Sit in Roger and Elizabeth LaPlant’s tidy Des Plaines ranch house and your eyes quickly scan the home for clues.
The refrigerator is covered with photos of children and grandchildren. Homespun sayings are interspersed with antiques, accumulated over 38 years of marriage; a crucifix holds a position of prominence by the back door. It’s the kind of home where the coffee pot is always on and the back door is always open. Only Roger’s doleful expression, as he methodically strokes the family dog, reveals a crack in the veneer.
In March 1989, Roger LaPlant was just starting to enjoy his retirement. He and Liz, still relatively young and healthy, had managed to raise two children and send them to college-no small accomplishment on a gas company employee’s salary. “I was always here when those kids came home from school,” Liz said proudly.
Now, the LaPlants were finally on their clock, looking forward to days filled with grandchildren, golf and garage sales.
But two weeks after the retirement party, any prospects of peaceful golden years evaporated. Their 33-year-old daughter, whom we’ll call Pauline, accused her father of sexually molesting her when she was 5. During the next few months she would add child pornography and ritual baby-killing to the list. “Pauline told me, `You murdered so many I lost count,’ ” Roger said.
Pauline is certain that those alleged events took place in the basement 28 years earlier because the memories “came” to her during therapy with a counselor from the Vineyard Ministry in Rockford, a charismatic church that has branches in the Chicago suburbs.
“After she first made her charges,” Roger said, “I took a lie-detector test, which my daughter and her mental-health professional laughed at. They said, `Anyone can lie.’ “
In an interview, Pauline said: “Therapists can lead people astray, but in my case that’s not true. . . . I know what happened. For me, the puzzle pieces have all come together. I have been depressed since I’ve been a little kid, and now I feel a freedom I’ve never felt before.”
Her brother, Bob, dismissed her allegations as “absurd.”
Pauline, who had severed all relationships with her father for two years, recently started seeing him again. “But it’s still real tense,” Roger said. “Now she has taken our two grandchildren to her therapist, and they are having memories of being abused too.”
Theirs is no longer such an unusual tale. The LaPlants’ story has been repeated in countless tidy kitchens across America, in what some people see as an epidemic of sexual abuse-or, at least, sexual abuse allegations.
Sometimes Dad is accused of leading a satanic cult, other times a prostitution ring. Sometimes the allegations are made after the breakup of a marriage or after a miscarriage. But the basic script remains the same: a sordid act remembered by a grown daughter (rarely a son) while in therapy, leaving families shocked and shattered.
“People say children don’t lie,” Roger said. “Well, my daughter isn’t lying. She firmly believes that this has happened to her.”
No one denies that incest is a widespread crime that can happen in the most hard-working, God-fearing families. Statistics on the number of adults who have been sexually abused as children range from 16 to 25 percent. The parade of celebrities-among them Roseanne Arnold, former Miss America Marilyn Van Derbur Atler and LaToya Jackson-who claim abuse has made the subject almost as routine in Hollywood as plastic surgery.
What’s going on? Are that many men in such a state of sexual frenzy that they must prey on daughters and granddaughters? Are wives so fearful of their mates that they’re willing to live with a pedophile? Can horrendous memories be repressed for decades, then suddenly bubble to the surface? Not so many years ago, victims of sexual abuse were rarely believed. Are we now believing too quickly?
“All we’re saying is, let’s use the same critical thinking that we would for anything else,” said Pamela Freyd, executive director of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, a national advocacy group based in Philadelphia.
Freyd, who has a doctoral degree in education and has been a teacher for 20 years, said she founded the group in 1992 to support family members accused by adults of committing incest and to “interject some calm into the hysteria.” (She said she also had some related personal experiences, which she declined to discuss.)
When she started the group, she knew seven families who were grappling with the same nightmare. Today, more than 2,600 families from the U.S., Canada and Europe have contacted the foundation, and it takes 30 volunteers to field all the calls.
A consistent pattern
“We generally talk to first-time callers for 30 to 40 minutes,” Freyd said. “We cannot determine the truth or falsity of any story that we hear. We simply record and look for patterns.”
Perhaps the most striking pattern the foundation has documented is that 80 percent of accusors are daughters 25 to 45 years old. Nearly all went into therapy for problems such as eating disorders, marital trouble or depression before recovering their memories.
Such data are available each month in the foundation’s newsletter, which is crammed with advice ranging from what to do if your child takes legal action against you (17 percent have been sued for injuries) to optimistic stories of reconciliation. Above all, it’s a shoulder to lean on for families struggling to hold it all together.
While the first reaction to accusations of incest may be to want to crawl into a hole, the foundation advocates fighting back.
In Lowell, Mass., Shirley and Raymond Souza, who were convicted of sexually abusing two of their grandchildren, have received the support of hundreds of friends and neighbors who have formed a defense committee to raise funds for the couple’s appeal. On May 10, the Souzas, both 61, were sentenced to 9 to 15 years in prison.
The LePlants have chosen to go public “because it’s the only way we have to show our daughter we love her,” Liz said in a tired voice. “If I try to tell her, she accuses me of being too controlling.”
Could the False Memory Syndrome Foundation be the perfect cover-up for legitimate abusers?
“Maybe,” said Liz, who is the foundation’s coordinator for Illinois. “We just take people at their word. But if you see all the families and listened to their pain, I can’t imagine anyone sitting through all that heartache. Nobody would want to do that.”
Amnesia `doesn’t track’
The increase in the number of adult children who reportedly recover abuse memories is troubling to many people. One of the most outspoken has been Richard Gardner, a clinical professor of child psychology at Columbia University, who compares the situation to the Salem Witch Trials in 1692 and the communist witchhunts of the 1950s.
Gardner has helped convict numerous sex offenders, but he doesn’t buy decades of amnesia that suddenly turn into alleged monstrous acts.
“Other victims of traumatic events-such as Holocaust survivors, for example-cannot get the horrors out their mind. Here, we’re dealing with people who don’t remember anything for 30 or 40 years, and in the course of therapy-it suddenly all comes back? Something doesn’t track here.”
What doesn’t track, according to Gardner, is that some therapists start with a presumption of sexual abuse and then manipulate, prod and coerce already vulnerable patients until they get them to confirm their presumption. Some patients-adamant that no abuse took place-are accused of being “in denial” or of “not being cooperative.”
In the case of the Souzas, the grandchildren testified to being locked naked in a cage in the basement and being tied to the bedpost with a brown rope; being forced to touch their grandparents’ genitalia; and being touched by their grandparents.
Said Gardner, who is involved in the Souzas’ defense: “I showed a tape where the child is saying, “My mommy says that Grandpa tied me up.’ And the evaluator said, `Well, tell me more about how Grandpa tied you up.’ Saying nothing about the child saying, `My mommy said.’ “
Such claims also provide women who are having problems with relationships, drug addictions or eating disorders a handy hook on which to hang their problems.
“If a patient can come to believe that her father’s sex activities with her in early childhood were the cause of all her difficulties, then she has a simple solution,” said Gardner, author of “True and False Accusations of Child Sex Abuse: A Guide for Legal and Mental Health Professionals.”
Simple answers from books
Simple answers to complex problems can also be found in the self-help section of any bookstore.
“The Courage to Heal” by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis, which has become the bible of the recovery movement, has come in for hefty bashing from family members, even though many reputable therapists consider it required reading for their patients.
The book asserts:
– “If you are unable to remember any specific instances of childhood sexual abuse, but still have the feeling that something happened to you, it probably did.”
– “If you think you were abused and your life shows symptoms, you probably were.”
“Secret Survivors: Uncovering Incest and Its Aftereffects in Women” by E. Sue Blume contains a 34-item survivor’s checklist that includes “not at home in one’s own body,” “headaches,” “need to be perfect,” “feeling crazy” and an “extreme desire for privacy when using the bathroom.” Those characteristics may describe people who are survivors of incest, but they also describe many people who aren’t.
Many professionals question the techniques used to retrieve memories: hypnosis, dream interpretation, psychodramas, illustration and amobarbital, a compound used during World War II to help soldiers talk about the trauma of battle, so they could be “fixed up” and set back into combat.
The case against the Souzas was built in part on the basis of one of their daughter’s dreams, in which she was being raped by her parents. Lynn Gondolf, a Texas woman who has since recanted her story of her father repeatedly raping her, said her counselor “told me that my drawing of my home revealed that it was an unhappy place.”
Bandwagon counselors
Diagnoses may be reached because in some cases the people delving into such sensitive areas may not be mental-health professionals.
While one can’t claim to be a psychiatrist (who is a medical doctor), a psychologist or a psychiatric social worker without the proper accreditation, it takes no formal certification in many states to call yourself a therapist or counselor and cash in on the multimillion-dollar industry known as the recovery movement.
“Fads are picked up by people on the periphery of psychiatry and wrapped up into a juggernaut,” said Dr. Paul McHugh, director of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions in Baltimore and a board member of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation.
But equally respected physicians say such techniques as hypnosis, dream interpretation, psychodramas, illustration and use of drugs have their place.
“Everything may have its place when used by informed, well-trained professionals,” said Richard Kluft, director of the dissociative disorders program at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia. “In therapy, you may be told absurd things that are the truth and reasonable things that are fantasy. For a given patient, you are going to find areas that are true, areas that are false, areas which you can’t say anything about and areas that are obviously influenced by therapy. The problem is that there’s no reliable way to determine which is which.
“The tradition of psychotherapy is that you expect all sorts of things to come up and you sort them out as you get to know the patient,” Kluft said. “What is happening now is that something comes up and people immediately start running amok.”
Dr. Lenore Terr, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the Medical School of the University of California at San Francisco, is considered one of the country’s leading experts on memory. Terr, who has been studying child abuse since 1962, said memories can return after years and can be accurate-but with some distortions.
She recounted the story of a woman who had a perfect memory of a finger being inserted into her vagina as a child. “It happened only once, but she could remember a person standing at her feet and hurting her; she thought it was her grandfather, but her mother-with whom she had checked-remembered that it was a urologist who had put an instrument into the child’s urethra so she could urinate normally.
“So the memory was completely accurate and, yes, it was a repressed memory, but it was the urologist, not the grandfather. The key was that there was some attempt at corroboration.
“The real tragedy is when a woman confronts someone before trying to make any external confirmation-for example, asking a sister: `Do you remember being tickled a lot by our neighbor? Do you remember anyone coming into our room?’ “
Ask questions early
While people may want a handy checklist to test the veracity of such memories, you can never make a blanket statement that such repressed memories are all right or all wrong.
“That’s why every single case has to be looked at individually,” Terr said. “About the only thing that is absolutely certain is that it would be a lot easier if we could deal with this in childhood. Children drop hints, but many adults let them pass. Parents need to follow up with questions. `What do you mean Mr. Smith is playing funny games?’ `Why did you ask if it’s wrong to take your clothes off?’ If these people could be treated right away, you have a better crack at helping them than you do 30 years later.”
Knowing what could or should have been done is little consolation to the LaPlants. Their focus is on the future, and they are buoyed every time they hear that a daughter has recanted.
“If Pauline walked up our driveway today and said, `Mom and Dad, I was mistaken,’ all would be forgiven,” Liz said. “You never stop hoping, and you never stop loving them. They’re still your kids.”
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Call 800-568-8882 for more information on the False Memory Syndrome Foundation.
A mother tells of her `devastating experience’
Here is the text of a letter sent to the False Memory Syndrome Foundation’s monthly newsletter:
The meeting with my daughter and the therapist was the most devastating and numbing experience I remember ever having experienced. My daughter was supported by the therapist in a very emotional and angry tirade directed at me.
The therapist insisted that I had had an abused childhood, that I was either deliberately or unwittingly withholding painful episodes of abuse involving myself, relatives or family friends. The more the therapist made these statements, suggesting things that I was “denying,” the angrier and more unreasonable became my daughter’s tirade.
It broke my heart to sit and watch and hear my daughter, whom I love with all of my being, hurting so very deeply. And I was unable to hug her or say anything, except to very feebly express my total bewilderment. The therapist, in my presence, as though I were not there, pointed out to my daughter that not only was I a person who needed to control everything and everyone, I was also a “great denier.”
A Mother
