HOW OFTEN ARE CHILDHOOD MEMORIES REPRESSED?

• There is general agreement among memory researchers that memories of events which happened before the age of 2 are never remembered into adulthood and cannot be recovered; memories before the age of 3 are rare and not particularly reliable. Claims by Ross et al (11) that 27% of their Multiple Personality Disordered (MPD) patients recall abuse that occurred before 3 years of age are probably invalid. A claim by Rosanne (12) of abuse when she was 6 months old is certainly a false memory. Claims by some adults that they can remember being a just-fertilized ovum stuck in their mother's fallopian tube are totally devoid of credibility.
• Some survivor's memories of childhood sexual abuse have always been present from the moment when they occurred until the present time. The memories were never repressed. Unfortunately, with the publicity given to false memories, these survivors are sometimes ignored or belittled.
• Some memories are simply forgotten. This includes almost all early life experiences. It is quite possible that a child could have a mild molestation experience and permanently forget about it, just as children can forget painful bicycle accidents, falling down stairs, breaking an arm. etc.
• Some therapists believe in the concept of repressed memories. i.e. that memories of hundreds of incidents of serious sexual abuse and ritual abuse can be actively repressed so that the events cannot be recollected in adulthood. They believe that through intensive techniques (hypnotism, "truth serum" sessions, guided imagery, dream analysis, etc) such memories can be recovered.
• Other therapists believe that a single instance of serious abuse after about age 4 or 5 is very rarely forgotten, and that repeated abuse after that age is perhaps never forgotten.

Two researchers from Harvard University recently completed a literature search on the topic of repressed memories of childhood incest. (1) They postulate instances of sexual child abuse where:

• the abuse has been corroborated independently of the survivor's memory
• the abuse was sufficiently traumatic that the child would have been expected to remember it if it were not for the repression
• the child actually repressed the memory (and didn't simply forget it)
• the victim in her adult years was unaware of the abuse; she was not lying about not having remembered it

Most people would accept this as a classic description of a recovered memory of childhood sexual abuse. However, Pope and Hudson were able to find only four such cases, none of them well documented, in all of the published literature. It may well be that (contrary to public belief) repression of traumatic childhood memories occurs very rarely.

Williams (2) studied 129 adults who had been treated as a child aged 10 months to 12 years in a large city hospital. The interviews were conducted about 17 years later when all had reached adulthood. 16 women (12%) said that they had no memories of childhood sexual abuse; 38% said they did not recall the incident that brought them to the hospital. Unfortunately, the study contains some ambiguities:

• the hospital records contained many findings of sexual abuse; unfortunately, in recent years, physical examinations of children have been shown to be unreliable. It was beyond the scope of the study to attempt to verify whether the abuse had actually happened by consulting with family members. The child might have been simply brought to the hospital to rule out the possibility of sexual abuse. Or sexual abuse might have been suspected, but did not actually occur in some cases.
• some of the molestation which was in the form of fondling might simply have been forgotten; it might have been less distressing to the child then accidents which are often not remembered into adulthood (e.g. breaking an arm or suffering serious cuts due to a fall)
• some of the children brought to the hospital were under the age of 24 months, before the age when memories are retained; others were under the age of 36 months when memories are unreliable and frequently forgotten.
• they did not interview the adults further to determine whether they:
  • had amnesia or
  • they remembered the abuse but did not choose to reveal it to the interviewer.

Fortunately, The Femina study (3) took this exploration one logical step further. They interviewed 69 people who had reported abuse 9 years earlier when jailed. Of these, 26 (38%) did not mention the abuse at the time of the study. This datum matches the Williams study. However, the interviewers then tried to find out why the victims did not report the abuse. The answers were unrelated to repressed memories. Common responses were:

• embarrassment
• a desire to protect parents and
• a need to try to forget the abuse.

It is probable that at least some of the incest and sexual abuse survivors in the Williams study had similar reasons. It is possible that few or none had repressed memories. It is tragic that the 12% of the women who didn't remember sexual abuse during childhood were not separately examined in the Williams study. If the study had been conducted differently, one might be able to conclude that essentially all children remember into adulthood any serious sexual abuse which occurred after the age of 4.

The Williams' study uncovered two additional factors:

• Survivors were more likely to recall sexual abuse with high amounts of force than with low amounts.
• Survivors were more slightly more likely to recall frequent abuse than infrequent abuse during childhood. However, the difference was not statistically significantly; a larger number of test subjects would be needed to verify this conclusion.

It is very difficult to understand why the Williams study has not been redesigned and repeated (perhaps on a larger scale). It would appear to be the best method of determining whether memories of repeated childhood sexual abuse actually can be repressed and to obtain an estimate of how often this happens.

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