Fragment by Fragment

With unflinching honesty, these 18 authoritative voices challenge the reader to look deeply into the complexity of memory and child sexual abuse. This is the most significant compilation of study to date about memory and false memory of child sexual abuse. Fragment by Fragment is both scholarly and clear and readable. The book’s authors assert, in different voices and perspectives, that memory is extremely complex. With intellectual integrity, these feminist scholars look squarely and deeply into this multi-layered phenomenon. The book gives us a complex understanding of the innate ambiguity of memory, itself, especially memory of trauma. As the title suggests, it is by piling fragment after fragment that a survivor, a therapist, a court, or society at large can come to a clear assertion that sexual abuse or incest has occurred in any given case. One part of this ambiguity is the fractured psyche of the survivor. A victim may know that they were abused, may have always remembered it, can even have concrete substantiation that it occurred, and yet may still doubt it, at moments, or for periods of time, in order to protect herself from bottomless grief. Remembering trauma is debilitating, sometimes impossible. We know and accept this for victims of other kinds of trauma, for example in war or after terrible car accidents, but yet society still holds the view that forgetting must be rare. Society has a profound need to deny the extent of both abuse and protective amnesia. This denial reinflicts the survivor. So, if she can manage to disbelieve or disregard her own experience she becomes more acceptable. The survivor’s silence in turn prevents society from learning more, so the whole thing becomes a vicious cycle. The book also includes a section on the courts, specifically how the ‘false memory syndrome’ was created to discredit witnesses testimonies. FMS defense is now used regularly, in Canada and the US, even where the victim never forgot, or there is corroboration, or even physical evidence. The passage of time also calls such memory into question. Therapist Anna Salter recounts how she was attacked for challenging the claims of false memory advocates; she endured lawsuits and slanderous comments in attempts to discredit her. While she encourages professionals to refuse to be intimidated by these tactics, the book points out that many therapists and legal professionals have stopped or reduced their work with survivors because of such attacks. So here’s my recommendation. Buy this book and read it; then pass it on (or buy a second copy and give it away). Perhaps then the book will have achieved its purpose, as a tool for social and political change. It’s up to us to get it out there.