reason it infuriates me when people say why should (insert perps name here) have to suffer for a "mistake" they made. When judges give out slaps on the wrist because he seems like such a nice guy. When people ask where was that teacher when I was in school? After a boy comes forward.
I have been reading this for the last bit. I think it may be of interest to you. You can decide if you want to share it with your son and/or with his therapist.
Again, we talked about how those stress hormones released at such high levels are going to impair the hippocampus. It's going to be difficult for the brain to encode and consolidate this information. So the memories are going to be fragmented when they're stored in the victim's brain. And that means that the recall of this is going to be very slow and difficult.
Now the way I try to explain this in presentations is I notice many of you are taking notes of this presentation, and many of you I see have full-size notes or sort of decent-sized legal pads. What if I told you that you had to take your notes on today's presentations on little teeny post-it notes like this size or maybe this size? You might get this size, or maybe you'll be fortunate and you'll actually get up to this size. And I want you to write down everything that you know and have learned in this presentation on post-it notes of different sizes. And they're all small. They're all little tiny pieces. I want you to write down what you know. And on something like this you might get a couple of words. On something like this you might get a small sketch, but it's going to be in lots of teeny tiny pieces. And let's just also pretend these are different colors — some are pink, some are yellow, and some are blue.
Now, I want you to take all of the post-it notes where you've so carefully tried to write down what you've learned in this talk. I want you to put them all in your hands, and I want you to imagine the messiest desk ever. Maybe it is your desk. Maybe it's your colleague's desk. I want you to take that pile of precious post-it notes, and I want you to scatter them all over that desk. I want you to put them up high. I want you to put them up low. I want you to put them in folders that have nothing to do with this talk. I want you to crinkle some of them up and shove them under things. I want you to take one and wad it up and put it in the pencil case. And then I want you to walk away for 24 hours, and then I want you to go back in and I want you to stand before that world's messiest desk and I want you to find all of those post-it notes. And I want you to put them in the correct order, and then I want you to tell me right back what you learned in my presentation.
That's why memory can be slow and difficult — because the encoding and the consolidation went down in a fragmented way. It went down on little tiny post-it notes and they were put in all different places in the mind. And you have to sort through all of it, and it's not well-organized, because remember I told you to put some of them in folders that had nothing to do with this. I told you to put one in the pencil jar. It's not where it's supposed to be. It takes a while to find all the pieces and put them together. So that's why victims, when they're trying to talk about this assault, it comes out slow and difficult.
But the question everybody wants to know about is the accuracy of that information, okay. And what we know from the research is that the laying down of that memory is accurate and the recall of it is accurate. So what gets written on the post-it notes — accurate. The storage of it is disorganized and fragmented.
However, there is an exception — alcohol. If the victim was under the influence of alcohol at the time of the assault, the encoding process might not have happened at all or in any degree of accuracy. I think in a group of this size all 21 and over, we can appreciate that alcohol impairs encoding across the board — not just for traumatic events, for a lot of events. So if you have a traumatic event that occurred under the context of alcohol, the information might not have been encoded, and it may not be consolidated, and it may not be transferred into long-term memory. So for victims who are assaulted under the influence of alcohol, they may not have anything to retrieve. So to speak, their post-it notes are just blank. They may not have it, okay? But for those who are able to remember it, either in pieces and parts, it does go in accurately, it does come out accurately, but it comes out slow, steady,fragmented and disorganized.
https://nij.gov/multimedia/presenter/presenter-campbell/pages/presenter-campbell-transcript.aspx
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