When I was in my 30s, I accused my father of molesting me. I didn't see him or talk to him for eight years. I didn't let my children see him, either. And then I realised that it wasn't true.
In the late 1970s, a handful of feminist scholars had done some ground-breaking research and delivered some distressing news: incest wasn't the rare anomaly it had long been believed to be; it happened often, in normal families.
A psychological phenomenon called repressed memory had allowed this to go unacknowledged, even unknown. As Freud had first asserted a century earlier, the impact of child sexual abuse on young psyches was so profound that victims often lost their memories, for years or decades...
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