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.
psychology UNREDACTED 
To expand on Ashley Conway’s point about the enmeshment of the BPS and the BFMS, this has immediate relevance today. Peter Mandelson cannot remember emails and money being paid to him. Andrew Mountbatten cannot remember meeting a woman he went on to pay £12 million to. And yet, his legal team just prior to that out of court settlement sought judicial permission to question Virginia Guiffre’s husband and psychologist about her mental state and the prospect that she was suffering from false memory. The psychologists inside the false memory movement offer us scientism on behalf of the rich and powerful not science in the interest of ordinary people.
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