Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: the Recency of Its Association With Sexual Abuse

The postulation about a connection between sexual abuse and post-traumatic stress disorder is remarkably recent. Many Swedish and international writings contain lists of real or alleged negative effects of abuse that had been observed. In the Swedish literature great authority is attributed to the following four titles: Monica Dahlström-Lannes (1990); Sexuella övergrepp mot barn. Allmänna råd från Socialstyrelsen 1991 no. 3; the same booklet revised by Monica Dahlström-Lannes and published in 1993; and Kaisu Akselsdotter (1993). Dahlström-Lannes was considered to be the leading expert on sexual abuse within the Swedish police for twenty years. – The next two books were published by The National Board of Health and Welfare, and the last was published by Save the Children. All four books contain lists of sexual abuse symptoms.

Note however that in none of these books is PTSD mentioned as a possible effect of abuse.

Patricia & David Mrazek (1981): The effect of child sexual abuse juxtaposed 54 negative effects of sexual abuse that allegedly were observed in 42 books or articles that were been published over a period of 49 years (1932-1981). None of them mentioned PTSD.

It could be argued that PTSD was not included in the usual diagnostic manual until 1980. It is therefore not even physically possible that a book or an article published before 1980 could have listed PTSD. And considering the time needed for (a) first-hand research, (b) publishing the result of first-hand research, (c) juxtaposing the results of many papers on such results, and (d) evaluating, accepting and printing Mrazek & Mrazek's manuscript, these writers could hardly have reported any results about PTSD in 1981.

This objection is valid concerning the terminology, but not concerning the facts. Before the Vietnam War the same syndrome was called "combat fatigue" and at the time of the First World War "shell shock". If children showed the same pattern of psychic illness that was later referred to as PTSD (a condition that has indeed been observed among child-prisoners of Nazi concentration camps), then descriptions of the pattern would have turned up repeatedly, and only the name would have been missing. – But no trace of such a pattern can be found in any writing.

Sweden is one of many countries that are strongly prone to imitate the USA. The Swedish craze about "detecting" sexual abuse in every corner, and about perceiving such crimes as extraordinarily important, is such a plagiarism. The same is true of the specific arguments applied in legal trials: the abuse symptoms, repression, dissociation, multiple personality, recovered memory therapy, etc.

The idea that PTSD is a recurrent effect of sexual abuse can be found occasionally in American writings as early as 1982. But it did not receive any great impact until 1993. There is a specific reason why this year was decisive.

The longest and most expensive legal case in the entire history of the United States is the trial involving the McMartin Pre-school in San Francisco. The information provided here about this case is primarily taken from Eberle & Eberle (1993) and Earl (1995). Something about this trial was mentioned in chapter 2. The case started in 1983 and ended in 1990. It is an objective fact that no child accused anybody of any crime, and that no child was afflicted by any psychic ailment, until the child had been exposed to intensive and extensive indoctrination by psychologists and pseudo-psychologists. The indoctrination is thoroughly documented on audio-tapes. By contrast, after the psychological treatment the children got serious nightmares, and then they accused 358 people of a wide variety of surrealistic assaults. For example, one of the teachers allegedly brought a lion to the preschool, which performed anal sex on one of the young boys.

As we noted above, the prosecutors realised that a trial of 358 defendants could only end with 358 acquittals. Therefore they prosecuted only two defendants, while all the other suspects disappeared in silence. The district court had borrowed judge William Pounders from the Supreme Court of California. We have seen in chapter 2 that Pounders permitted the prosecutors to mislead the jury, both by presenting adult witnesses who had been promised a great reduction of their punishment if they committed perjury, and by presenting child witnesses whose testimonies Pounders knew to be false.

This trial caused a gigantic media hype all across the United States for a period of seven years. When the defendants were finally acquitted, the rage rose to an even higher level. Because of this hysteria – and not because of any legal circumstances – an entirely new pattern occurred. The same defendants were tried once more for those few charges on which they had been acquitted by less than 100 % of the jury.

In 1990 the second trial again led to acquittal. And now the outrage grew to an altogether new dimension. Some psychologists and psychiatrists realised the need for new weapons. In 1993 Jill Waterman and her co-workers published Behind the Playground Walls. They claimed that the McMartin children had really been exposed to sexual as well as ritual abuse. The Waterman-team implied that the children and the preschool teachers had drunk blood from the skulls of babies who had been slaughtered. Furthermore, those psychic ailments that the indoctrinating psychotherapists had caused, were called "post-traumatic stress disorder". By means of this stratagem, Waterman and her co-workers constructed pseudo-evidence for a pseudo-theory about the close connection between sexual abuse and PTSD.

A further note is necessary. While many defendants in many countries had during an extended period been convicted on the basis of "sexual abuse symptoms" of the injured party, Kendall-Tackett et al. (1993) investigated 45 studies of such effects. They found that, with two exceptions, no symptoms were more frequent among abused children than among non-abused children. One of the two exceptions was PTSD.

However, the Kendall-Tackett team imagined that the McMartin children had really suffered abuse. And they falsely attributed the harmful iatrogenic effects of indoctrination to such imaginary effects. The team only put forward one qualification: since these children had been exposed to both sexual and ritual abuse, it is not clear how much of their PTSD was due to the former and how much was due to the latter. With such a serious flaw their results cannot be taken seriously.

In chapter 36 something will be said about the case of Judith. Here it should be noted that in this case Carl-Göran Svedin invoked Kendall-Tacket et al. (1993), after having had minimal contact with the injured party. The analysis by Edvardsson (1997) is important.









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Uppdaterad: 2009-11-19

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