Amanda Marcotte talks about the value of using a preponderance of evidence standard in the court of public opinion as opposed to a beyond a reasonable doubt standard.

No feminists that I know of have ever in sincerity said that the court should throw out the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard in proving a crime. However, as Brady points out, that’s a criminal standard. It’s perfectly reasonable to have other standards for other situations, such as determining if you feel someone in your community is guilty and needs to be shunned as a danger to women. [Read more…]

The Guardian reports on a cunning plan from lawmakers in Afghanistan.

A new Afghan law will allow men to attack their wives, children and sisters without fear of judicial punishment, undoing years of slow progress in tackling violence in a country blighted by so-called “honour” killings, forced marriage and vicious domestic abuse.

The small but significant change to Afghanistan’s criminal prosecution code bans relatives of an accused person from testifying against them. Most violence against women in Afghanistan is within the family, so the law – passed by parliament but awaiting the signature of the president, Hamid Karzai – will effectively silence victims as well as most potential witnesses to their suffering. [Read more…]

Originally a comment on Creating false memories.

There is growing evidence that memories are actually stored in the brain in a very fragmented fashion, with individual fragments held in the place where the data point was processed. That is to say, your memory about driving to work this morning might consist of the sound of traffic and horns stored in the sound processing part of the brain, the route is stored in the part of the brain that processes spacial relationships, individuals signs stored in the parts that deal with vision, color, shape and contextual meaning, etc. These fragments are stored as archetypes: you do not have hundreds of memories about how bacon tastes, for example, you have only one or two that get used over and over again.

In the cerebellum, there is a kind of daemon that assembles these fragments into a cogent whole. This daemon is basically an idiot savant, capable of amazing feats but about as bright as a puppy. Like a puppy, it is very eager to please: if you ask for a memory that it does not know, it will assemble one for you out of the stored memory archetypes. There are independent checks, such as the part of the brain that gives rise to the “I’ve seen/heard/been here before” feeling, but ultimately the memory daemon is the final arbiter of what we remember.

If the daemon can be convinced that a memory exists, it will exist. Maybe it is an actual event — a birthday party or observation of a crime — with some facts remembered and other filled in to justify opinions or cover gaps. Maybe it never existed and was created from scratch, like a Ferris wheel made out of Tinker Toys. Once it has been sufficiently reinforced, it will be as real as any other memory.

Elizabeth Loftus in 1995:

This manuscript is close to the final version that was published with this citation:
Loftus, E.F. & Pickrell, J.E. (1995) The formation of false memories. Psychiatric Annals, 25, 720-725.

So, scroll down to Lost in a Shopping Mall.

Most of the experimental research on memory distortion has involved deliberate attempts to change memory for an event that actually was experienced. An important issue is whether it is possible to implant an entire false memory for something that never happened. Could it be done in an ethically permissible way? Several years ago a method was conceived for exploring this issue; why not see whether people could be led to believe that they had been lost in a shopping mall as a child even if they had not been. [Read more…]

Now morally superior Woody Allen is sending his lawyer out to go on tv and trash Mia Farrow.

(It’s all very tabloid, isn’t it, very People magazine, very what’s new in Hollywood. But it’s also a classic of power-abuse and celebrity-abuse and men crapping on women. We’re stuck with it for a bit.)

An attorney for Woody Allen said Tuesday that Dylan Farrow was coached by her mother and Allen’s former girlfriend, Mia Farrow, to believe false memories of sexual abuse by Allen. [Read more…]

Kathryn Joyce answers a question I’ve wondered about – yes, the way unmarried mothers were treated in the US (and elsewhere) was as bad (or almost as bad) as the way they were treated in Ireland, and yes, there were a lot of them, and yes, their babies were taken away from them.

It’s a time that in the United States is often referred to as the “Baby Scoop Era,” and during it some estimates hold that a full fifth of all children born to never-married white women relinquished their infants for adoption. For women sent to maternity homes, that number rose to 80 percent, comprising anywhere from 1.5 million to 6 million women.  [Read more…]

I’ve been thinking about memory, naturally. I often do anyway, and Dylan Farrow’s open letter has brought it to the fore again. I was thinking yesterday about how non-specific and narrative and composite my memories are, at least the older ones. I set myself a question: can I summon up a clear distinct visual memory that I know to be one memory, like a photograph?

I tried hard for some time, and couldn’t do it. I suspect it can’t be done. If I see something only once, I don’t properly remember it at all. If I see it repeatedly, I can visualize it, but I can tell the visualization is composite – it’s not a one-time look that gets frozen. [Read more…]

I was reading this article about child sexual abuse and belief, in which Andrea Grimes starts by telling us a little about herself –

I am an only child and I have awesome, twangy Texas-raised parents who Texas-raised me. My best friends are brilliant academics who sort of hate academia. I am overly friendly in awkward situations. I am funny and I love Star Trek. I throw big parties. I do yoga at home so I can skip savasana. I talk too much.

And when I was a kid, a relative sexually abused me.

I was reading this article, I say, and when I read that sentence I suddenly remembered that I can say the same thing, and that it was odd that I hadn’t thought of that while thinking about memory and Dylan Farrow. [Read more…]