ABSTRACT
A very disturbing aspect of contemporary society is the dramatic increase in allegations of childhood sexual abuse. Two indexes of this unsettling trend are readily available: the skyrocketing frequency with which young children are called on to provide evidence concerning abuse that they may have experienced or witnessed (Gray, 1993) and the increasing numbers of adults (mostly women, but also some men) who come to believe that they were abused at a young age by their fathers or other close relatives (Pendergrast, 1995). The interpretation of children’s reports of abuse is not an easy matter, even in situations in which there may be physical corroborating evidence, and these interpretive problems increase dramatically when we attempt to understand adults’ claims of early abuse, especially those that are based on recently “recovered” memories. Indeed, if it is difficult to assess a 3-yearold’s claim of what might have happened to her a year ago, consider the problems associated with evaluating a 35year-old woman’s memory that she had been abused by her grandfather 30 years ago.
