Gender and Recall of Child Sexual Abuse

Abstract

One critical question at the heart of the debate on recovered memory is “how common is it to have no memory of sexual abuse that occurred in one’s childhood?” An increasingly large number of studies have documented that traumatic events from childhood may be forgotten (see Williams & Banyard, in press). Much of this research has specifically focused on adults’ experiences with forgetting child sexual abuse and is based on naturalistic studies of clinical samples of men and women in treatment for the consequences of sexual abuse. This research reveals that many adults who now recall sexual abuse that occurred during childhood report that there were prior periods when they did not remember the abuse. For example, Herman and Schatzow (1987) found that over half of the women participating in an outpatient group for incest survivors reported some degree of prior forgetting of the sexual abuse they had experienced and that 28% of the women reported prior severe memory deficits. Prior studies have not focused on memories of sexual abuse among males or on possible differences in memory status for men and women who have experienced sexual abuse in childhood.

This research was supported by the US Department of Health and Social Services, National Center for Child Abuse and Neglect Grants #90-CA-1495 to the Joseph J. Peters Institute and #90-CA-1406 and #1552 to the University of New Hampshire (Linda M. Williams, principal investigator). The authors gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Jane Siegel, Project Director.