Quotes on Roland Summit
  
 (1999)

Roland Summit’s ideas provided a pseudo-scientific rationale which underpinned the approach taken by the investigators. He had written a 1978 paper outlining what he termed "The Child Sexual Abuse Accommodation Syndrome". In that paper he argued that children never fabricated accounts of sexual abuse and thus were to be believed when they disclosed them, regardless of how incredible their accounts were. However, children who had been victims of incest would often recant in order, as he claimed, to maintain family equilibrium. Here were two components which were to be reiterated by many of those involved in subsequent investigations, and they became enshrined as dogma in the phrase ‘Believe the Children’ - and in the maxim that children never lie about sexual abuse unless they are recanting. Because of this it is extremely important to note that Summit’s supposedly scientifically-phrased ‘Syndrome’ was based on no research, being in his own words "impressionistic". For the twelve years before he constructed the ‘Syndrome’ he had done no therapy with children under 7, and even then the children were not in treatment for sexual abuse (Nathan and Snedeker:145). This is very important, because Summit’s ‘Syndrome’ was subsequently asserted in legal proceedings as a way of dismissing children’s denials of abuse.

As a major protagonist in the satanism scare, it is also worth examining Summit’s use of logic when faced with the possible unreliability of a claim. For instance, Summit has both denied that the complainant mother in the McMartin case was mentally unbalanced when she made her allegations, but simultaneously argued that mental instability is a pre-requisite for the recognition of child abuse:

Eccentric, alienated, unsocialized and paranoid personality types are needed to ferret out allegations of child sex abuse in the face of lack of evidence and conventional, well-socialised parents and professionals (who reinforce denial for their own mutual belief)...It takes somebody paranoid to continue to express suspicion and to take the child from doctor to doctor until somebody confirms that maybe there is abuse (Summit, quoted in Earl, 1995:90-91)

In a further piece of innuendo, Summit has alleged that the mother’s paranoia may not have been delusional but the result of ‘menacing strangers [presumably the perpetrators] who patrolled her yard’ (Earl:90). Similarly, in the face of considerable investigation and evidence to the contrary, Summit has continued to insist - in line with his fervent belief in SRA - that there were tunnels underneath the McMartin playschool (Summit, 1994)

“Satan's Excellent Adventure in the Antipodes” by Michael Hill, Professor of Sociology

(1995) 

So the ritual abuse support groups continue to meet and the conferences continue to be held, most recently last September when 300 counsellors and healthcare workers gathered to hear a six-hour lecture from an American ritual abuse campaigner, Dr Roland Summit. A psychiatrist who was involved in the failed McMartin preschool case, Dr Summit devoted much of his lecture to the "backlash" being perpetrated by journalists and academics against ritual abuse believers. He mentioned stories of blood-spattered babies hanging from trees, but cautioned that he did not know how reliable these stories were. Dr Summit's speech was co-sponsored by the Child Protection Council, the Children's Hospital and the Australian Medical Association.

“Therapy in Turmoil: The Memory Controversy (part 1)” By Richard Gulliatt

(1995) 

Roland Summit who wrote a paper in 1978 called "The Child Sexual Abuse Accommodation Syndrome" (CSAAS). He promoted the concept that children's stories of sexual abuse must be totally believed, even though they sounded incredible or would have been physically impossible. However, children were not to be believed if they later retracted their stores of abuse. It was only later that researchers proved that young children can easily be influenced to describe events that never happened, in response to direct and repeated questioning.

Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA) - An Introduction by Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance

(1994) 

Summit is a prime believer in organised widespread satanic ritual abuse. Despite the complete absence of any objective evidence from police investigation of the McMartin Pre-school case, and the acquittal of all accused, he has published articles arguing that satanism really was practiced there, and that the tunnels existed despite the police's inability to locate them. In the last decade he has been one of the primary professionals endorsing the viewpoint that "children never lie about abuse" and has close associations with the "Believe the Children" organisation. He also invented the "Child Abuse Accommodation Syndrome" in 1983, which states that children will always deny abuse, even once they have disclosed it. Although this may sometimes be true, he does not acknowledge the possibility that a denial might mean that in fact sexual abuse has not happened.

Casualties of Sexual Allegations, Newsletter August 1994

(1996) 

In 1983, Roland Summit developed a model called the Child Sexual Abuse Accommodation syndrome. This model stated that the stages of
disclosure of child sexual abuse followed the following patterns: secrecy, helplessness, entrapment, disclosure, and retraction.

According to Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker in Satan's Silence, Summit had no children as patients at the time he developed this model, and he had done no research. The model, which was purely hypothetical, became tremendously influential in the thinking of child protectors. Steven Ceci and Maggie Bruck in Jeopardy in the Courtroom asked how Summit's claims stack up against the empirical literature. 

According to the research, Ceci and Bruck note that, "there are a number of children who immediately disclose their abuse (either accidentally or deliberately), but there are also a number of children who delay their disclosures for long periods of time. No profile accounts for a sizable portion of these children's behavior." (p 35)

FMS Foundation Newsletter, Vol 5 No. 1, January 1, 1996

(1992) 

Underwager said many psychotherapists believe in "recovered, repressed memories" and in the claims of those who "retrieve" such memories through psychotherapy. One of the leaders, Roland Summit, for example, claims that memory of abuse is often buried within a conscious memory of a happy childhood and that half of all women are sexually abused as children.

Underwager, however, says such claims lack scientific support. Studies show that memory, especially of early childhood, is more reconstruction than recall. As a fluid process, he said, memory and the ability to reconstruct memory is contingent upon one's current state of mind, beliefs and circumstances.

FMS Foundation Newsletter, Vol 1 No. 4, May 1, 1992