Law in Action; I'm told this is well worth hearing.

An interesting discussion (catch it on iPlayer); most disturbing, to me, was the lady's final comment that she would have simply given up after the false accuser changed her story but that she felt she needed to highlight this situation. The vast majority of people I've met over the years have been victims or family of false allegations. The lucky few who escaped unscathed, like Simon Warr, Gambo, Cliff and Nigel Evans MP, bravely insist on continuing to champion change in the law and in police behaviour. I believe it is essential that we who survived continue to fight.

I listened to that part of the programme and found it interesting. I wonder how much damage therapists are doing. As far as I'm aware, they're not regulated in the UK. They might also be open to manipulation by a cunning false accuser, used to bolster their story. I suspect that one of Rolf Harris's accusers did that, reportedly obtaining a PTSD diagnosis in 2012.

Jo wrote:
I listened to that part of the programme and found it interesting. I wonder how much damage therapists are doing. As far as I'm aware, they're not regulated in the UK. They might also be open to manipulation by a cunning false accuser, used to bolster their story. I suspect that one of Rolf Harris's accusers did that, reportedly obtaining a PTSD diagnosis in 2012.

I have uncomplicated PTSD. It took months to get that diagnosis in my experience.

Memory is particularly problematic when used as evidence to support a claim in a police investigation or court trial. Police and lawyers are chiefly concerned with the surface images of memories and dreams, determining whether they are true or false. How can a dream or repressed memory that may “seem so real” be proven unless it’s backed up by some form of physical evidence? I think it’s not the image that interests most therapists but the feelings behind the image. A couple of examples. Someone may repeatedly dream of planes crashing, even if they have never been involved in a plane crash. Or someone with a healthy set of teeth may have a recurring dream of their teeth falling out. The emotions that underlie these images include fear: fear of what could happen or fear of loss. Sadness is another often repressed emotion. These underlying, unconscious, suppressed feelings that can manifest themselves in dream images may have been having a terrible long term impact on the mind. The longer they’re kept hidden, allowed to fester, the worse they become. Simply becoming aware of them may be all that’s needed to release or unlock their power over the mind. Crucially, no one can safely tell where feelings originate and start to become stuck or locked in the mind. They could spring from a combination of past events. They could even have originated in events that happened to family members from a previous generation, for exampe, a bereavement. Repressed feelings have a habit of being passed down to the next generation if not made conscious.