As long as your are "Gathering Material for the Defence" this is the BEST article I have read about the subject. Your "friends" must be paying you well, or you are very twisted in your ideologies, or perhaps, this is the "price you pay" so you can get closer to the "inner circle" of traveler trust.

The following editorial is enough for the prosecution to get any jury to send your client to jail for a long time. (I refuse to watch television, except in an emergency, and seldom listen to the radio - therefore, I have not seen the horrific tape - nor do I ever want to - but I have seen films of the Harlow experiments - they are chilling.)

EXCERPTS from:

Los Angeles Times - Op/Ed page one CHILDREN -Young Brains Shaped by Abuse October 6, 2002
By DEBORAH BLUM
MADISON, Wis.

It's a kind of gospel of neuroscience that our brains do their best job of preserving a memory when emotion helps burn it in. We need photographic records of the easy moments because they slip away. Our neurons, those busy nerve cells in our brains, are careless with contentment. They don't pay close attention. It's the jolt of shock or grief or fear that etches a memory deepest.

To understand just how powerful this effect is--like national tragedy, like death in the family--you have to recognize just how important a parent is to a small child. Actually, we ought to have that one down by now. The most compelling experiments ever, illuminating the inescapable bond between an abusive mother and a child who needs her, were done in the 1960s. Let's not fool ourselves: We've known for decades what a dangerous parent means to a small child.

The studies I'm thinking of were done by the late Harry Harlow, a University of Wisconsin psychologist who used baby monkeys as his model for small children. In this particular set of experiments, he wanted to know what happens to a child whose mother rejects her. He wanted to be very precise about the nature of rejection. So he and his colleagues built a series of "evil" robot mothers. They had soft padded bodies and blandly smiling faces. But they were evil, all right. One shook infants until their teeth rattled. One was spring-loaded to hurl the baby animals away. The most infamous came equipped with brass knobs that would ram into a baby as it cuddled in.

Harlow and his colleagues expected that they would end up with neurotic babies. And they did. But, unexpectedly, they also produced devoted ones. No matter what the mothers did, the babies always came back. A baby monkey would pick itself up, wait until the knobs retracted, and once again wrap itself around the mother. It would cling hopefully to the shaking mother, trying to stay on. The infants seemed tireless in their willingness to try again to persuade their mothers to, well, be mothers--be loving, be safe.

Those studies represent only a fraction of Harlow's sometimes lovely, sometimes explicitly painful research into parent-child relationships. He believed that his other work, demonstrating the importance of a loving touch, mattered more in everyday life. No one grows up whole and healthy, he insisted, without "a solid foundation of affection." But he was emphatic about the value of the darker studies. Not every child gets that foundation; some get the opposite, obviously. And yet all children need loving adult support. If you're going to study love, Harlow insisted, you have to study all its aspects.

Since the Harlow days, psychology has leaped forward in illuminating our need for that foundation of affection, and nurturing, and security. No psychologist argues that parents need to be perfect, that we permanently damage a child through the occasional gust of impatience or anger. But the emphasis there is on occasional. Consider once again the accidental gotcha of that parking lot security tape. Does anyone believe that this was the one, the only time that Martha Toogood's mother took out her frustrations on her child?

Researchers such as Robert Sapolsky, at Stanford University, have shown that a young brain does its desperate best to cope with an environment of fear and threat. It restructures. It notches up the stress response. It keeps the body poised for flight. It floods the nervous system with angst. When the child grows up, the adult brain is beautifully designed to hover right on the edge of panic. Although there's a certain hyper-alertness in that, Sapolsky and his colleagues see no advantage. They see cost. Stress-related hormones and neurotransmitters put real wear and tear on the system and have been linked to destruction of brain cells and to memory loss.

And abuse wears away at the potential of the child in other ways. Psychologists once thought that all people had an innate ability to read facial expressions, were born knowing how to register a friendly smile and an angry frown. Now studies contradict that. Experiments instead show that abused children can be face-blind. Consistently, these boys and girls will read anger into a smile, see real threat in even the mild irritation of a raised eyebrow. Their brains show a sudden furious leap of response, one that doesn't register in children from more supportive homes.

So "I had a bad day" doesn't make it as an excuse, not for Martha Toogood's mother, not for any of us. Let's go ahead and file the videotape away. And, yes, let's give that child a break from home. I hope she has a chance for some silly, happy moments, gets to pile up some of those bright, casual photographs. Memories count. Let's not forget that.

*

Deborah Blum is a Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer and the author of "Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection."