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Recovered memories of abuse in women with documented child sexual victimization histories
Author(s) -
Williams Linda M.
Publication year - 1995
Publication title -
journal of traumatic stress
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.259
H-Index - 134
eISSN - 1573-6598
pISSN - 0894-9867
DOI - 10.1002/jts.2490080408
Subject(s) - sexual abuse , forgetting , psychology , child abuse , recall , psychiatry , victimology , child sexual abuse , poison control , injury prevention , suicide prevention , clinical psychology , medicine , medical emergency , cognitive psychology
This study provides evidence that some adults who claim to have recovered memories of sexual abuse recall actual events that occurred in childhood. One hundred twenty‐nine women with documented histories of sexual victimization in childhood were interviewed and asked about abuse history. Seventeen years following the initial report of the abuse, 80 of the women recalled the victimization. One in 10 women (16% of those who recalled the abuse) reported that at some time in the past they had forgotten about the abuse. Those with a prior period of forgetting—the women with “recovered memories”—were younger at the time of abuse and were less likely to have received support from their mothers than the women who reported that they had always remembered their victimization. The women who had recovered memories and those who had always remembered had the same number of discrepancies when their accounts of the abuse were compared to the reports from the early 1970s.