REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING CHILDHOOD SEXUAL ABUSE

Out of a large number of university students who responded to a questi onnaire about childhood sexual abuse (CSA), approximately a quarter re ported that they had an experience in childhood that qualified. The ma jority of students who reported a CSA experience refused, elsewhere in the questionnaire, to classify themselves as 'sexually abused'. Moreo ver, those who claimed lack of understanding of the event at the time it occurred also reported that they thought about the event less often in the intervening years and that they conceivably would have not rem embered the event even if asked directly about it. Lack of understandi ng at the time of encoding leads to less reported memory. These observ ations are discussed in terms of possible mechanisms for how genuine s exual abuse experiences might be temporarily forgotten-even for extend ed periods-and subsequently remembered.