@article{ref1,
title="Self-reports of forgetting and remembering childhood sexual abuse in a nationally representative sample of US women",
journal="Child abuse and neglect",
year="2002",
author="Wilsnack, Sharon C. and Wonderlich, S. A. and Kristjanson, Arlinda F. and Vogeltanz-Holm, Nancy D. and Wilsnack, R. W.",
volume="26",
number="2",
pages="139-147",
abstract="OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this article is to describe patterns of forgetting and remembering childhood sexual abuse (CSA) in a nationally representative sample of US adult women. METHOD: The respondents were a national probability sample of 711 women, aged 26 years to 54 years, residing in noninstitutional settings in the contiguous 48 states. In a 1996 face-to-face interview survey, trained female interviewers asked each respondent whether she had experienced any sexual coercion by family members or nonfamily members while growing up; whether she believed that she had been sexually abused (by family members or others); and whether she had ever forgotten the CSA experiences and, if so, how she had subsequently remembered them. RESULTS: Twenty-one and six-tenths percent of respondents reported having sexually coercive experiences while growing up; of these, 69.0% indicated that they felt they had been sexually abused. More than one-fourth of respondents who felt sexually abused reported that they had forgotten the abuse for some period of time but later remembered it on their own. Only 1.8% of women self-described as sexually abused reported remembering the abuse with the help of a therapist or other professional person. CONCLUSIONS: The findings indicate that, among women who report CSA, forgetting and subsequently remembering abuse experiences is not uncommon. According to the women surveyed, however, very few (1.8%) of those who felt abused recovered memories of CSA with help from therapists or other professionals. As one of the few studies of CSA memories in a nationally representative sample, this study suggests that therapist-assisted recall is not a major source of CSA memories among women in the US general population.<p /> <p>Language: en</p>",
language="en",
issn="0145-2134",
doi="",
url="http://dx.doi.org/"
}