Child Sex Abuse and Recovered Memories of Abuse: Looking Back, Looking Ahead

Abstract

Sexual abuse of children has garnered a substantial amount of empirical research, state and federal legislation, and media coverage in the past several decades. This article briefly examines the history of child maltreatment and child sexual abuse (CSA) and societal responses to it. A review of selected articles on CSA that were published since the inception of Families in Society reveals how our knowledge of and ideas about sexual abuse, the perpetrators, responses to abuse allegations, and the Freudian concept of repression have changed over time. The phenomenon of repressed and recovered memories of abuse is also discussed, including the articles that were published in the journal. Despite continued disagreement in the field between researchers and clinicians, a summary is provided detailing points of consensus related to CSA and recovered memories.