People believe it is plausible to have forgotten memories of childhood sexual abuse

Memory development: implications for adults recalling childhood experiences in the courtroom

“…These views can be at odds [8][9][10][11][12] with what has been revealed by the scientific study of memory and its development. For example, many jurors and legal professionals (e.g., judges, lawyers, police) in North America 8 and Europe (e.g., Sweden 13 and Norway 14 ) are naïve when it comes to understanding how memories are formed, how they become distorted over time, and how stress and emotion affect remembering [15][16] .…”

“…However, these narratives were sparse on peripheral information and contained reconstructive errors 5 . In an effort to understand whether 'common sense' views of memory are consistent with what the scientific study of memory has revealed, a number of researchers [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17] have posed questions about how memory operates to various legal professionals (lawyers, law enforcement officers, judges) as well as members of the general public who are eligible for jury service. As it turns out, the common sense view of memory is frequently inconsistent with the findings from memory research.…”

The Effects of Memory Recovery Techniques on Jurors’ Perceptions of Recovered Memories

“…The current study found both types of memories to be similarly perceived, with moderate to moderately high levels of credibility, although the means were higher in the naive memory recovery technique condition. This may be because the public believes that adults in psychotherapy with a mental health disorder diagnosis could have forgotten episodes of child sexual maltreatment (Rubin & Berntsen, 2007).…”

What Psychologists Know and Believe about Memory: A Survey of Practitioners

“…The idea of repression of traumatic childhood memories is still very much alive among both psychologists and lay people. Two recent surveys have shown that a large proportion of people who think they might enter psychotherapy also believe that they may harbour repressed memories about their childhood (Pezdek & Blandon-Gitlin, 2009;Rubin & Berntsen, 2007). The lay belief in repressed memories is not that surprising in view of the cultural impact of Freudian thought in western societies, but it is a little surprising that the idea is still prominent among professional psychologists who are supposed to be scientifically updated.…”