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Journal
of
Consulting
and
Clinical Psychology
1994,
Vol.
62,
No.
6,
1167-1176
Copyright
1994
by the
American
Psychological
Association,
Inc.
0022-006X/94/S3.00
SPECIAL
FEATURE
Recall
of
Childhood
Trauma:
A
Prospective
Study
of
Women's
Memories
of
Child Sexual Abuse
Linda
Meyer Williams
One
hundred twenty-nine women
with
previously documented histories
of
sexual victimization
in
childhood
were interviewed
and
asked detailed questions about their abuse histories
to
answer
the
question
"Do
people actually
forget
traumatic events such
as
child sexual abuse,
and if so, how
common
is
such forgetting?"
A
large proportion
of the
women (38%)
did not
recall
the
abuse that
had
been reported
17
years earlier. Women
who
were younger
at the
time
of the
abuse
and
those
who
were
molested
by
someone they knew were more likely
to
have
no
recall
of the
abuse.
The
implica-
tions
for
research
and
practice
are
discussed. Long periods
with
no
memory
of
abuse should
not be
regarded
as
evidence that
the
abuse
did not
occur.
In
the
early 1970s, child sexual abuse
was
thought
to be a
relatively
rare event.
In the
past
decade, however, several major
retrospective studies have independently documented
the ex-
tent
of
child sexual abuse
and
suggest that
our
early assessments
of
its
prevalence were gross underestimates.
The
best research
indicates that between
one fifth to one
third
of all
women have
experienced
sexual abuse
in
childhood (Finkelhor,
in
press; Fin-
kelhor,
Hotaling, Lewis,
&
Smith,
1990;
Kilpatrick,
Edmunds,
&
Seymour, 1992; Peters, Wyatt,
&
Finkelhor, 1986; Russell,
1984,
1988; Saunders, 1992). Because most sexual abuse expe-
rienced
in
childhood
was
never reported
to the
authorities (Fin-
kelhor,
1993),
our
understanding
of the
nature
and
long-term
consequences
of
child sexual abuse depends
in
large
part
on
such
retrospective studies.
Some child abuse researchers
and
other academics, however,
have
raised
scientific
questions about
the
accuracy
of
retrospec-
tive
reports (Briere,
1992b)
and
have taken steps
to
improve
the
validity
and
reliability
of the
questions posed
to
respondents
(Koss,
1993; Martin, Anderson, Romans, Mullen,
&
O'Shea,
1993).
One
concern
is
that,
in
such studies, legitimate cases
of
abuse
may be
missed,
and
most child abuse researchers argue
that prevalence estimates based
on
adult
retrospective reports
are
probably underestimates (Finkelhor,
in
press). Although
some have argued that there
may be
many
false
positives
in
ret-
This
research
was
supported
by
Grant
90-CA-1406
from
the
National
Center
on
Child Abuse
and
Neglect.
I
gratefully
acknowledge
the
research assistance
of
Jane Siegel,
Maisha
Sullivan,
Judith Jackson-Graves, Karen Gartner, Joan McCord,
Pat Van
Wagoner,
and
Kathleen Patton.
I
also thank Lucy Berliner,
Ben
Saunders,
John Briere, Kathy Kendall-Tackett, David Finkelhor, Julie
Lipovsky,
Batya
Hyman,
and
members
of the
1993 Family Violence
Seminar
for
their
helpful
comments
on
earlier
drafts
of
this article.
Correspondence concerning this article should
be
addressed
to
Linda
Meyer
Williams,
Family
Research Laboratory, University
of New
Hampshire,
126
Horton Social Science Center, Durham,
New
Hamp-
shire
03824.
respective
reports
(Nash,
1992),
the
prevailing presumption
is
that some victims
fail
to
disclose their victimization because
of
embarrassment
or
forgetting. Until now, there
was no
evidence
about
the
proportion
of
people sexually abused
in
childhood
who
would
fail
to
report
such abuse
on
reinterview many years
later.
The
scientific debate about retrospective studies that rely
on
recall
of
child sexual abuse
has
more recently been
affected
by a
public debate about repressed
and
recovered memories. Public
attention
has
focused
on a
large
and
steadily growing cadre
of
public
figures,
celebrities,
and
others
who
have revealed their
own
child sexual victimization experiences, many reporting
they
had at
some time forgotten that
the
abuse
had
occurred.
The
laws
in
many
states
have changed
to
extend
the
statute
of
limitations,
and
recently recovered memories
of
abuse have
figured
prominently