing forms of IP have shared the tactic of the self-righteous suppression of free speech. Critics of organised religion are met with death threats or accusations of ‘Islamophobia’ leading to deplatforming at academic events. Ditto for those of us who are gender critical, with the heckler’s veto shutting down who can say what in conferences or teaching. Once unpopular speech is conflated with actual violence, then the Enlightenment has been betrayed – and the BPS has played its part.

This scenario of a violation of a key Enlightenment value (freedom of expression for all) has favoured the professional classes (Nossel, 2020). The latter rely for their legitimacy on their graduate status and special claims of epistemological authority derived from unfettered academic research. In the case of psychology, this has led hypocritically to an approach to knowledge which is both restrictive and prescriptive. That is, only this sort of exploration in the academy or the clinic is permitted and psychologists cannot reflect on complexity but must become political activists, where one value position only is prescribed. The piece in the Daily Telegraph, quite understandably, dwelt on these restrictive and prescriptive aspects of the BPS discourse.

If social justice activism was a lazy short cut for the left in wider politicking, then decolonising the curriculum was its glib virtue signalling rallying cry and partner in the academy. Again, this is a half-baked approach to history because it too is restrictive and prescriptive. A great irony here in the British cultural context is that while psychology has relied on its eugenic history, this was not much about race but a lot about class (Pearson, 1905; Pilgrim, 2022a and b; Pilgrim, 2008, Benn Michaels, 2006). Karl Pearson was certainly a racist but subsequently the main concerns in British social policy were about the fecundity of the poor and their inherited inadequacies, discussed by Cyril Burt in his advice about educational policy (Mazumdar, 2004). Today’s racial focus misses the point, not because it is irrelevant but because the history of class in the UK, at home not abroad, is more relevant.  Locale, ethnicity and poverty are a better intersecting account of predicted disadvantage than skin colour (Wacquant, 2022). 

Another irony is that while the most recent social justice preoccupation (such as race or transgender) might drive some historical interest, the BPS has failed palpably to ensure that the history of psychology is taught more generally and with rigour in higher education. Many in the History and Philosophy Section tried and failed to reverse that failure. British empiricism and its self-deception about disinterestedness and objectivity are still the tactical lever for worthies in the BPS to promote this narrative, on programmes like All In The Mind on Radio 4. An understanding of the history of British psychology is needed to understand that current self-satisfied norm in the discipline.

This leaves the Society having its cake and eating it – i.e. psychologists claiming to be impartial scientific incrementalists on the one hand but picking up the latest opportunity for value-led virtue signalling within modish IP, on the other. Look no further than the content of The Psychologist every month to prove this point. British psychology suffers twice over from the error of presentism. It both fetishises the most recent empirical research and the most recent social justice campaign to promote. History, properly applied, exposes that error of presentism, and its agenda should not be set pre-emptively as being only about ‘decolonising the curriculum’. 

And there is more….

Critiques of IP and its corrosive impact on academic freedom are now relevant to the rhetorical weakness of the BPS as a charity and an allegedly learned body. The notion of ideological capture is part of that discourse about the degradation more generally of academic culture. IP has quite correctly drawn such critical interest across the political spectrum. 

In the case of the BPS the naïve realism spawned by British empiricism has enabled a different sort of policy capture. That is evident in my previous posting on memory and the law. When John Morton chaired the memory and law group in the 1990s, a sensible balance was rehearsed about the frailties of human memory. More recently that sensible balance has had to be retained outside of the BPS, as Adrian Skinner helpfully clarified (see Comment at the end of this post). The report produced for the British Academy (Baddeley et al, 2023) eschewed the tunnel vision of Martin Conway and his acolytes. The wide lens and balanced approach, started by Morton and continued by Baddeley et al., has gone absent without leave from BPS officialdom.

In the case of the sub-culture of false memory fundamentalism, mainly situated across the psychology departments of Leeds, City University and Portsmouth, the displacement of Morton by Martin Conway ensured a blocked dialectic. Those psychologists concerned with child protection and working with traumatised clients were denied a voice to challenge that sub-cultural obsession with defending those accused. (See my previous post.) 

My point of emphasis here is that current IP compliant messages in The Psychologist, ensured by its editor Jon Sutton, live cheek by jowl with a slavish adherence to the positivist legacy exemplified by Elizabeth Loftus in the 1990s. The academic champions of the false memory movement inside the BPS gave legitimacy to the now defunct British False Memory Society, just as Sutton’s editorial policy on defending a pre-Cass position about gender-confused children has ensured the exclusion of legitimate concerns from gender critics. When the latter speak out they are either ignored or slapped down.

Returning to doing proper history, before an allegedly learned body like the BPS nails its colours to an ideological line about gender, race or memory and the law, then a calm and rigorous look back at the contradictions set in train at the turn of the 20thcentury, when the BPS was set up, should be reflected on. That look back would reveal that policy capture has come in two guises. The first is about cultural compliance with current virtue signalling norms since the turn of this century. Accordingly, The Psychologist has acted as a barely veiled front for transgender activists. The second is about aggrandising one version of experimental psychology by pushing the narrow line of reasoning that casts doubt upon all testimony in courts, leaving the accused protected and the accuser disbelieved. This seemingly demonstrates how clever psychologists are and how ordinary people are scientifically illiterate.  

What these two forms of policy capture have in common is that they have both betrayed children. In the case of paediatric transition, we are just waking up to a major medical scandal of iatrogenesis led, note, by psychologists (the case of GIDS at the Tavistock Clinic) (Abassi, 2024).  In the case of memory and the law, a handful of accused parents of children, now grown up, have insinuated their campaigning aims into the BPS, via a sub-culture of academic allies. By contrast, John Morton, in the 1990s using a wider lens, emphasised that victims of child abuse needed more consideration because they outnumbered those campaigning parents many-fold. 

This is the sort of mess we get into when leaders in the BPS try to mix virtue signalling IP with aloof and philosophically implausible claims of scientific disinterestedness. The special pleading of the first goes on and on because ‘the battle can never be won’ (Reed, 2018) as one after another splintered partisan interest group encourages reports of individual victimhood from within their midst. 

The second, which is a more circumscribed version of policy capture, might be rectified. However, that would require that the outsourcing of proper academic consideration (the Baddeley report noted above) is now abandoned. This implies pressing the reset button for the memory and law group, which would have to include the very people previously excluded. This refers to clinical researchers, memory researchers and child protection experts who have a wider interest in their topic than just the false positive reasoning favouring the rich and famous.  In the meantime, the BPS will continue to betray children twice over.

References

Abassi, K. (2024). The Cass review: An opportunity to unite behind evidence informed care in gender medicine. BMJ, 385: q837.

Allen, E. (1996). Religious heterodoxy and nationalist tradition: the continuing evolution of the Nation of Islam. The BlackScholar, 26 , 2–34.

Baddeley, A., Brewin, C. et al. (2023). Legal aspects of memory: A report issued by the Psychology and Law Sections of the British Academy. Journal of the British Academy, 11, 95-97 with annex).

Benn Michaels, W. (2006). The trouble with diversity: How we learned to love identity and ignore inequality  Holt.

Butler, J. (1999). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. Routledge

Diamond, S. (1998). Not by politics alone: The enduring influence of the Christian right. Guilford Press.

Dutton, K. (2020). Black and white thinking: The burden of a binary brain in a complex world  Bantam.

Fekete, L. (2016). Hungary: Power, punishment and the ‘Christian-national ideal’. Race & Class, 57(4), 39–53.

François, S., & Godwin, A. (2008). The Euro-Pagan scene: Between paganism and radical right. Journal for the Study of Radicalism, 1(2), 35–54.

Fraser, N. (1999). Social justice in an age of identity politics: Redistribution, recognition and participation. In Ray, L. & Sayer, A. (eds) Culture and economy after the cultural turn (pp25-52) Sage.

Hochschild, A. R. (2016). Strangers in their own land: Anger and mourning on the American right. New Press.

Honneth, A. (1995). The struggle for recognition: The moral grammar of social conflicts Polity Press.

Mazumdar, P.M.H. (2004). ‘Burt, Cyril Lodowic’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Nossel, S. (2020). Dare to speak: Defending free speech for all.  HarperCollins.

Pearson, K. (1905). National life from the standpoint of science.  A&C Publications.

Pilgrim, D. (2022a) Race, ethnicity and the limitations of identity politics. Journal of Critical Realism. 22. 1-16. 

Pilgrim, D. (2022b). Identity politics: Where did it all go wrong? Phoenix Books.

Pilgrim, D. (2008) The eugenic legacy in psychology and psychiatry. International Journal of Social Psychiatry 54, 3, 272-284.

Reed, A. (2018). Antiracism: A neoliberal alternative to a left. Dialectical Anthropology, 42, 105-115.

Sobolewska, M., & Ford, R. (2020). Brexitland. Cambridge University Press.

Wacquant, L. (2022). Resolving the trouble with ‘race’. New Left Review, 133/4. 

'False Memory Syndrome', Memory and the Law Group

BPS long term pro-FMS stance.

AdminBPSWatch

Ashley Conway* posts…

David Pilgrim’s post (and Adrian Skinner in the comments) notes the failures of the BPS in their dismal approach to addressing the False Memory Syndrome disinformation campaign. This is not new.  I have been at this topic for 30 years, during which time the BPS has not just been useless, it has been worse than that by directly or indirectly promoting the FMS line to the detriment of many thousands of victims of abuse.

John Morton chaired the original BPS group on tackling this issue back in the 1990’s and he did it well.  I extract here some of his comments from a brief piece in The Psychologist in 1998.

“  …While we all agree that memory has constructive and reconstructive aspects, there is a grave danger of creating the image of us all apart from accused parents [emphasis added] living in a world of fantasy about our past. I would like to quote the conclusions of Alan Baddeley on this topic, from his book Human Memory (Baddeley, 1990): Much of our autobiographical recollection of the past is reasonably free of error, provided we stick to remembering the broad outline of events. Errors begin to occur once we try to force ourselves to come up with detailed information from an inadequate base. While one falsely accused parent is one too many, there are at most a few hundred in this country.  Meanwhile, ChildLine alone deals with 3,000 calls a day, and cannot handle thousands more. The number of abused people needing help is in the hundreds of thousands. Alas, there is some anecdotal evidence that women asking for treatment, reporting a history of sexual abuse, are currently being refused because therapists fear being taken to court under the false memory banner. This trend must be resisted.” [John Morton, Director of the Medical Research Council Cognitive Development Unit, London. Personal Space. The Psychologist, August 1998, p 408.]

Some years later the BPS chose to have its Memory and Law Guidelines group chaired by Martin Conway, who soon afterwards joined the scientific advisory board of the British False Memory Society and acted as an expert witness for the defence on a number of occasions using an FMS line.  The BPS Guidelines came out in 2010.  In 2012 I sent him an email:

Dear Martin,

I am currently writing a short book for victims of child sexual abuse, and want to get a fair and balanced message across, including something about the dangers of false memory induction. I was planning to include a recommendation to the BFMS website. So I had a look at the site, and was shocked at the mis-information that I found there. I will not be recommending it.

You are listed as a Scientific Advisor to the BFMS.

The BFMS has a number of untrue and misleading statements on its website. 3 examples:

(1) “Most genuine sexual offenders confess”. Not true.

(2) “Before recovered memory became fashionable, sexual offence suspects had the highest rate of admission amongst crime suspects at 89.3 per cent.” I have checked the source of this claim (34 year old data), and this representation of what was actually said in the source paper is grossly misleading.

(3) Vast tracts of text under the tab and banner “The Royal College of Psychiatrists Working Party Report on Recovered Memories – Extracts”, are not extracts from that report at all. They appear nowhere in the Royal College Report. So again this is completely untrue.

Under the BPS Code of Ethics, BPS Member Conduct Rules, and HCPC Standards of Conduct, Performance and Ethics, you are obliged to ensure the accuracy of information that goes out in your name. You carry the good name of these organisations with you.

Would you therefore ensure that the BFMS corrects these points, and ensure that only honest and accurate information is provided on its website, with immediate effect.

If for some reason the BFMS does not want to do this, then I presume that you will want to consider your position as a Scientific Advisor.

I would be grateful if you would e-mail me back and confirm your action.

I am writing to you personally in the hope that this correction can be achieved with discretion and with the minimum stress to all concerned. If you want to talk to me about this, I would be happy to do so.

His response (slightly edited to make sense to the reader here):

Dear Dr. Conway,

I have passed on your letters to the BFMS. I do not expect these assertions will upon examination turn out to be correct. If, however, they do the appropriate corrections to the web site will be made in due course.

I very much object to the underlying bullying tone of your communication and do not expect to hear from you again. If you have problems with the BFMS web site then please contact them directly.

In order to help your attempt to be ‘fair and balanced’ I attach a copy of the Memory & The Law Report and refer you to a recent edited volume by Nadel & Sinnott-Armstrong, Memory and Law, Oxford University Press, 2012.

For emphasis, this is from the Chair of the official BPS Memory and Law Guidelines group. To this day, as far as I know, these Guidelines remain the most up-to-date ones that the BPS itself has published.  And, for clarity, the three points that I raised with him are all indisputably correct.

*To repeat the note from the previous post, Ashley Conway is not related to Martin Conway.

'False Memory Syndrome', Memory and the Law Group

Is the false memory movement now a Dodo?

AdminBPSWatch

David Pilgrim posts…

Later this year the book Witness for the Prosecution I have written with Ashley Conway* will appear from Karnac Books. Below is a taster of some the arguments it contains, focusing on implications for British psychologists and the BPS.

The ‘memory wars’ (Crews, 1995) seemed to splutter to an end in the BPS in 2021 when Daryl O’Connor, the Chair of the BPS Research Board, pulled the plug on a working group on memory and the law. He argued that a consensus could not be established about producing a revised report. (Those on the group, despite their disagreements, were not happy with this arbitrary decision.). O’Connor was embedded in a partisan sub-culture supporting one side of the ‘memory wars’, which had begun in Britain at Leeds University when Martin Conway was Head of Psychology.

Homophily (the ‘birds of a feather’ effect in professional networks) is well known in sociology (McPherson et al 2007).  In the case of the false memory movement in Britain the academic departments in Leeds, City University (where Conway moved to) and Portsmouth became its nodes of flourishing. Conway’s leadership role is noteworthy. He chaired the BPS guidance group in 2008 (four of its ten members were from his department in Leeds). By 2011 he had joined the Scientific Advisory Board of the British False Memory Society (BFMS) and went on to archive their records at City University. Their fate became unclear. Some, or all, were shredded after the Society collapsed in 2024 for lack of funding. 

Mystery shrouds these events but deceit, in one way or another, is central to the history of the false memory movement. Its roots were in clandestine CIA-funded work, and it fetishised the denial of personal experience when challenging those recounting histories of abuse. Cynicism about complainants was turned into scientific rhetoric and trauma-obsessed therapists were the cause, meaning that both accused and accuser were simply the victims of psychotherapeutic norms. This tells a good story but is it an honest and plausible one?

Martin Conway remained key player in the false memory movement until his death in 2022. In one particularly irritable meeting I attended about exploring a new memory and law report, prior to the O’Connor decision, Conway fumed out prematurely, muttering angrily ‘we have to follow the science’. His published guidance on this had been set out in Conway (2012). To his annoyance, some in the meeting were pointing out, quite properly, that the ecological validity problem in psychology raised a question about what exactly science meant in the case of our discipline. 

Some of us with a clinical background were particularly cautious, given what we knew about the understated prevalence of child sexual abuse, the culture of denial about it in society and the proven impact of childhood adversity on mental health. Those doubts were to be a sticking point in the failed consensus adjudicated on by O’Connor by declaring the group now defunct. Had it continued, dirty washing about the false memory movement and the over-claiming of experimental psychologists about the open system of everyday life might have been washed in public.

Early in the meeting that I attended Conway declared that he was on the Scientific Advisory Board of the BFMS. At the very moment of his swansong, that Board was encountering significant problems. Two of its members were exposed in the press for their sexual misconduct. The first was Karl Sabbagh and the second Dan B. Wright. This is pertinent given the skewed obsession the false memory movement had had, since the early 1990s, with false positives. For them only the accusers’ accounts should be a matter of scientific focus and memory frailty though ubiquitous (as commonsense does tell us) can be ignored when it comes to those accused. 

I return to Andrew Mountbatten below but will look first at Sabbagh and Wright to illustrate that the false memory scientists clearly had their a priori biases. This matters because the normal caution we have, quite rightly, to discount ad hominem reasoning can be challenged, when and if bias is clearly present in scientific work. Where bias is demonstrable then legitimate attention can be paid to the personal motives of the researchers involved (Coady, 1992, Walton, 1998). 

The cases of Sabbagh and Wright

In September 2019 Karl Sabbagh was sentenced at Oxford Crown Court for grooming a 14-year-old girl online for sexual contact. He received a 45-month sentence and was placed for life on the sex offenders register. The 77-year-old was married with four children and during his time of imprisonment he remained as a named member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the BFMS.

His offending was intercepted by the police in a Dublin hotel, where he was on the brink of assaulting his victim. Prior to this he had sent her money, jewellery, a vibrator and footage of himself masturbating. He had asked her to stop shaving her pubic hair and to send him lewd pictures of herself. The court heard that these indecent images were classed in the British system as ‘category A’, which is the most serious grade (involving penetration, sexual activity with an animal or sadism). The Communications Director of the BFMS, Kevin Felstead, removed him and his name but after quite a while.  Felstead admitted that he only knew of the conviction because a journalist from Third Sector had emailed him with the story in 2021. Sabbagh would have probably remained on the Board until the closure of the Society, had the journalist not intervened (Delahunty, 2021).

In 2009 Sabbagh published Remembering Our Childhood: How Memory Betrays Us. On its cover was a fulsome endorsement from Elizabeth Loftus, the doyen of the experimental wing of the false memory movement in the USA viz:

A terrific book. Sabbagh’s journey into childhood memory shows keen insight into how it works and what it means. He offers a masterfully original and beautifully written perspective on one of the most fundamental aspects of the human mind.

Hiding in plain sight in the book is Sabbagh’s argument that paedophilia is harmless and a moral panic. The book was a megaphone for the false memory movement. It had been written with the encouragement of not just Loftus but also another fellow British FMS Board member Lawrence Weiskrantz, Emeritus Professor of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford.

Sabbagh was an experienced and well recognised writer, but he had no specialist research knowledge about ‘memory science’, and so the endorsement of Loftus and Weiscrantz gave his ersatz writing gravitas. The false memory movement has contained many dilettante experts who had their reasons to offer their services to enlighten the public. In the USA these included Mark Pendergrast, Pamela and Peter Freyd and Eleanor Goldstein. During the 1990s all of them faced accusations of abuse from their daughters, now grown up. Together they demonstrate what happens when the interest work of careerist experimental psychologists and partisan campaigners comes to together in a synergistic PR campaign.    

If Sabbagh was a dilettante memory expert that was not the case with Dan B. Wright, who was a professor and well published in the field. Two years after Kevin Felstead had to remove Sabbagh from the BFMS Scientific Advisory Board, he was obliged to repeat the exercise (Hargrave, 2023). This was in May 2023 and yet again Felstead faced the public embarrassment of his ethically dubious advisors, after contact from a journalist. The case stretched back to 2012 in Florida and was then reported in the press in 2022 in Nevada (Longhi, 2022).  At the time of the investigations against him for sexual misconduct, Wright was already on the Scientific Advisory Board of the BFMS.

Felstead seemed to be perplexed by his presence in the organisation, saying to the Hargrave (ibid) that “I have never had any contact with Dan Wright whatsoever. No email, no verbal contact, nothing at all.”   Given Wright had been on the Board for over a decade the latter seemingly was not functioning. Maybe Felstead had forgotten about him (our memories do play tricks). Maybe the Board had recently become moribund, or it had always been a fig leaf of legitimacy for Felstead and his aims. Did academics on the Board in Britain not know of the Florida scandal? We probably will never know, though we do know that deceit has been a leitmotif of the false memory movement.

This is the Wright story in summary.  In 2021 he had recently been appointed to an endowed Chair at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. A reporter on the Las Vegas Review-Journal summarised a serious case of sexual harassment that had occurred ten years previously, when Wright worked at the Florida International University (FIU). Wright had been the director of the legal psychology program at FIU. There, in 2012, he was investigated for making sexually inappropriate comments, stalking women in his department and ‘creating an intimidating work environment for women’. The original report from FIU revealed “a level of inappropriate behavior and lack of professional judgment, involving women, that rises to the level of harassment based on their gender,”.  When the reporter in Nevada asked Wright for his reflections he said, conveniently: “That was a number of years ago…I’m trying to get on with my life.”.

The investigation and report revealed that Wright:

1 Would make comments about his penis to women in public.

2 Made comments about two students being together sexually. He told one student about a sexual dream he had had about her and another that he had imagined her in a lingerie pillow fight.

3. Texted women for inappropriate and non-work-related reasons, telling them that he was thinking of them.

4 Constantly interrupted women while they were working and repeatedly asked them out (witnesses said that Wright “does not take ‘no’ for an answer.”)

5 Touched women without their permission, including by putting his hand on their waists or the smalls of their backs, or by putting his arm around their shoulders.

6 Try to get female students to be alone with him, earning the label from peers as the “Dirty Dan Trick”.

Wright flatly denied all these accusations, so was he suffering from a false memory (i.e. had he forgotten a pattern of events implicating several women that had really happened?) Was he implying that the ten complainants were suffering a false memory (i.e. remembering things that had never happened to them?). These two questions put together highlight why the false memory movement has been biased and tunnel visioned in its interest. It wants to focus on the second question and point up that those reporting sexual abuse in court were suffering from a memory implantation at the hands of trauma obsessed therapists. This lop-sided attention is why the ad hominem caution can be parked on reasonable grounds, when we appraise those in the false memory movement. 

The credibility problem for the false memory movement

Just because the US False Memory Syndrome Foundation and the British FMS have now closed (in 2019 and 2024 respectively) it does not necessarily mark the permanent demise of the false memory movement. Both the family activist wing and the experimentalist wing of the movement have to some extent been re-configured in new or existing organisations, such as the ‘innocence projects’. These singularly define rough justice as being about those falsely accused. A challenge to that position has been increasingly evident in the past ten years. 

Sabbagh wrote his book before Jimmy Savile went from hero to zero overnight at the end of 2011. The #MeToo movement meant that the journalistic fawning over Elizabeth Loftus was subsequently tempered considerably (cf. Abramsky, 2004). Journalists have had to weigh up how to approach accounts of historical abuse (continue to fete a female public intellectual or stand by female survivors of abuse?). The false memory defence has been used mainly against women on behalf of men accused. Maybe the false memory movement has had a feminist by-pass. This point applies not just to Loftus but to the mothers of abused victims opting to support their husbands and instead disparage their daughters (e.g. Goldstein and Farmer, 1992; Freyd and Goldstein, 1997).   After Goldstein died, her daughter reporting abuse offered a view of her mother in an open letter online attacking the leadership of the FMSF (Sharlet Stacy (2021, December 3). Open letter to Freyd, Loftus and the FMSF. Open Letter Posted To “DISSOC” Email Listserv).

Some women had responded robustly about the bias against victims in the 1990s. Jennifer Freyd, in the wake of abuse by her own father went on to become a Professor of Psychology at the University of Oregon in 1992. She pointed up ‘betrayal trauma’ and ‘DARVO’ (Deny Attack and Reverse Victim and Offender) and queried ecological validity but her arguments did not dent the false memory movement (Freyd, 1996)   Another woman, the clinical psychologist Anna Salter, was sued in the courts for complaining of the damage being done by the false memory defence and the lack of evidence that therapists routinely implanted memories (Salter, 1998). The latter litigation, which failed, was from Hollida Wakefield and Ralph Underwager (1992). Underwager (resonating here with the Sabbagh case) had argued in an interview in a Dutch paedophile magazine Paidika that paedophilia was a God-given blessing and should be celebrated. Wakefield was more cautious in the same interview – she stayed on as advisor to the FMSF, but Underwager resigned to ward off a PR disaster, once news of the Dutch confession crossed the Atlantic (Geraci, 1993).

Prior to the formation of the FMSF during the 1980s, Underwager had headed up VOCAL (‘Victims of Child Abuse Allegations’) and defended hundreds of parents accused of child sexual abuse. He argued that communist inspired social workers were removing children from good American Christian families. He lobbied to abolish child protection legislation. Much of the VOCAL ideology about taken for granted false accusations spilled over in the 1990s into the false memory movement. If an accused parents said that they had been falsely accused, then they were clearly telling the truth.

Today is not the 1980s and 90s

More recently the cultural landscape is different. The fall out of the Epstein scandal has resonances everywhere. The amused fascination that Elizabeth Loftus had offered to journalists and her fawning acolytes in psychology either side of the Atlantic has been disrupted by a fundamental question about her credibility.  (On the fawning point see for example One on one – with Elizabeth Loftus | BPS).)

Two publicly filmed scenarios point to the declining credibility of the false memory defence.  In 2020 Loftus acted as a defence witness for Harvey Weinstein. The prosecutor and Assistant District Attorney, Joan Illuzi-Orbon, asked this question: “Have you ever written a book called ‘Witness for the Prosecution?’”  Impassively she replied ‘No’. Many in the courtroom laughed loudly knowing that she was famous for being the lead author of a book called ‘Witness for the Defense’ and that she had no interest in offering help to accusers (Loftus and Ketcham, 1991). The glee in the audience offered a new public cultural marker about the credibility of the false memory movement.

In the second example, a year later (22nd November 2021) District Judge Alison Nathan granted Ghislaine Maxwell permission to call Elizabeth Loftus as an expert witness. Loftus repeated the stereotypical position of false memory findings, thereby casting doubt on the testimony of (any) complainant. Loftus simply introduces doubt from a distal body of knowledge in the academy, pouring a jug of cynical cold water over any human testimony. This really is not like DNA testing case by specific case. Maxwell was found guilty, which was par for the course. She is now spending 20 years in jail for trafficking female minors. 

The false memory defence has proved to be fairly useless in practice for defence teams; most of Loftus’ innumerable criminal1 cases have still culminated in guilty outcomes (Hoult, 2023). Judges and juries come to reasonable decisions despite those in the false memory movement bemoaning their scientific illiteracy (French, 2018). The condescension from the movement is premised on the notion that only the false memory experimentalists are offering the world science in the public interest. The problem for those like Loftus and French is that their self-confident and patronising stance has not won the memory wars for good reason.

An example about judicial norms changing is the experience of another false memory expert Lawrence Patihis, from Portsmouth and ex-colleague and admirer of Loftus. Recently (September 2025) he was asked by the defence to “help educate” the jury on how memories work. However, he had his expert witness testimony rejected by a court in Michigan USA, because the judge said it would “open the door to jury confusion”.   The point here is not whether it would have led to confusion (who knows?); it is that judges no longer uncritically treat false memory proponents as they would any other expert witness. Similar rejections by judges were emerging about Martin Conway’s expertise in court prior to his death. 

Given the closure of both the FMSF and the BFMS, one remaining option now for those experimental psychologists peddling the false memory defence is freelance lobbying to be an expert witness (see for example  https://lpatihis.wixsite.com/lawrencepatihis). For campaigners like ex-BFMS boss Kevin Felstead other options are to set up a consultancy with sympathetic defence lawyers (see https://memoryandinjustice.co.uk/.) Both have also joined forces with FACT (https://factuk.org/) a generic home for those claiming to be falsely accused or victims of past miscarriages of justice, set up by the ex-MP Harvey Proctor.

Thus, for now at least, both campaigners like Felstead and academics in the Loftus tradition are carrying on their work in new organisational forms. However, their opponents also show no sign of going away. Not only has survivor-based research challenged the false memory movement (Cheit, 2014; Crook, 2022; Hoult, 2023), some more sanguine experimentalists have urged caution when partisan claims become entangled with empirical findings. The original ‘lost in the mall’ study was disavowed by its originator (James Coan) and other memory experimentalists have rehearsed cautionary evidence (Brewin et al, 2020; Andrews and Brewin, 2024). Coan is important for his innovative ‘lost in the mall’ study. He went on to be Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia and remained angst ridden about his creative youthfulness, as he explained here to a journalist:

I’m slow enough on the uptake that it took me a while to realize that the study I was doing was making people who had been sexually abused feel like I was their enemy,” he tells me. “That was completely devastating to me.” Although he has been asked to testify about false memory in countless court cases, Coan has always refused. He just doesn’t think the mall study is sufficiently relevant. In her excitement, he thinks, Loftus may [subsequently] have ‘mischaracterized’ what started out as an undergraduate assignment for extra credit. “I got five points,” Coan says. “Five points and decades of grief.” (Heaney, 2021 (emphasis added); https://www.thecut.com/article/false-memory-syndrome-controversy.html)

And it is not just Coan who exercises restraint in the face of the dangers of overclaiming about false memories. Take the encyclopaedic tome Memory now in its fourth edition (Baddeley, et al, 2025). The authors mention Elizabeth Loftus about witness statements and Martin Conway about autobiographical memory but many key names and their published work, from the sub-culture of memory experimentalists I mentioned at the outset, are simply missing from the book.  Maybe Baddeley et al do not get involved with discussing the ‘memory wars’, because they know that they are dirty wars and might toxify the brand of mainstream experimental psychology. More than that, they engage respectfully with clinical research and weigh up the evidence on recovered memories. That respect has been pointedly missing from the discourse of the false memory movement. The latter disparaged clinical research. A lack of engagement with it means that the false memory experimentalists literally do not know what they are talking about. None of them are mental health workers but are very certain about what happens in the clinic.

For example, they deny that dissociation can account for delayed memories – when it can. They argue that dissociation is simply a conceptual smokescreen to re-insinuate the psychoanalytical concept of repression, when it is nothing of the sort. Dissociative phenomena, including dissociative amnesia, are conceded by therapists who are out with the psychodynamic tradition or even hostile to it. They generalise about the use of hypnosis and guided imagery as being commonplace with no empirical evidence to defend that claim of high prevalence. The dominant models of psychological therapy do not deploy these techniques. They talk of ‘repressed memory therapy’ as a given, even though the latter’s existence has no evidential basis – where is the published practicum or its training institute?  They confuse the legitimate exploration of childhood adversity, which is good practice in mental health work, with evidence of false memory implantation. This a catalogue of misunderstanding, wilful or otherwise, and blind ignorance.

Moreover, were hypnosis that effective at radically altering our view of the world, then most mental health problems could be erased in a few sessions. Ironically the progenitor of the false memory position, Martin Orne, could not deliver evidence to his CIA paymasters that such major erasures and replacements were feasible (i.e. the scenario of The Manchurian Candidate). Although he became the recruiter in chief for the FMSF he was always ambivalent about what could be said case by case. Within a few years he was pulling back from the more strident totalising claims of the FMSF and its new public intellectual Elizabeth Loftus (Orne, 1995; Ceci and Bruck, 1995). Despite that, he remained on the Advisory Board of the Foundation until his death in 2000. 

But probably the most important weakness in the false memory movement is not its failure to win the scientific argument, but a cultural turn against those who trivialise sexual crimes or undermine their fair-minded appraisal. The false memory movement for a long while helped to feed a culture of denial alongside claims about the ‘parental alienation syndrome’ and the moral panic thesis about the scale of child sexual abuse. In the latter regard its seminal leader Stanley Cohen pointed out that the problem with child abuse was not moral panic but ‘moral stupor’ or ‘chilling denial’ (Pilgrim, 2018). 

More widely, critics have been concerned with the moral role of evidence or ‘epistemic injustice’ (Fricker, 2007). The false memory movement by only obsessing about one form of injustice (for those accused of crimes) has lost any credibility – what about the injustice for legions of victims who find no redress? The false positive message has drowned out the false negative one. This has culminated in a ‘punching down’ effect. Psychological knowledge has been used for the powerful not the powerless. If this is in doubt look at who has employed Loftus: Robert Durst, Harvey Weinstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, O.J. Simpson and Michael Jackson. Under the radar other rich financial interests were evident, when Loftus worked for the defence of employers being sued for asbestos related disease by ex-employees (Hoult, 2023; Durst v. 3M Co., No. 20-C-74 KAN, Initial Designation of Experts and General Objections to Designations for Oct. 2020 Trial by Bechtel Corp., 23 (W.Va. Cir. Ct. July 21, 2020). 

Returning to recent newsworthy elite interests, special pleading by Epstein’s associates includes their own lack of memory about the facts. Peter Mandelson could not remember his email exchanges with Epstein and argued that he was conned by a narcissist (possibly it takes one to know one in this case), so he was a victim just like the trafficked girls were. He knew nothing of the latter because he was a gay man and Epstein would thus not involve him in knowledge of his crimes – really? He supported Epstein when the latter was arrested sending supportive messages in 2008. Why?

But the best story implicating hazy memory from this group of elite mutual backscratchers has been left to a royal: the very public undoing of the former Prince Andrew.  In his BBC Newsnight interview with Emily Maitlis (September 19th, 2019) he stated that “I have no recollection of ever meeting this lady, none whatsoever.”. Shown a photograph of him with her, when she was 17 years of age, accompanied by Ghislaine Maxwell, he denied any recollection still.  In February 2022 he paid ‘the lady’, Virginia Giuffre, an estimated £12 million pounds, while continuing to claim innocence of any wrongdoing. On July 25th, 2025, Virginia Giuffre committed suicide. After being banished by the royal family and stripped of his titles, the police removed Andrew’s gun licence, probably on sensible grounds.

Dirty wars and dirty history

The memory wars, like all dirty wars have led to dire consequences and many unanswered questions. Andrew’s ostracization will probably not be the last story we will hear about the Epstein scandal. Will a verdict on Epstein’s purported suicide in prison become clearer? Will Andrew keep telling us stories about untraceable bookings in pizza restaurants? Why did he pay millions to a woman he had never met?  For our purposes here though, will Elizabth Loftus and her acolytes any longer have any utility for defence teams? Will her appearance in support of Ghislaine Maxwell be her swansong?

Apart from the punching down image and the matter of epistemic injustice, ‘memory science’ has been saturated with deceit from its early days in the Cold War. Orne, and others like Ewan Cameron in Canada working for the CIA deceived and abused their subjects who were children (Ross, 2006, Torbay 2023). Social psychology experimentalists went on to normalise deceit (Milgram is the best known to psychology undergraduates). James Coan quickly worried about what he had unleashed and quite understandably backed away. 

When the experimentalists in the false memory movement insisted on reducing the memory wars to an epistemic matter, they evaded their own moral and political context (Pope, 1997). This reflected a form of naïve realism dating back to the turn of the 20th century, when positivists genuinely believed that they offered disinterested knowledge, which would create verifiable covering laws applicable across time and space. They were wrong and Karl Popper dissenting from his elders in the Vienna Circle to produce his critical rationalism pointed out why. He also noted that science was a social activity requiring reflexivity and humility. Arrogant ‘disinterestedness’ was thus removed as an option but those on one side of the memory wars did not get the memo.  

At the turn of this century post-Popperian philosophers have refined and extended that attack on positivism (Pilgrim, 2022). The memory experimentalists with their tunnel vision about false positives advance a form of scientism that is a hundred years out of date. It appeals to the idea that psychology as a single discipline can claim optimistic scientific incrementalism, by simply repeating the closed system logic of the experiment over and over again. However, to use a phrase from Don Bannister (1968), unfortunately for experimental psychologists, the ‘test tube talks back’. The survivor researchers noted earlier have made that point clearly. 

Moreover, Viennese contemporaries from the early 1930s, Paul Weiss and Ludwick von Bertalanffy who were experimental biologists, spawned General Systems Theory. This had two impacts. First, it pinpointed the error of transferring the findings from closed systems to open systems, offering the serious caution for psychologists about ecological validity (Adolph, 2019; Smedslund, 2016; Uher, 2021). Second, it required that we review whether human science should rely on case specific retroduction not deduction from experiments (Bateson, 1972; Pilgrim, 2022). That second point gets to the heart of why judges and juries do not give the false memory defence credibility. It is not, as French and Conway claim because they are scientifically ignorant, it is because they exercise good judgment, when faced with competing accounts from complainants and those they accuse in very specific circumstances. 

Finally, in its official policies the BPS has swallowed the story of scientific incrementalism, mainly because those favouring one side in the memory wars captured the policy apparatus (the homophily across Leeds, City University and Portsmouth) (Conway, A. and Pilgrim, 2022). Loftus was lionised and the law and memory group, dominated by the experimentalists, shut out the concerns of clinicians. 

With time, this may not be a ‘good look’ for the Society. To cite Faulkner (1951), ‘the past is not dead, it’s not even past’. Epstein and his narcissistic elite friends have set many hares running to still be caught. Moreover, the official inquiries into child sexual abuse in this country and Australia have jeopardised the prospects of the false memory movement having any abiding credibility (Goodman-Delahunty et al, 2017). 

There is more in the offing, and the BPS is not likely to come up smelling of roses when the history of the false memory movement is told in all its gory details.

* Please note, that to avoid any confusion, Ashley Conway is not related to Martin Conway. All references to Ashley Conway are indicated by the use of his initial.

Blog Administrator notes:

We have covered the debacle of the Memory and Law group on the blog previously (see here, here, here and here); clicking on “False Memory Syndrome” and Memory and the Law Group in the list of categories to the right of the screen will also give access to other posts.

Blog Administrator notes:

2 February 2026. Minor typographical changes made and the distinction between Ashley and Martin Conway clarified.

Footnote 1 Edit added 3 February 2026.

References

Abramsky, S. (2004). Memory and manipulation: the trials of Elizabeth Loftus, defender of the wrongly accused. Orange County Weekly September 9th. hhtp://doi.org/10.1177/21582440231173915eekly.com/features/features/memory-  

Adolph, K. E. (2019). Ecological validity: mistaking the lab for real life. In R. Sternberg (ed) My Biggest Research Mistake: Adventures and Misadventures in Psychological Research pp 187–190. New York: Sage.

Andrews, B. and Brewin, C. (2024). Lost in the mall? Interrogating judgements of false memory. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 38, no. 6: e70012. 

Bannister, D. (1966). Psychology as an exercise in paradox. Bulletin of the British Psychological Society 21, 229-231.

Baddley, A., Eysenck, M.W. and Anderson, M.C. (2025). Memory (4th Edition).  London: Routledge

Bateson, G. (1972).  Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Chandler.

Brewin, C.R., Andrews, B. and Mickes, L. (2020). Regaining consensus on the reliability of memory. Current Directions in Psychological Science 29, 2, 121-26.

Ceci, S.J. and Bruck, M. (1995). Jeopardy in the Courtroom. Washington DC: American Psychological Association.

Cheit, R. (2014). The Witch-Hunt Narrative: Politics, Psychology and the Sexual Abuse of Children. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Coady C.A.J. (1992). Testimony: A Philosophical Study. Oxford University Press. 

Coan, J. (1997). Lost in a shopping mall: An experience with controversial research. Ethics & Behavior, 7. 271-84.

Conway, A. and Pilgrim, D. (2022). The policy alignment of the British False Memory Society and the British Psychological Society. Journal of Trauma & Dissociation 23(2):165-176

Conway, M. (2012). Ten things the law and others should know about human memory. In L. Nadel and W.P. Sinnott-Armstrong (eds) Memory and Law Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Crews F. (1995). The Memory Wars: Freud’s Legacy in Dispute. London: Granta Books.

Crook, L. (2022). False Memories: The Deception that Silenced Millions. New York: TM Publishing: LLC.

Delahunty, S. (2021). Charity reports itself after Third Sector alerts it to sex-offender advisory panel member. Third Sector February 3rd.

Faulkner, W. (1951). Requiem for a Nun. New York: Random House.

French, C. (2018). Reaching ‘Brenda from the chip shop’: scientific literacy. The Psychologist March, 45.

Freyd, J.J. (1996). Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Freyd, P. and Goldstein, E. (1997). Surviving Through Tears: Surviving False Memory Syndrome. Bocata Raton: Upton. 

Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Geraci, J. (1993) Interview: Hollida Wakefield & Ralph Underwager Paidika 9, pp 2-12, 

Goodman-Delahunty, J, Nolan, M A and van Gijn-Grosvenor, E L. (2017). Empirical guidance on the effects of child sexual abuse on memory and complainants’ evidence. Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, Sydney: Australia.

Hargrave, R. (2023). Expert faces axe from charity advisory board over historical sexual harassment claims | Third Sector May 23rd

Hoult, J. (2023). Using experts’ casework demographics to evaluate expert witness credibility:  An empirical case study of the 1970-2020 legal casework of Elizabeth F. Loftus, Ph.D.  (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4502988, retrieved December 2nd 2024)

Loftus, E. and Ketcham, K. (1991). Witness for the Defense. New York: St. Martin’s Press. 

Longhi, L. (2022). UNLV professor had prior investigation for sexual harassment  Las Vegas Review Journal August 26th

McPherson, M., Smith-Lovin, L. and Cook, J. M. (2001). Birds of a feather: homophily in social networks. Annual Review of Sociology. 27: 415–444

Pilgrim, D. (2022). Critical Realism for Psychologists. London: Routledge

Pilgrim, D. (2018).  Child Sexual Abuse: Moral Panic or State of Denial? London: Routledge

Pope, K. (1997). Memory, abuse, and science: questioning claims about the False Memory Syndrome epidemic. American Psychologist. 51, 9, 957–74.

Ross, C. (2006). The CIA doctors: Human rights violations by American psychiatrists. New York: Manitou Publications.

Sabbagh, K. (2009). Remembering Our Childhood: How Memory Betrays Us Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Salter, A. (1998). Confessions of whistle-blower: lessons learnt. Ethics & Behavior. 8 (2): 115–124. 

Smedslund, J. (2016). Why psychology cannot be an empirical science. Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science 50, 2, 185-95. 

Torbay, J. (2023). The work of Donald Ewen Cameron: from psychic driving to MK Ultra. History of Psychiatry 34, 3, 320-330.

Uher, J. (2021). Psychology’s status as a science. Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 55, 212-224

Wakefield, H. and Underwager, R. (1992).  Recovered memories of sexual abuse: lawsuits against parents.   Behavioral Sciences & the Law 7,2 541-50.

Walton, D.H. (1998). Ad Hominem Arguments. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.

EDI, Ethics, Identity Politics

On performative diversity and virtue signalling.

AdminBPSWatch

Peter Harvey posts…

Below is a screen shot from an email I received recently from Clinical Psychology Forum (CPF) which outlines its revised guidance for submission of articles:

You will have your own opinions, thoughts and raised eyebrows about this but here are some of my observations.

My first impression is that this is incredibly patronising. Understanding sample selection and generalisability is a fundamental element of research design. Are the editors seriously suggesting that doctoral level graduates and trainees do not have this knowledge? Likewise the comment on ‘positionality’ in qualitative work. When I was examining some 25 or more years ago and these methodologies were becoming more common, it was a sine qua non that the investigator engaged in multiple and frequent reflections on the material and their interaction with it. Why do people need reminding of this? Perhaps I am missing something here. Is it that CPF is actually getting submissions that have to be rejected for such basic errors? If so, it suggests a more serious problem – that research design and methodology are not being properly taught and supervised either at an undergraduate level or during clinical training. I am far too distant from it all to know the answer to that so it would be interesting to get a view from those currently involved.

There are two words, however, that (in the modern parlance) are triggers for me – ‘diversity’ and ‘colonial’. Starting with diversity I am absolutely not arguing with a principle that treats all humans as equal and that discrimination on the grounds of, for example, race or sex is fundamentally and morally wrong. Nor am I disputing that people are excluded and discriminated against historically and currently both in society at large and in the psychological research literature. Nor do I deny that much of the history of European colonialism is shameful. These are moral positions supported (in my case) by a strong humanist philosophy. But if I am engaged in a research exercise then what needs to guide my thinking is “What method or procedure do I need to employ that will give me at least an approximate answer to the research question that I am asking?”.  This is not an ethically neutral question, of course, as a flawed design will produce flawed results which, if inappropriately applied, may cause harm. As participant characteristics and sample selection are an integral part of that process then it should go without saying that this is guided by the same ethical and moral principles as the rest of the project. In fact, the BPS’s Code of Human Research Ethics (2021) is explicit:  

Section 2.1, Respect for the autonomy, privacy and dignity of individuals, groups and communities

Psychologists have and show respect for the autonomy and dignity of persons. In the research context this means that there is a clear duty to participants. For example, psychologists respect the knowledge, insight, experience and expertise of participants and potential participants. They respect individual, cultural and role differences, including those involving age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity race (including colour,  nationality, ethnic or national origin), religion and belief, sex, sexual orientation, education, language and socio-economic status.

That seems pretty clear to me, so what does emphasising  “diversity” add? All the editors of CPF need to do is to require that all submissions follow the BPS Code – job done.

Once the research is completed it is always incumbent on an investigator to highlight  the limits to their data and for the reader to be equally alert to the dangers of over-generalisation. This is no more than good practice.

There is a further question which relates to the diversity of the population from which you are sampling. When I was part of a selection team for a clinical training course we, along with others in the profession as a whole, were concerned about the ethnic diversity of trainees. The problem for us was that the ethnic diversity of psychology graduates was (at that time at least) poor. However much one wants to strive for diversity (however defined) there are factors that are beyond our control.

Apart from that, we need to ask the question – how diverse is diverse? Do we select from the ever-expanding categories on a random basis or just pick the one that happens to be most fashionable at the current time? Do we pick one of each? Will we need a sort of diversity quotient threshold that all published work has to reach?  Or do we do what seems to happen with monotonous regularity – have some token representation that simply ticks the box so we can get on with our lives comfortable that we have assuaged at least some of our guilt?  Surely the diversity to be aimed for is the one that is most representative of the group to which we want to generalise rather than engaging in a performative exercise?

But it is the phrase “…mindful of colonial influence…”  that  really got me scratching my head. What does that mean in operational and behavioural terms? What would I, a researcher, have to do in actual practice, to demonstrate that I am mindful of colonial influence? Is this a test of my knowledge of British and European history? And what exactly does the phrase “…mindful of…” mean?  And, whose colonial influence do we include? The exhortation assumes that all clinical psychologists share the same colonial history. Whilst the profession may not be as diverse as the general population of the UK I know that not everyone shares the same background as me.  So would a psychologist from a different ethnic or cultural background to me (perhaps someone from one of the historic colonies) have a waiver? Or would a clinical psychologist qualified in Holland need to be mindful of the actions of the Dutch East India Company? Should a Christian psychologist be mindful of the Crusades? Perhaps all submissions need to be accompanied by statement from an independent asssessor to the effect that they have witnessed and can attest to the fact that the experimenter did in fact, reflect mindfully on colonial influence for the prescribed 30 minute period ( I am happy that CPF use this freely and without authorial credit). 

But perhaps I am being too literal here and a more nuanced and sophisticated reading of colonial influence is required. In his endlessly entertaining and intellectually sparkling book After Theory, Terry Eagleton argues that post-colonial studies have “… been one of the most precious achievements of cultural theory…”  despite his observation that

… some students of culture are blind to the Western narcissism involved in working on the history of pubic hair while half the world’s population lacks adequate sanitation and survives on less than two dollars a day. [page 6]

He goes on to be much more critical and places this particular approach within a wider critique of post-modernism generally (in my view the book should be required reading on training courses). But his phrase Western narcissism is perhaps key here and is what the editors are trying to address. I interpret that as questioning the assumptions that we make as post-Renaissance liberal Europeans about our shared culture and heritage which usually lead to a sense of intellectual, moral and ethical superiority. This stance, of course, devalues other cultural norms and values.

Cultural relativism is a key element of of post-modernism, a definition of which is provided by Eagleton…

 By ‘postmodern’  I mean, roughly speaking , the contemporary movement of thought which rejects totalities, universal values, grand historical narratives, solid foundations to human existence and the possibility of objective knowledge. Postmodernism is sceptical of truth, unity and progress, opposes what it sees as elitism in culture, tends towards cultural relativism, and celebrates pluralism, discontinuity and heterogeneity. [footnote, page 13]

This is not the place to engage in a critique of post-modernism (particularly as Eagleton does it so much better and with far greater wit and panache than I) but I do have some problems. In particular, this approach is often applied uncritically (an irony for so-called critical theory) and presents us with contradictory positions and yet further confusions. The Editors’ injunction demonstrates just such a problem.

Are they asking us to be aware of our colonial history or is it a more general reminder to be aware of our particular cultural values, of which colonialism may be a part? This certainly makes more sense to me. Taking a critical and questioning stance about making ‘cultural’ assumptions and decrying a position that assumes it is superior to others is not the problem. Where I struggle is in knowing how to deal with that in the real world out here. I suppose that part of it is  (to my mind anyway) oversimplification – it’s almost as if it is “My culture bad, your culture good. I was the oppressor, you were the oppressed.”. There is no nuance, no ability to take a stance that says that there are both good and bad aspects of my culture as there are of yours. I suppose that some would argue that there is no equality or balance to be had as, historically, the balance has always been in favour of the colonialists and cultural supremacists.  I am not going to take issue with that. But I still struggle when a particular culture espouses values and principles that I cannot support. So within our “English” culture (now there’s a concept freighted with conflict) there are beliefs I certainly don’t share and people whose behaviour I don’t support because they conflict with my ethical and moral system. In the same way there are values and beliefs in other cultures that I cannot support (where women are systematically oppressed, for example or where homosexuality is punished by death). I cannot ignore or defend the idea of so-called ‘honour killing’. An example of how this plays out in practice is shown in recent paper on female genital mutilation in the Journal of Medical Ethics (see here for the full version) 

…we highlight a troubling double standard that legitimises comparable genital surgeries in Western contexts while condemning similar procedures in others…

There can be little doubt that we are all struggling with how to manage our personal and cultural backgrounds in a humane and honest way. As psychologists we should, more than most, be aware of these and have the tools to deal with them. But is this self-awareness and self-knowledge enough?  In my own case I am more than conscious of the privilege that my sex, ethnicity, education and class give me as I tick all the wrong boxes when it comes to diversity. I cannot change these things nor can atone for them – they are an integral part of me. I can, however, try to apply this self-awareness to ensure that I do not abuse those characteristics to take unfair advantage of anyone. But in our post-modern Zeitgeist that is not enough it seems. We have been told that we need gatekeepers, monitors of language, taste and public presentation, people to guide our thoughts, feelings and behaviours. This is well articulated by Rosanne McLaughlin when discussing how critics and curators are reframing great artists to fit with modern ethical narratives in the visual arts.

Now I am not going all Andrew Tate or Jordan Peterson here. I am well aware that people like me are disproportionately represented in most organisations and professions (although, it should be noted not in clinical psychology in which 80% of the workforce is female – see here). I am also aware that we wield a disproportionate amount of power and influence and that, both historically and currently, people have suffered at the hands of those who abuse their power and position. 

So what can I do? If I were in practice and wanted to submit paper to CPF how will they assess (and, just as importantly, how do I assess) whether I have been culturally mindful or not? And this is what is wrong with the editors’ injunction.  Unless these statements are operationalised and clarified in behavioural terms they are little other than vacuous feel-good phrases. They are no more than a pious posturing in order to placate our own feelings. It is also dangerous. Such superficial poses feed the reactionary forces that wish to pursue a frankly racist agenda. And this is what really, really gets me angry. That there are serious failings in both society at large and psychology, both historic and current, which need addressing when it comes to matters of equality, fairness and justice is beyond dispute. It is right that we should know about and reflect on the lengths to which our predecessors went (and the depths to which they sank) to exploit people and cultures to feed their (and now, our) appetites and desires (see, for example, the history of nutmeg (Ghosh, 2021)). It is also right that we are aware of the exploitation that goes on to this very day, although rare earths for our electronics have replaced aromatic spices (see, for example, Sebastião Salgado’s photographs and Niarchos (2025)). We need to take a critical stance when we assess past psychological research and ensure  that we are not over-interpreting data from limited samples (such as US psychology undergraduates earning course credits for participating). We need to remind ourselves that the world within both our and our clients’ heads is not just a function of internal psychic forces but is influenced by the outside world of society and culture (perhaps all psychology degrees should have mandatory sociology and anthropology modules). 

Knowing this stuff is uncomfortable – as it should be. Feeling upset and some sort of empathy for those who have suffered is an understandable humanitarian response to exploitation, pain and distress. We have to be grown-up enough to live with and deal with that discomfort. A mere recitation of fashionable diversity mantras changes nothing. We cannot alter what has happened. Our timeframe in the now and the future. Let us learn from the past and do our level best to ensure that our actions and behaviours do not repeat the exploitative oppression of our forebears.

References

Ahmadu, F.S.N., Bader, D., Boddy, J., et al (2025).Harms of the current global anti-FGM campaign.  Journal of Medical Ethics . Published Online First: 14 September 2025. doi: 10.1136/jme-2025-110961

British Psychological Society. (2021). BPS Code of Human Research Ethics. British Psychological Society.

Eagleton, T. (2003). After Theory. Allen Lane.

Ghosh, A. (2021). The Nutmeg’s Curse; Parables for a Planet in Crisis. University of Chicago Press.

Niarchos, N. (2026). The Elements of Power. William Collins.

Salgado, S. (2024). Workers. An Archaeology of the Industrial Age. Taschen.

Salgado, S. (2026). Gold. Taschen.

Gender, HCPC

ScotPAG’s tribute to a Clinical Psychologist

AdminBPSWatch

Pat Harvey posts…

BPSWatch is keen to see a wider recognition of the contribution that Dr Anne Woodhouse, consultant clinical psychologist, has made to exposing the worrying deficiencies of the HCPC. Far from providing reassurance that their regulation offers the public protection, they waste resources and fail to deal with the worst of their trans ideology activist registrants who make malicious and unjustifiable vexatious complaints. Simultaneously, they are failing to investigate a myriad of potentially legitimate complaints about social media propagandising or serious specific practice issues in such contexts as expert witness provision. We recently made a fully referenced and evidenced complaint against a senior practitioner responsible for the Tavistock GIDS children’s service debacle and linked their professional behaviour to specific HCPC standards which were not met by that registrant in that key position over a number of years. Unsurprisingly, the HCPC chose not to investigate, stating that “… Concerns which relate to an organisation are outside our remit and should be resolved through the local complaints process…”.

Below, with the agreement of ScotPAG, we reprint their account of Dr. Woodhouse’s experience and pay tribute to her persistence and courage. This is a link to the blog and the original piece which itself has additional links to all the documentation of Dr Woodhouse’s Tribunal papers.

Our Homage to Dr Anne Woodhouse

​Dr Anne Woodhouse is a member of ScotPAG. We are delighted that her recent HCPC Tribunal found that there was no case to answer regarding allegations of misconduct affecting her fitness to practice as a clinical psychologist. 

The allegations were clearly vexatious, made by a LGBTQ activist and Depute Head Teacher of the school Dr Woodhouse’s daughter attended. The HCPC took the claimant’s unfounded allegations at face value, and failed to do any due diligence to establish the burden of proof, pursuing Dr Woodhouse for three years over fact-based tweets. This has been tantamount to harassment. 

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​The HCPC has lost its way as a regulatory body, and it is time for similar organisations to wake up to their ignorance of what is actually happening in society. Instead of persecuting individuals like Dr Woodhouse, HCPC should have been supporting and congratulating her for her diligence and care. She had done her research, and had surveyed the evidence. Dr Woodhouse had also been alert to the failures of various organisations and public services which had, via their promotion of gender identity ideology, twisted and corrupted the original safeguarding regulations for women and children. 

​​Gender identity ideology is a scam based on junk science, which has been visited on us all. It has caused terrible harm to countless children and their families, and it has hounded countless women and some men out of their jobs and livelihoods. It has upended many organisations and made them not fit for purpose. Politicians and many organisational leaders have proved themselves to be useful idiots to this authoritarian movement which demands the sterilisation of children and the compliance of all. If organisations like the HCPC, the BPS, the Scottish Government, the Labour Party and the BBC (plus too many others to mention), had actually done their homework properly, the gender identity ideology movement would have been ignored and labelled as the snake oil nonsense that it is.

Gender, Identity Politics

Plea to Wes Streeting to halt the Puberty Blocker Trial

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The Secretary of State will currently be receiving many representations to stop what is being tagged #StreetingTrial. He has publicly registered his discomfort with medically interfering with natural puberty and also appealed for cross-party consensus “to take the heat and the ideology” out of the debate.  However, aside from the ubiquitous heat and ideology in the context of current debate on “gender”, there is no real possibility of clinical and professional consensus on allowing a clinical trial of puberty blockers to go ahead on children reaching and going through puberty. Many clinicians would say that a serious medical intervention which impacts the body and brain of a developing child is unjustifiable where it is seeking to address what are fundamentally psychological matters of feelings: wishes, desires and dislikes. But many clinicians who would say that have been silenced over the last decade by anxieties for their jobs and reputations. They may have hoped for the universities  and research journals to have promoted enquiry and discussion and their professional bodies to have supported ethical and cautious individualised psychological practice. Until now that enquiry and caution has not been forthcoming and they have seen that the heat and ideology of transgenderism has resoundingly captured the floor. 

The Cass report, the closure of Tavistock GIDS and the banning of puberty blockers seemingly opened a door for more widespread and welcome reflection and review.  A hoped-for follow up of the many young people who were given puberty blockers in the UK, however, has never been undertaken and the prospect of using this medication on more children in the context of a “clinical trial” now looms. This is a turning point for many silent and silenced clinicians and they are protesting. 

We publish here a letter to Wes Streeting that sets out the objections of clinical psychologists whose professional training and expertise means that they cannot, in conscience, agree that such a trial is justifiable.

The Rt Hon Wes Streeting

Secretary of State 

Department of Health and Social Care

14 December 2025

Dear Secretary of State,

Plea to halt the Pathways Puberty Blocker Trial

We, the undersigned 20 clinical psychologists, have personally noted and experienced the censorship of open debate in academia, educational and health service settings and in the media. Clinicians and other professionals have been silenced and feared for their jobs and reputations. It is only now that more of us feel able to speak out, and we are doing so to ask that the Pathways Puberty Blocker trial be halted.

There are many possible psychological, familial, cultural and social reasons why some children show signs of feeling unhappy with the sex they were conceived with and born as. This distress is not the same as suffering an inborn constitutional condition or a serious life-threatening illness such as cancer, hence the ethics and the cost-benefit weighing of the medical risks of clinical trials is completely different. It is neither ethical nor is it possible to conduct a legitimate randomised controlled trial on puberty blocking for psychologically based distress. The actual purpose of the Pathways Puberty Blockers trial is ill-defined, and its methodology cannot answer questions beyond “what happens if we do this to one group and do it a bit later to another?”. With such an unsound rationale it is clear that the medical and developmental risks are not justifiable.

It seems only political intervention at this stage can pause the trial so that the many serious questions can now be raised by clinicians. There is not a current professional or clinical consensus in this area of practice and many clinical experts have grave reservations. We are concerned, as you are, about the sociopolitical context that has influenced previous decision making and we strongly question the assumptions that underpin the rationale for this trial. Our concerns include ideological agendas and vested interests. Past research in this area has been heavily scrutinised and weaknesses, bias, suppressed and inadequate research exposed. The current trial risks repeating and replicating these issues again in its flawed research design. 

Key psychological and clinical considerations are central to our grave concerns. Young children do not understand the essential nature of their birth sex until they are older, or the nature and fluidity of the concept of their identity which is still forming. At the age at which it is being proposed they receive puberty blockers they cannot validly consent to risk their fertility, their ability to experience sexual pleasure and other aspects of adult sexuality. Parents cannot validly consent on their behalf as this is not the same as their sanctioning risky treatment for potentially life-threatening diseases.

Politicians on all sides of the House would support you to act with courage and responsibility.  Halting the Pathways Puberty Blocker trial will allow these seriously problematic issues to be fully and more widely considered before more children are subjected to medical interventions that we already know interfere with normal maturational processes and which are likely to result in serious lifelong changes to their bodily functions and their brains.

We welcome your openness where you acknowledged that you have concerns with, and deep discomfort about, medications that interfere with puberty. As clinicians we share that discomfort. Leaving behind the heated ideology which to date has interfered with debate, the reality is that previously suppressed profound lack of consensus remains within the clinical community and that the trial should therefore not proceed. We are happy to engage in further discussion or assistance.

Yours sincerely,

Ms Patricia Harvey           Consultant Clinical Psychologist (rtd) on behalf of

Dr Lucy Johnstone           Consultant Clinical Psychologist

Dr Gill l’Anson                   Consultant Clinical Psychologist

Dr Celia Sadie                  Consultant Clinical Psychologist

Dr Libby Barnardo          Clinical Psychologist

Dr C Thompson               Consultant Clinical Psychologist

Dr John Higgon               Consultant Clinical Psychologist (rtd)

Prof David Pilgrim        Chartered Clinical Psychologist

Dr Peter Harvey              Consultant Clinical Psychologist (rtd)

and 11 named Consultant Clinical Psychologists/Clinical Psychologists.

Gender, Identity Politics

Would we treat eating disorders with Ozempic?

AdminBPSWatch

Gender distress in children and young people may have been the subject of a raging social polemic, but it is undeniably psychological phenomenon arising within diverse developmental, family and social contexts.  The proposed Pathways clinical trial [see here]  is laden with methodological and ethical concerns. Its publication has been in the pipeline for some time. Yet again the British Psychological Society fails members and the general public – it has neither produced a timely response the this highly controversial project, nor is there any sign of the guidelines for psychological interventions with gender distressed children that was promised many months ago. The BPS has fundamentally abdicated on this important issue of psychological theory, research and practice. We republish here, with permission and in full, a highly pertinent blog post [see original here].

As well as concerns about risks vs benefits, and the ethics of irreversible interventions  with children, the UK’s puberty blocker trial raises fundamental questions about how we respond to distress.

So the UK’s puberty blocker (PB) trial has ethical approval, and thus the green light to proceed. The details of the trial are extensively covered elsewhere. Suffice to say that drugs which suppress the hormonal changes which come with puberty are currently banned from being prescribed to minors. This  follows concerns raised by the Cass Review. Clearly this is not a perfect ban, both inside the NHS and outside it (I won’t provide any link to recent publicity surrounding dodgy private providers). However, the Cass Review also pointed to the limited evidence for the effectiveness of such drugs and called for more research. So, the UK is now running a trial to consider the effects of these medications on the mental and physical wellbeing of under 16s with gender incongruence “when a person’s gender identity does not match the sex they were assigned at birth” (a quote from the trial summary). The evidence to date has been of poor quality and, charitably put, not hugely suggestive of benefits.

While this trial has been long-anticipated, reactions have been, perhaps predictably, mixed. Here though I want to focus on some of the risks. There have been a number of prescriptions of such drugs in the UK in the last fifteen years (estimates suggest at least 2000) and, as Cass pointed out, follow up of those people has been poor. Also significant health concerns about the wider effects have been raised (and have been known for some time). Indeed the original “Dutch Protocol” for young teens assumed to be transgender, relied on the effects of such drugs stunting male genital growth to facilitate later “passing” as female. And while that sounds really very creepy indeed, it’s fairly remarkable the degree to which this was overlooked as the protocol influenced the development of services in other countries. There was simply an assumption that we were sure, even at very early stages, that we know what gender ‘is’, that we would know who would have a settled transgender identification, and that the risks of treatment were worth the benefits. The first assumption has been thoroughly debunked by the Cass process, and worries about the second (harm vs benefit) are really at the heart of objections to the current research.

In relation to harms, as well as effects on sexual development, concerns have also been raised in relation to irreversible consequences for bone health and brain development. Given this I don’t think it’s hugely insightful to point out that proper follow-up of those given such drugs is a logical first step. Not to mention the possibility of further animal trials before opening up more experimentation on children. While proper follow-up has been an aspiration for a while (and there is a current review into adult gender services which might provide some of this information), finding the data for that basic first step has been more difficult than you might imagine. But still lot of this information is out there already. On the basis of what was effectively a huge unregulated trial conducted by the UK’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS). The concerns about brain development are clearly present for the investigators, and there will be a parallel study looking at brain changes over time. However, this study is also with live ammo (i.e. actual human children), something which surely should be ethically questionable given the, at best, inconclusive results from previous animal trials (linked above).

These worries about the general mental and physical health effects of PBs are also highly relevant when considering the quality of the study protocol itself. This piece, by Hannah Barnes (the author of Time to Think, award-winning account the UK’s national gender service), outlines many of the issues. Methodology will, I think, be a significant area of coverage over the next few weeks. Initial concerns include the degree to which the questions about any changes to mental wellbeing will be answered at all, given that the study compares the PB group to a group receiving other support and interventions. The risks (and apparent irreversibility) of the effects of such drugs also raises ethical questions which it is perhaps surprising that the ethics committee has not taken more seriously. As Dr David Bell (a clinician who investigated practices at GIDS) said the other day, not only is the trial unable to reliably answer its own questions, but also,

“UK law, derived from European law and the Declaration of Helsinki, says that research on children should not disrupt their normal stages of development without good reason,”

Part of the reasoning behind such prohibitions is that we do not consider children able to meaningfully consent to potentially permanent changes of the sort puberty blockers may produce. All of which is to say there is more to this than simply a poor study design. We’re asking children to consent to something permanently life altering. We may do this with medical trials where lives are at stake but, again a significant finding of Cass, was that suicide risk in the cases of children presenting in GIDS services was not discernibly different from those presenting in other mental health services. The myth which terrified so many parents (“would you rather have a live son or a dead daughter”) was just that.

All of these concerns are being raised and documented elsewhere, and there will doubtless be more critique emerging. But, however we gauge the risk vs benefits, there is still something that is somewhat odd with the PB trial. Are we looking to treat mood and wellbeing issues? But we seem to be doing so by accepting that someone simply is what they say they are. And by enacting that belief with them. This is dramatically different from the way we would proceed in most other areas. We don’t, for example, respond to bodily dysmorphia by instead decide to amputate limbs. Indeed reactions to such things have generally been very negative. Maybe we just haven’t become open minded enough yet, but I’d be surprised if we ever even consider broad acceptance of this to be a sign of progressive liberality. Imagine, for a moment, that the proposed trial was about mastectomies for thirteen-year-olds with gender discomfort. Would that seem shocking? I imagine it would. What though is, fundamentally, the difference between that and permanently impeding the effects of puberty? Other than that it is less visible.

Another parallel might be if we decided we’d trial treating eating disorders with Ozempic. If we actually decided the treatment was to encourage children to become as thin as the want? At a key moment in their physical development. Would that be OK? It seems that in the case of eating disorders we enter treatment with an idea that living in your body and minimising dangerous changes is our preferred stance. With gender issues however, sometimes that stance seems to be dismissed as cis-hetronomative or as conversion therapy.

Of course all such calculations of cost vs benefit fall away if one other factor holds: that we treat the idea of being trapped in the wrong body as real. That we decide that an experience or feeling is some kind of metaphysical identity. As Helen Joyce puts it, a “gendered soul”. After all, you perhaps need to believe in something pretty strongly if you are, for example, going to castrate a child on TV. Risks/side effects/long term outcomes, comorbidities and complexities will be of little concern as the belief is so fundamental. Given that, it is worth revisiting the quote at the beginning of this piece, about “when a person’s gender identity does not match the sex they were assigned at birth”. The reference is to “gender identity” rather than, for example, to bodily, or role, discomfort. An experience is being interpreted as an identity which is potentially fixed. But one which really has no scientific validity. And this is happening in reference not even to a real case, but when considering hypothetical children who might enter the study. As an encore we get sex “assigned” at birth, something which may have some relevance to very rare circumstances of unusual genital development, but for the rest of us create the false impression that sex is somehow a chancy guess. This kind of language is something we might expect from gender identity activists, but I at least was surprised to see it from the oversight committee of a high profile medical trial. Perhaps it’s less surprising though when you consider that the host institution has a long record of an affirmative position around what is routinely framed as LGBTQ+ rights. Which now, evidently, include the right of adults to deny children normal development.

Kathleen Stock recently compared PBs to trepanning, a process that presumably also felt less morally complex in a time when we believed we needed to release tormenting demons. Maybe, if you believed hard enough, you might allow a shaman with a dubious skull-slicing protocol near your head? I had rather hoped medical researchers today might not ground their judgement in such notions of souls and spirits. After the announcement of the puberty blocker trial though I am left wondering.

Annual Report, Change Programme, Financial issues

Over 38 000 emails…..

AdminBPSWatch

Peter Harvey posts….

Members will be ecstatic to know the BPS is so proud of the fact that it was able to handle over 38 000 emails last year that it got a special shout-out in the CEO’s introduction to the Annual report (see here). In fact, this is such a significant achievement that it is the very first fact that he mentioned. I can hardly contain my sense of pride in the Society’s important step towards its aim of promoting the advancement and diffusion of psychological knowledge, both pure and applied (see the Royal Charter). But there is more – 244 queries directly relating to practice issue were responded to (another highlight from the CEO’s report). This is all too much excitement at my age.

I really, really would like to say that it gets better but the Annual Report is a shambles – trivial, over-confident, smug and looks as if it is a not-very-good trainee’s branding and PR project. I expect next year’s will be published electronically in emojis. To save you the effort of having to expose yourself to the glossy visual overload and assorted trivia, here are my key take-aways.

Falling membership. One of the more serious and worrying facts is that membership is falling. The total in 2024 was 58 387, down from 61 149 in the year before and, most significantly, from 66 098 in 2020. It is inordinately difficult to find accurate membership figures if we want to put this in a historical context: in 2018 it was said to be “...just above the 60 000 mark…”;  in 2019, two different figures are quoted, one of  60 000 and one of 70 000 (both approximations); I cannot find a figure for either 2021 or 2022. I would have thought that the all-singing, all-dancing £6m Change Programme (about which we have yet to receive a full evaluation – bland reiteration of the phrase “…it has been a great success…” simply won’t do) would be able to provide such information at the touch of a button. I have been a member long enough to remember when the full membership figures (including past years) were a regular feature of the Annual Report (and this was before the much hyped Change Programme). This fall in membership is important especially in light of some other data and it links to finance (see below). According to the Board of Trustees (BoT) minutes of 16 December 2024, 18% of members benefit from free membership (full disclosure, as a retired member I am in this category), including first-year students. In the BoT Minutes of 8 May 2025 it is stated that “… significant numbers of students do not continue membership when it continues to be free and many graduate members cease to be members when the discounted rate ends…”. As subscriptions make up 57% of the BPS’s total income this is a worrying trend.

Psychology as a career. The Psychology Careers Festival which was attended by 2596 people is heralded as a significant success (page 7 of the Annual Report). Perhaps some context might help here. According to the Higher Education Statistics Agency latest figures (see here) some 119 120 people were studying psychology in 2024/25 (an interesting side note here – this is a significant drop from a peak of 141 095 in 2022/23).  Considering there were 120 speakers over 80 sessions (a large investment of time both organisationally and by the speakers) I am not sure that getting just under 3% of your target population is an outstanding success.

Staffing. Hidden deep within the impenetrable financial report (see below) is this important fact. In 2023 the BPS underwent a restructuring process – this resulted in the loss of 30 posts (including 12 voluntary and 4 compulsory redundancies) (see page 60 of the Annual Report and there is more on this below under Finance). How much of the detail of the restructuring and change, as well as the need for it, has been fully and properly reported to the membership who actually pay for all this? A gentle reminder here to the BoT and the Senior Management Team about their accountability to the membership – it is both a moral duty and a requirement of the Charity Commission to tell us what is happening to our Society.

What’s missing. To my mind there is a great deal missing from the main body of the report. No mention of how the BPS has responded to a key shift in the law (the Supreme Court ruling on Sex and Gender), the fact that two serious incident reports have been made to the Charity Commission (see BoT Minutes, 16 December 2024, Item 1.8), no mention of the fact that the BPS has been running a “…number of years of deficit budgets…” (see BoT Minutes, 16 December 2024, Item 2.3, Noted 3). There is much more so I suggest that you read past blog posts on BPSWatch.com to find out what you are missing (and then we can trumpet the fact that our numbers are up).

Finance. In stark contrast to the glossy fluffiness and inanities of the previous 29 pages, the financial statements are an accountant’s delight. Opacity and complexity spring to mind as apt descriptors. Is this a deliberate ploy to obfuscate and confuse the inexpert reader (as are all of us not versed in the mysterious jargon of finance)? Why doesn’t the BPS present a simple one- or two-page graphic (complete with the ubiquitous pie chart) for us simple souls? Virtually every organisation of which I am a member (such as the Royal Society for the Protection Birds) manages this in their annual reports. If I could do this on my computer using Excel and PowerPoint (and no, I am not going to do it) surely the all-singing, all dancing IT system funded by a £6m Change Programme should be capable of this simple task? A more suspicious person than I might even suggest that this is not a mere accident – as I have noted in a previous post (see here), members are regularly denied important information about the finances of their society. And by the way, while we are on the topic of finance, how many of you knew that there have been six Heads of Finance over the past seven years . This is a rate of change that even I, untutored as I am in the ways of business, suggest is not a Good Thing.

So, to the detail (and apologies in advance if I have missed anything, this is not an easy task). 

  1. Income is up. Yes, there is an approximately £1m increase in subscription income BUT, we have seen, this is not due to an increase in membership so, ipso facto, it is due to an increase in fees. This is not good – there will be a point at which members will ask the ‘value-for-money’ questions and I have already noted the fall-off in student and graduate members. In addition, there is (an admittedly small) drop in Chartered members but with organisations such as the Association of Clinical PsychologistsUK (full disclosure, of which I am a member) offering  a very attractive alternative to clinical psychologists, the BPS should be worried (especially as the Division of Clinical Psychology is still the largest of the sub-systems in the Society).
  2. Income is down. In contrast to the above, other sources of income do not look good. The BPS has a number of revenue streams apart from membership fees. These include Registers and Directories (down from 2023), Conferences and Events (down from 2023), Journals and Book Publishing (down from 2023), Advertising revenue  (down from 2023), Examination income (down from 2023), Professional Development Centre (down from 2023). Two other streams (Quality Assurance and Rental Income) show an increase (see page 49 of the Annual Report for full details). This is a worrying trend as these declining sources are unlikely to increase and it only needs a change in the Quality Assurance stream (the largest) to be compromised and the BPS will need more than the sale of the Leicester office to keep afloat.
  3. Staff costs. Staff costs are down due to the loss of people noted above, the overall cost of this exercise over the two years 2023 and 2024 being £763 000 and is unlikely to be repeated. However, there is a continuing cost of those on higher salaries (defined as those earning > £60 000 p.a.) of whom there are now 12 (down from 15 in 2023). Without making any value judgements or allusions to individuals, four of that number are earning over £100 000 p.a. (excluding pension contributions – see page 55 Annual Report) which (taking the median of the ranges provided) totals just over £500 000. I leave these figures with you upon which to contemplate.

As some of you know, I and my associates on BPSWatch have a long history with the BPS, contributing (we hope) positively and constructively to its aims of developing a responsible, serious and thoughtful science and practice of psychology. The current Annual Report (and those of the recent past) suggest that our efforts have so far been in vain and that the organisation is failing its members, the public and the discipline of psychology.

"The Psychologist", Gender, Governance

Bullying, harassment? It’s not the members, BPS.

AdminBPSWatch

Pat Harvey posts….

Dealing with the many ongoing dissatisfactions of members at BPSWatch, I have just received yet more alarming information about the way in which members are actively dissuaded from persisting to query unsatisfactory responses to their concerns. They are threatened and bullied. This post will provide examples of such evidence that will not breach the confidentiality of those who have brought their reports to us having received the same treatment as I will outline below. We consider this scandalous and worthy of immediate re-scrutiny by the Charity Commission.

Right at the outset when we were propelled to launch BPSWatch.com due to the plethora of concerns amongst psychologist colleagues about their professional body, we were astonished to discover that the CEO of the Society had been suspended, along with the Finance Director. We reported this as mere fact, as we believed that the members had a right to know that some kind of serious incident had occurred. Suspensions of such senior officers in large organisations are often reported as matters of fact which can be expected to have an important impact upon the functioning of that organisation in the short term at least. We received a letter from the then Legal and Governance Officer at the BPS claiming that this was defamatory content. Inexperienced, we were alarmed by this and removed it. AI gives in the footnote below the reasons why we should have stood firm [1]. [This footnote appears at the end of the post].

The behaviour of the BPS towards its members subsequently has given us ample reasons for saying, five years down the line, that we would not respond to threats and bullying because they are the modus operandi of dealing with dissatisfied members who challenge Senior Managers, the Editor of The Psychologist or sometimes Elected Officers. This is a very strong allegation to make, but it has been reported to us by numerous individuals who have persisted with complaints or have challenged policy. We have kept the evidence that has been given to us, often by individual members who feel they have been suddenly subjected to extremely inappropriate threatening communications when they are acting as questioning members whose fees keep the Society afloat and senior staff handsomely remunerated, are entitled to do.

It is as if the BPS are operating the DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender) playbook when they are called to account on highly controversial policy pronouncements, failure to respond to important practice issues, publication bias, censorship of debate, communication blackouts and more (see here). It almost seems as though at some stage there has been a policy directive: “If you want to close the member communication down, tell them their persistence is bullying, harassment or vexatious, perhaps threaten them with member conduct rules or violating dignity at work, or legal action”. I think that it is now long overdue that we provide for members/readers the evidence of this ‘BPS as the victim of its members’  stance. 

 It is notable that the exactly the same phraseology is used by different senior staff regarding different issues to different members and this is particularly evident in direct quotes below:

Response to representations about governance and concerns about openness and transparency – reply from the Deputy CEO:

“I ….will not be engaging in any correspondence relating to the internal affairs of the society. I feel that some of your phrases, and the volume of repeated correspondence when answers have been provided, can be construed as harassment and bullying and I will not allow my team to be subjected to inappropriate behaviour. I would like to draw your attention to both the BPS Dignity at Work policy (attached) and the Member Code of Ethics and Conduct.”

Response to communications critical of media engagement of the BPS – reply from Director of Communications and Engagement:

“I also note that some of these emails have been sent early morning, some on Easter Sunday and others at weekends. I would respectfully ask you to review how you correspond with the society. I feel that some of your phrases, and the volume of repeated correspondence when answers have been provided, can be construed as harassment and bullying and I cannot allow my team to be subjected to inappropriate behaviour. I would like to draw your attention to both the BPS Dignity at Work policy (attached) and the Member Code of Ethics and Conduct.”

It is laughable to complain about the timing of emails. Staff need only open work emails during working hours whereas some members will be attending to issues whilst outside their working hours and their working week!

Response to communications about extended debacle surrounding the BPS Memory and Law Group and failures to reply- reply from Director of Knowledge and Insight:

” I feel I have responded to your substantive comments, so I will regard our correspondence as closed. I did not intend my emails to be made public, however one of my emails to you has been posted on the BPSWatch blog with my name, under the heading “Dereliction of Duty”.  I reserve the right to take action in relation to any inappropriate reference to me in any public domain”. (See, however, here for full context of blog article “Dereliction of Duty”)

With regard to the above instances, these are a sample of the many related to us over the past 5 years. Members have told us that they are frustrated, dissatisfied – worse still – intimidated by the direct or implied threats of censure and expulsion. In those instances we have heard and seen nothing to suggest personal abuse against BPS staff and officers or actual harassment of them. The communications have been with personnel who are in a formal role and hence accountable for their actions as representatives of the organisation.

Very frequent and particular concerns have been expressed about the role and function of the BPS magazine, The Psychologist, and decisions of its managing editor, recently retitled Head of Science Communication/ Managing Editor, and his Editorial Advisory Committee (PDEAC). The concerns range from failure to inform, or inform accurately and openly (see below), important relevant Society business when it is not bland, comfortably self-congratulatory, or when it is subject to controversy. With regard to controversy, members have long stated that there is a party line and that the Editor, supported by the PDEAC, resists initiating publication of material which goes against the prevailing editorial position and also resists printing a full range of critical responses.

For example, in 2021, the Editor reprinted a one-liner from the acting Chair of the Board of Trustees:  “… In February, our Vice President David Murphy chose to resign from the Board of Trustees…”. This resignation by a very long serving volunteer and member-elected officer merited coverage in external publications:  Civil Society (see here)  reported that “…In February 2021, a long-standing trustee and former president of the BPS, David Murphy, resigned citing concerns about governance, spending and transparency...” and Third Sector  (see here) noted that “…A long-standing trustee and former president of the British Psychological Society has resigned citing concerns about governance, spending and transparency...”. Dr. Murphy was aggrieved and had to take to X: “I was disappointed to read the statement in @psychmag today  https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-34/june-2021/society-crossroads which states that I “chose to resign” without any mention of the reasons. The subsequent focus on gender & prescribing issues may imply these were involved, I’ve posted my resignation letter below.”. That letter can be read here and it is also referenced in a previous blog post here. None of this controversy about profligate spending, transparency and openness was mentioned in The Psychologist and only favourable propaganda about the organisation appears in the publication to this day, hence the continuing function of BPSWatch.

One of the most serious issues that we have covered in this blog has been the avoidance of discussion of the matter of gender ideology and activism and its impact upon controversial psychologist-led services for children. During this last five years the UK has seen relevant judicial rulings, the closure of the national service at the Tavistock and the Cass Inquiry Report. My own complaint about the lamentable BPS Gender Guidelines (2019) secured one concession in 2022, a rebadging to indicate that these did not apply to minors under 18 years of age. Since then the BPS has failed to produce professional practice guidelines for children. The Editor has been reluctant to initiate publication of any articles which are not firmly espousing the trans gender affirmative line and has actively sought articles to promote an evident bias about which he is openly proud. He has stated categorically to me and others that he will always prioritise material on this subject from transgender people and those who work directly with them. He has put this in writing to individuals and in print as a response when pressurised to publish a multi-signed letter from practitioners, a number of whom were former workers who left the discredited services due to concerns (see Editor’s Response here). Despite the assertion “In terms of our own coverage, we are a forum for discussion and debate and we are keen to hear from a range of voices, including trans people and those psychologists who work directly with them. We will begin to publish a selection of responses here.”, only 4 were published, 3 of which were trans ideology affirmative. We know that more responded and that others were immediately discouraged, seeing the caveat of preference expressed by the Editor. The privileging of lived experience as the foremost influence upon, and basis for, policy-making is now the subject of much concern, even from campaigners who are stressing the need for objectivity and balance. A search will demonstrate that proportionally, very little has been published about or by detransitioners or by practitioners who are sex realist and critical of gender ideology and of the medicalisation of gender distress. 

So, having considered above a highly topical issue which has psychological principles and practice at its heart and has suffered suppression by editorial bias at The Psychologist, how is the “reverse victim and offender” seen in its pages? A statement was issued here which reads as defensive of wider criticisms. It also includes “…with extra online comment from the Managing Editor…“. Here the Editor states:

“Challenge and criticism are to be expected and even welcome. But I will no longer engage – I can no longer engage – with false information and the targeting of individual, named staff in repeated abuse. There have to be boundaries for professional and constructive discourse. And I’ve been particularly shocked by accusations of playing the victim or weaponising mental health: perhaps it’s time for a discussion on how we talk about such areas, and my own feeling is that as psychologists we must do better“.

I complained about this to the Chair of the PDEAC at the time. I stated:

“TONE AND CONTENT: 

The tone and content of that section is highly personalised and self-referential, about “I” whilst supposedly writing in the context of considerations about the role and function of a publication of which he is managing editor.  In what is a short section there are 26  first person personal pronouns. He alludes to unspecified and unevidenced abuse and false information, by implication, on social media:

“But I will no longer engage – I can no longer engage – with false information and the targeting of individual, named staff in repeated abuse. There have to be boundaries for professional and constructive discourse. And I’ve been particularly shocked by accusations of playing the victim or weaponising mental health: perhaps it’s time for a discussion on how we talk about such areas, and my own feeling is that as psychologists we must do better.”

These allegations are easy to make, easy to exaggerate, easy to stir up disapproval when you are in the position to publish them mainstream. They should not be made in this way unless there is evidence given and they are serious enough to be actionable. Robust criticism in this context is not abuse. If “false information” is being propagated this gives an opportunity for clarification and correction. Controversy can be debated in a healthy fashion if it is open to general scrutiny. These accusations are not, and are being used in a way currently being referred to as “cancel culture” and “the right not to be offended”.

The comments made in this section are particularly provocative in a circumstance where The Psychologist previously linked the now infamous Youtube video impugning the integrity of the deposed President Elect made by Carol McGuinness (the link posted on The Psychologist which was removed, as it now has been by the BPS themselves). It will undoubtedly be contended legally that this widely circulated and publicly available video constituted harassment and detriment to an individual at the point at which legal redress is sought. It can only be at best insensitive and at worst excruciatingly provocative in such circumstances for Sutton to juxtapose the innuendoes about member abuse with specific reference to Carol McGuinness’ exhortations in the following manner: “…I can only echo Professor McGuinness’s request that we debate with courtesy and respect; give trustees and staff support; and stand for elected roles…” when Carol McGuinness was visibly at the forefront of that attack on an elected officer.

OPPORTUNITY TO COMMENT/DEBATE:

This article appeared in the Debates Section. When I saw the article I checked to see whether anyone had commented, comments section being open and there were none. Later I checked again, and the comments section was no longer open.

I tweeted the following:

DEBATES SECTION: “From the Psychologist and Digest Editorial Advisory Committee…with extra online comment from the Managing Editor”. Accusations made here of “false information” and “repeated abuse” – BUT MEMBER COMMENTS ARE DISABLED ON THIS (see here)

… after which this appeared:

“P.S. And yes, comment is disabled on this post; I feel for very good reason given past experience. This is an opportunity to explain our position, rather than an invitation to debate. However, email addresses are there for both the Chair of PDEAC and myself, and any letters for publication will be considered in the usual way.”

I think many members will agree that this is a petulant, disrespectful and entirely inappropriate way for an editor to behave towards members – anticipating responses that had not occurred! Far from the supposed contrition of the earlier comment “I’m the first to admit we’ve never quite nailed that ‘discussion and controversy’ aspect. We’re far from perfect, and I’ve personally made some big errors of judgement over the years”

Sutton escalates hostility to which only alternative media would be able to reply. I am the author of the Twitter @psychsocwatchuk. I am named on the site. The added PS of the article which appears after I tweeted begins “…and yes, comment is disabled on this post etc…” appears to be a direct response to me and Sutton has blocked my twitter where he might have properly and openly responded to me instead of using the pages of The Psychologist. Something of a power imbalance, but one I as an individual member can do little about. It is precisely for these kinds of reasons  of shutting down debate that alternative media BPSWatch.com and @psychsocwatchuk have come into existence. It seems they continue to be needed.

The response was as follows:

“Thank you for your letter. After careful consideration I am of the mind that your complaint is about Jon Sutton’s conduct as a BPS member rather than any misapplication of PDEAC policies and procedures. I would therefore advise that you submit it via these channels: https://www.bps.org.uk/contact-us/complaints

I would add that the PDEAC (the committee) had oversight of Jon’s letter and approved it, and I personally stand by the content. PDEAC agreed at the time of conceiving of the two letters that their purpose was to put out a clear statement dispelling the suggestion that The Psychologist was being silenced. I would invite you to continue the debate by writing a letter to The Psychologist.”

Unsurprisingly, I got nowhere with an impervious environment at The Psychologist. To edit a publication which claims a readership online of 200,000 per month and to choose what to put out to those readers is an onerous responsibility. To choose to characterise dissent amongst members with dark undemonstrated allegations of this kind and to block comments is an abuse of responsibility by a powerful voice in the British Psychological Society.

David Pilgrim, alongside us at BPSWatch, edited a book on the BPS in 2023 . Its title “British Psychology in Crisis: A Case Study in Organisational Dysfunction” remains pertinent today as we have kept all the receipts that have come to us since its publication. The disregard and disrespect for members and for the important psychological issues continues apace. Student members are failing to join on graduation, practitioners are leaving. Membership has dropped by around 8000 since 2020. Fees have gone up. The headquarters is being sold. No reflection has taken place, no lessons have been learned.

[1] AI Overview

Members of the British Psychological Society (BPS) have a right to be informed about the suspension of the CEO and Finance Director, especially given the Society’s structure as a charity and professional association, and the potential legal and ethical ramifications of such a suspension. A member of a similar group, bpswatch.com, was threatened with legal action for reporting the suspension of a CEO, indicating that such information is considered to be something members are entitled to know. 

Why Members Have a Right to Know

  • Charity Governance: 

As a registered charity, the BPS has a duty of care and transparency to its members, who are stakeholders in the organization. This includes informing them of significant leadership changes or issues that could impact the organization’s operations or finances. 

  • Professional Association: 

The BPS also serves as a professional association, and its leadership structure is integral to its functioning and reputation. Members rely on the Society for professional development, standards, and ethical guidance, making them invested in its governance. 

  • Ethical and Financial Implications: 

The suspension of key positions like the CEO and Finance Director suggests potential serious issues within the organization, such as financial misconduct or mismanagement. Members, especially those holding high standards like Chartered Psychologists, have an interest in upholding the ethical and responsible governance of their professional body. 

  • Transparency in Professional Bodies: 

Professional bodies like the BPS are expected to operate with a degree of openness and accountability to their members, particularly when leadership is involved in significant internal issues. 

Therefore, withholding this information would contradict the expectations of good governance for a charity and professional association, and could be seen as a failure to be transparent with its membership.