The Cleveland sexual abuse crisis of 1987 violently forced the issue of sexual trauma and incest into the public consciousness. The signs of abuse, written in the child's body, and the interpretation of those signs became a subject of fierce dispute. More recently, memories of abuse have become the focus of florid argument; organizations of adults accused of sexual abuse have formed into ‘false memory societies’, promoting an awareness of the constructive as opposed to photographically reproductive nature of memories of abuse. A number of commentators associated with false memory societies have blamed Freud for the alleged prevalence of naive notions of videorecorder-like memory. Freud is described as the father of ‘recovered memory therapy’, which, it is claimed, is responsible for an epidemic of false memories and false accusations of abuse, with devastating consequences for families. This charge against Freud followed hard on the heels of the earlier and opposite accusation, by writers such as Alice Miller and Jeffrey Masson,