Memories " recovered " in therapy should not be allowed in court . SCIENTIFIC techniques for gathering evidence are usually treated cautiously by criminal courts until their efficacy has been proved beyond doubt . The use of fingerprints , for example , took a long time to be accepted . The DNA version of " fingerprinting " is still controversial in some jurisdictions . This is proper . Because forensic science appears to be both powerful and disinterested it can sometimes weigh disproportionately on jurors .

One allegedly scientific technique , known as " recovered - memory therapy " , is a case in point . Its practitioners believe that there exists a special mental mechanism that sequesters and represses the memory of repeated traumatic events , and that , by the use of special techniques , it is possible to recover these memories accurately , years or even decades later . Memories of such long - ago traumas ( most often childhood sexual abuse ) that have apparently been " recovered " by psychotherapists using these techniques have been employed in many countries to convict alleged paedophiles . Sometimes , no corroboration has been offered .

Unfortunately , recovered - memory therapy has not been proved beyond doubt to be reliable . In the minds of many scientific researchers it has not even been proved at all - - rather the opposite . Yet not only is its use accepted without question in many places , but the rules of evidence have often been bent to accommodate testimony gathered by it . In some places , indeed , statutes of limitation have been suspended for this sort of evidence alone .

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Two wrongs This bending of normal judicial procedures arises , to be sure , from a commendable desire to prosecute people who sexually abuse children , and to deter others who might be contemplating it . In recent years it has become clear that such appalling crimes are far more common than was previously thought , and that the shame and fear of the victims have protected many perpetrators . But that is no argument for endowing an unproven procedure such as recovered - memory therapy with the halo of science and then going on to use it to bring unsafe convictions .

By contrast with recovered - memory therapy , hypnosis is a reasonably well understood phenomenon . It is used by some police forces to help gather evidence . It can help to point the finger in circumstances that are otherwise mysterious . And yet such evidence is not admissible in court . This is because of a consistent finding that people are more confident of their memories under hypnosis , but that the memories themselves are more likely to be inaccurate . Only if the finger pointed under hypnosis leads to more substantial proof , of a sort that is admissible , can a case proceed .

The proper caution that governs the forensic use of hypnosis makes it all the more disturbing that some jurisdictions have come to treat the much more dubious methods used by psychotherapists to " recover " memory with special respect . There is , indeed , a consensus among mainstream medical institutions such as the American Psychiatric Association that , at its most charitable , there is no way in which scientists can tell if memories " recovered " in this way are reliable renderings of actual events .

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The rules of evidence are there for good reasons . They have been established over the centuries to protect innocent people from imprisonment . The same is true of statutes of limitation . Natural though it is for legislators to wish to hunt down sex offenders , there is no justification for doing so in a way such as this , which is liable to result in unsafe and unjust convictions . The recovered - memory bandwagon needs to be trundled sharply out of the courts that have been unwise enough to let it in .

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