Reason: How prevalent is belief in recovered memories? Are they still commonly accepted as evidence in legal proceedings?
Clancy: Yes. It is unbelievable. All of the scientific research shows that repression is just preposterous. But most therapists believe that repression exists. And most people in the world believe that the concept of repression is real. I think that's because of movies and Hollywood, we see it depicted, it's just culturally out there.
Reason: But in the scientific community—
Clancy: It's dead. Dead, dead, dead. For five decades we've known that memory is reconstructive in nature; we've known that memories can be created. The whole issue of repression didn't become a hot topic until the 90s. And for the past ten years scientists have been arguing that repression is preposterous.
Reason: You deny the existence of recovered memories; how do you explain the fact that adults do sometimes suddenly remember being abused, and the accounts turn out to be accurate and traumatic?
Clancy: Ninety-five percent of child sex abuse cases are non-traumatic events, traumatic in the sense of being life threatening or physically painful. If you look at the data, what is most likely to happen to victims involves touching and kissing. It's not something that requires medical attention. The average age of sexual abuse victims is seven. You take a young kid who does not know about sex—no kid under ten is able to understand what sex is—you have a child who doesn't know about sex, and somebody they love and trust is touching them in a way that is not painful. Put yourself in the perspective of the victim. There is no way to understand what is happening to you is a crime. They just don't know. It becomes one of the millions of experiences kids have that they don't understand. And it's not surprising to me that many kids simply don't think about it until later on in life. At some point, later on, when they hit puberty in high school or college, they put two and two together, and they realize that it was wrong. It was abusive. And people refer to that as "I remembered."
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