Adults can accurately recall traumatic events from childhood, including instances of sexual abuse, a new article shows.
This has prompted the researchers to advocate for investigation of childhood abuse claims made by people who come forward as adults.
“Time alone should not be a bar to hearing evidence about prior sexual assault,” said FIU legal psychologist Deborah Goldfarb, who is a co-author on the paper. “The evidence should be heard on its merits and arbiters of fact can then make an informed decision.”
According to the study, the more traumatic the event is to the individual, the more likely a person is to accurately remember it. Also, in general, children who are older at the time of an event are more likely to accurately remember. However, there is evidence that sometimes even those who are young at the time of a sexual assault can also accurately recall parts of that event decades later. Further, researchers found that victims’ memories are more accurate if they suffered from post-traumatic stress and if they received a higher level of maternal support.
Researchers from FIU and University of California, Davis made the findings after interviewing adults from two groups – people who were abused as 4- to 17-year-olds and were involved in the prosecution of their abusers, and people who were removed from their homes between the ages of 4 and 17 because of suspected maltreatment. Distinguished Professor of Psychology Gail Goodman from UC Davis was the lead author.
Although people might delay coming forward or forget some details in cases where trials are decades after the alleged abuse took place, that is not grounds for dismissing a victim’s complaint outright, researchers said. Often, there’s a reason why people delay in filing a complaint.
“Delaying disclosure is quite common for individuals who have experienced sexual assault,” Goldfarb said. “Studies have found a connection between the severity of the sexual assault and delaying disclosure.”
Goldfarb is an attorney and assistant professor of psychology at FIU. Her research analyzes the effect of time on memory for legally relevant events. She has published several articles on child sexual abuse allegations, children’s eyewitness memory and testimony and delay in disclosure of child sexual abuse.
An overview of the findings, which were based on longitudinal studies of 217 participants and 30 participants, will be published in a forthcoming article in Child Development Perspectives, a journal of the Society for Research in Child Development. Funding for this research was provided by the Administration on Children and Families, National Science Foundation and National Institute of Justice.
[…] Memories of sexual abuse, trauma remain accurate into adulthood […]
Timely and relevant.
No one disputes that those kinds of traumatic abuses can be recalled but by the same token it is also been proven that repressed memories of such events can be manipulated and victims can replace certain parts of the memory with something else.
I for one, have been witness to such an event. A very close friend of mine had his life ruined when it was discovered his daughter had been sexually molested. This was discovered after therapy sessions to help her as she was having grave difficulties with many aspects of her life and no one could identify why. Somehow the memories turned to accusing her father of the molestation. What happened next was a travesty and not until 3 years later, lives being ruined and an injustice of the law against the father was it discovered that the daughters memories had been manipulated in such a way because she truly was so devastated she could not remember who actually did the abuse and somehow her father was put in that persons place. So repressed memories of traumatic events can be remembered incorrectly and we need to be very careful of that. When it was finally discovered the daughter was even more devastated and the father destroyed. Nothing can replace that time, the reputation of the father, the broken family and the guilt the daughter now lives with
“[Kids] don’t remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are.”
I THINK a lot of our problem back to our teching
thank you for useful information