Implications
False memory rhetoric has made it popular to question the credibility of those reporting childhood abuse. A study of 113 adult victims of childhood sexual abuse in Ottawa found that although many of the women had corroborative evidence for their memories, over one-half had been accused by someone of having false memories. The women reported that exposure to false memory rhetoric led to increased symptoms of anxiety and depression, increased self-doubt about their memories, and an overall slowing of the progress of therapy (Dallam).
"Sociologist Katherine Beckett analyzed the evolution of the treatment of child sexual abuse in leading magazines and found that between 1980 and 1984 only 7% of stories focused on false accusations of child sexual abuse. With the founding of the FMSF in 1992, stories about false memories emerged; by 1994 Beckett found that 85% of the articles on child sexual abuse focused on false memories and false accusations. Mike Stanton (1997) spent a year studying the recovered memory controversy. Like Beckett, he found that false memory rhetoric had greatly influenced media reporting and that articles about false memory had been heavily slanted in favor of accepting the accused parents' stories without questioning whether they might in fact be guilty" (dallam).