Therapist Responses to Recovered and Never-forgotten Memories of Child Sex Abuse

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Abstract
In a national survey of 300 female and 300 male licensed psychologists, participants were presented with vignettes in which a 14-year-old girl told a therapist that her father had sexually abused her for a year at a specific age (either 2 or 8), that she either had or had not forgotten the abuse from the time of its occurrence until the current year, and that the therapist is the first one that she had told about the abuse. Participants provided information about the degree to which they found the allegations credible and the steps that they found important in responding to the allegations. The age at which the alleged abuse occurred and the therapist's age produced significant effects on evaluations of credibility, as did an interaction of therapist's sex and theoretical orientation. There was no difference in evaluations of credibility between male and female psychoanalytically oriented therapists; among nonpsychoanalytically oriented therapists, female respondents were more likely than male respondents to find the claim credible.