“Child abuse is not necessarily traumatic or significant. Thus, recovered memories of such events can be explained by regular forgetting.”
“Repression is actually simple forgetting. Most children who get abused don't understand it at the time. Thus, it is not a significant experience… so they forget it, like we forget so many aspects of childhood.”
“The notion that sexual abuse is and should be a traumatic experience when it happens -- something done against the will of the victims… for most victims this is not the case.”
“The trauma model of sexual abuse not only does not help these people, it makes matters worse for them.” - Susan Clancy, in the FMSF Newsletter. [1]
“One must allow for ordinary forgetfulness for events not perceived as strikingly memorable, especially among the one-third of subjects who experienced only touching and fondling.” - Harrison Pope. [2]
“The person fails to think about the abuse for many years, NOT because it was so traumatic it was sealed off behind a "dissociative wall," but because it was nontraumatic at the time.” - Richard Mcnally, in the FMSF Newsletter. [3]
Refutation
Citations
[1] Rogers, Thomas. (2010, January 19) “The Trauma Myth”: The child betrayed. Salon. https://www.salon.com/2010/01/19/trauma_myth_interview/
Cited in New Books: The Good and . . . (2010, Spring). FMS Foundation Newsletter. 19(2), 8.
[2] Pope, H. G., & Hudson, J. I. (1995). Can memories of childhood sexual abuse be repressed? Psychological Medicine, 25(01), 121. doi:10.1017/s0033291700028142
[3] McNally, Richard. (2005, March/April). Sidebar. FMS Foundation Newsletter. 14(2), 2.
[4] Rind, B., Tromovitch, P., & Bauserman, R. (1998). A meta-analytic examination of assumed properties of child sexual abuse using college samples. Psychological Bulletin, 124, 22-53.
[5] The Leadership Council. (2005). The Leadership Council's Examination of the Rind Meta-analysis. The Leadership Council on Child Abuse & Interpersonal Violence. http://www.leadershipcouncil.org/1/rind/1.html
[6] Rowan, A. B., & Foy, D. W. (1993). Post-traumatic stress disorder in child sexual abuse survivors: A literature review. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 6(1), 3–20. doi:10.1007/bf02093359
[7] Goodyear-Brown, P. (2011). Handbook of Child Sexual Abuse: Identification, Assessment, and Treatment. John Wiley & Sons. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118094822
[8] Freyd, J.J. (2021). What is a Betrayal Trauma? What is Betrayal Trauma Theory? Retrieved July 22, 2022 from http://pages.uoregon.edu/dynamic/jjf/defineBT.html