impossible for us to even attend to all the perceptual elements of any given experience, much less to recall them all. There is no evidence to support the claim that all memories of experiences happened as they remembered to have happened or that they have even happened at all. And there is no evidence to support the claim that subjective certainty about the accuracy of memories or the vividness of memories significantly correlates with accuracy. Finally, the claim of a causal connection between abuse and health or behavior does not warrant concluding that ill health, mental or physical, is a 'sign' of having been abused. This model is the basis for a number of pseudoscientific works on child abuse by self-proclaimed experts such as Ellen Bass, E. Sue Blum, Laura Davis, Beverly Engel, Beverly Holman, Wendy Maltz and Mary Jane Williams. Through communal reinforcement many empirically unsupported notions, including the claim that about half of all women have been sexually abused, get treated as a 'fact' by many people. Psychologist Carol Tavris writes In what can only be called an incestuous arrangement, the authors of these books all rely on one another's work as supporting evidence for their own; they all recommend one another's books to their readers. If one of them comes up with a concocted statistic--such as "more than half of all women survivors of childhood sexual trauma "-- the numbers are traded like baseball cards, reprinted in every book and eventually enshrined as fact. Thus the cycle of misinformation, faulty statistics and unvalidated assertions maintains itself. (Tavris, 1993) The only difference between this group of experts and say, a group of physicists is that the child abuse experts have achieved their status as authorities not by scientific training but by either (a) experience [they were victims themselves or they have treated victims of abuse in their capacity as social workers] or (b) they wrote a book on child...
