This is prompted by a recent viewing of the documentary Capturing the Friedmans, which is highly recommended. It involves the sexual abuse hysteria of the 1980s, when people all over the country were persecuted on fabricated allegations of child molestation. At the same time, therapists were ascribing all sorts of adult problems to childhood sexual abuse and using specious methods to discover those memories. I believe most of their methods have been thoroughly debunked.
This is my family’s story. In 1983, my older sister went to college in a small town 700 miles away from our home in Los Angeles. She made the decision to live in an apartment alone, rather than in the dorms. Quite predictably, she became lonely and depressed.
It seems she quickly found a home in the campus network of support groups. It was Cal State Humboldt so it had a hippie vibe and I’m sure the self-help community was significant. She first sought out the “Adult Children of Alcoholics,” felt comfortable there and then continued on to other groups. My father is an alcoholic, so that wasn’t off-base, but accusations seemed to escalate at a rapid pace.
At some point, with the help of a therapist and maybe even hypnosis, my sister “recovered” a memory of childhood sexual abuse. She had a clear memory of sitting on the lap of a male neighbor. That memory was used to extrapolate the idea that my sister had been sexually molested.
I’m pretty sure the process went something like this: “you have these problems, you must have been molested. Let’s look at your past to find out when and where it happened. See, now that explains all your unhappiness.”
My sister blamed my parents allowing her molestation to happen and blamed them for all the poor choices she was making in life. She concentrated on my mother more, since the guilt really tore my mother apart. She wallowed in victimhood, saying that sexist men had ruined her life. When she turned 30, began to incorporate racism into the equation (we’re both half-Chinese) and asked me for advice (even though I am 8 years younger), I suggested that perhaps she should take some responsibility for her life and stop blaming other people. I told her I was especially troubled by her blaming of my mother, who was an absolute sweetheart that ran herself ragged giving us children whatever we needed. She cut me off, cold turkey.
Eventually, she chose to cut the whole family off as my mother was dying of cancer. It caused my mother untold suffering in the final months of her life - she constantly blamed herself, questioned what she had done wrong, hoped that things would be resolved before she died. They weren’t, and if I never see my sister again, that would be fine with me.
My sister was obviously troubled. But I wonder how things would have worked out if events had been different her freshman year of college. The crafting of the “survivor” identity seemed to consume my sister and perhaps it stunted her growth as a person. I’m wondering how many families out there were harmed by the sexual abuse hysteria of the 1980s. Care to share your story?