Sunday Times Sex Case Story Sham

The desire of the right-leaning part of the Fourth Estate to cast doubt on anything and everything to do with Labour’s deputy leader Tom Watson knows no bounds, and so it was no surprise to see Murdoch pundit David Aaronovitch trying his best to appear reasonable on today’s Sunday Politics before the inquisition of Andrew “Brillo Pad” Neil, only to be rightly called out by journalist and campaigner Peter Jukes as a conspiracy theorist.

Aaronovitch’s continued inability to understand how Police procedure works (see the Zelo Street takedown of this elementary failing HERE) has, though, been as nothing when put alongside today’s Sunday Times front page article “VIP sex cases link to false memory … Experts slam controversial therapy”. Here, the paper attempts to discredit witnesses who have come forward with complaints of child sexual abuse (CSA).

However, and here we encounter a significantly sized however, the standard of journalism in evidence is so lamentable as to render the piece effectively useless. Let us start at the very beginning, as it’s a very good place to start. “Two key witnesses championed by the deputy Labour leader tom Watson” it begins, going wrong immediately. Watson is not “championing” anyone. He is doing nothing more than facilitating.

But do go on: the witnesses “are being helped by a charity that uses a controversial therapy experts fear could generate false memories”. But only “could generate”, and we are not told whether the witnesses are subjected to that technique. If they are not, then why run the story, especially if this refers to an existing Police investigation and could therefore prove prejudicial to its outcome?

It gets worse: readers are told of “Matthew Scott, a leading QC who had worked on a number of child abuse cases”. Scott, otherwise known as the man behind the Barrister Blog, is, you guessed it, a barrister. What he is not is a QC, leading or otherwise. This is a basic research failure, and sadly for the ST it is not the only one.

Rather worse is the assertion “The therapy, in which the victims are given the details of the effects of sex abuse suffered by their own counsellor, has prompted concerns of a repeat of previous scandals in which ‘recovered memory’ played a part in false claims of child abuse in cases such as the Cleveland child abuse scandal in 1987 and the Orkney satanic ritual case in 1991”. Someone has not researched these cases very well.

“Recovered memory” therapy did not exist until AFTER both the Cleveland and Orkney cases had become part of the historical record. Add to that the quotation from Matthew Scott is from a blog post he wrote around a year ago on a different subject. All of which suggests that if anyone is suffering the effects of False Memory Syndrome, it is the hacks who cobbled together this appallingly bad piece of “journalism”.

Thus the sad decline of yet another former paper of record. Way to go eh, Rupe?