Like many of those who have been affected by a false allegation of sexual abuse, my heart sank when I turned on Women’s Hour on January 9th 2023 and heard yet again the claim that such cases were very rare. I’m afraid it was too upsetting to go on listening. The comment was made in […]

The tragic story of Antony Broadwater’s wrongful conviction is essential reading because, although it took place in the USA, there are important lessons for our own justice system. Mistaken Identity In 1981 Alice Sebold, an 18-year-old student in Syracuse University in the US, was violently raped in an underpass amongst broken beer bottles and dead […]

Whether or not all memories are accurate is of vital importance to the wrongfully accused. This is particularly the case when the allegations are historical. In such cases, there will usually be no witnesses to the event described by the complainant, and no forensic evidence. Records made by the accused may well have been lost […]

An article on The Justice Gap website gives an interesting insight into the mind of Danny Day who falsely accused a fireman Dave Bryant of raping him three decades earlier. Dave Bryant was convicted in 2013 and sent to prison. His case was quashed on appeal in 2016. Shortly after his release his wife Lynn […]

Carol Felstead’s father describes how his daughter developed false memories of abuse after receiving hypnosis purported to recover repressed memories. Dr Julia Shaw, a memory scientist talks about the danger of “recovered memory therapy” and the need for better regulation of the psychotherapy industry. Watch the video on the BFMS site here. Listen to ‘Sentence […]

Anyone who has been wrongfully accused of child abuse will know how difficult it is to convince others, whether police, social services or their employers, that they are innocent. One reason for this may be that everyone is subject to cognitive biases. These are very common thinking errors which influence the way we make decisions. […]

What follows is a shocking story of how a wrongfully accused teacher lost everything. His career, his home, his reputation and of course his happiness. It tells how he contemplated suicide as the only way to escape his suffering. Simon Warr taught O level languages. He was, and is an innocent victim of the febrile […]

Notes on a lecture on Friday 18th November 2016, at the Forensic Psychology Unit, Goldsmith’s College, London Panel: Professor Elizabeth Loftus, Professor Christopher French, Dr Robert Nash and Dr Kimberley Wade Definition of a false memory: a memory that feels absolutely real but the remembered event didn’t actually happen. We don’t live far from Goldsmith’s […]

This new book, Wrongful Allegations of Sexual and Child Abuse, is edited by Dr Ros Burnett (Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford). It contains 21 chapters by criminologists, psychologists, legal scholars and other experts, discussing policies and practices that impact on people who are falsely accused of sexual and physical offences against adults and children. […]

The Victorian government will reportedly conduct an investigation into the practice of repressed memory therapy.The government revealed plans it would look into who was practising repressed memory therapy and the training they had received, according to a report on the ABC TV program Stateline. The Health Services Commissioner will oversee the inquiry which is expected […]