Rating ‘Recalled Details Opf Rape After Therapy’

A Royal Navy junior rating who claims she was raped by a senior colleague regained her memory of the incident after undergoing a controversial psychotherapy technique, a court martial heard yesterday.

Chief Petty Officer Phillip Coates denies a charge of raping the 24-year-old on board the warship while at sea in the Mediterranean between March 8 and 9 last year.

It is the first prosecution of an alleged rape of a female sailor since women were allowed to go to sea with the Navy, except on board submarines, in 1990.

The trial at HMS Nelson, in Portsmouth Naval Base, has heard that the leading hand was allegedly raped by the medical assistant who was on board the ship for Flag Officer Sea Training exercises.

The alleged victim told the court she was raped in a small room between decks after getting drunk at a barbecue held to mark the end of the training event. The trial has heard that in the days following the alleged attack, the rating could not remember the incident apart from “gut feelings” and “images”.

But two months later she attended a session with Dr Susanne McGowan, a consultant psychologist for the community mental health department at HMS Drake, Plymouth. Following these sessions, the alleged victim could remember the incident in much greater detail, the trial has heard.

Dr McGowan said yesterday that she was not treating the alleged victim as a patient but was giving her “support and an environment to help her recall memories”. She used a part of a technique used in Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR) to help the rating recall some of her lost memories, she said.

The technique involved tapping rhythmically on the rating’s hands to help her relax and focus, she said. But Dr McGowan admitted the technique was controversial as there was no guarantee that the recalled memories were not fantasy.

“The controversy is the suggestion that the therapist is putting ideas into the memory of the person being seen. Memories can always be fantasy or fact,” she said.

Dr McGowan added that she did not say anything which could have created memories in her client’s mind.

The trial has heard that the alleged victim left the sessions shaking because of the details she had recalled, but Dr McGowan told the court she only observed that the woman had become “flushed”.

“The issue she had was her inability to remember what happened and that was causing her distress.

“What I was doing was providing a secure, safe and relaxed environment using a technique which other clients find relaxing.

“I gave her the opportunity to freely recall the detail about what happened to her. Recall of memory is a natural and spontaneous thing. All I was offering was an environment in which that could possibly be accelerated.”

Under cross-examination by Alan Large, defending CPO Coates, Dr McGowan said that she did not take any notes of what the woman told her during the two sessions.

Mr Large said: “There is no way of telling whether the woman got back, during your sessions with her, a memory of fact or a memory of fantasy.” Dr McGowan replied: “That is true of all memory.”

She added: “We cannot know that memories recalled are valid or not valid.”

The woman told the hearing she only remembered the details of the alleged rape after seeing the psychologist in May – two months after the incident. She gave a brief statement in the hours after the alleged attack, but barely remembered anything a day later.

The woman said: “My memories were hazy but when Dr McGowan helped me my images and gut feelings became clear. It was like watching myself in a dream. It was like floating off in a daydream. Bit by bit I began to remember what happened and each bit that I remembered became longer.”

CPO Coates, who is in his 30s and married, had spent two days putting the vessel’s crew through their paces after boarding to carry out emergency training exercises.