Adults’ retractions of childhood sexual abuse allegations: high-stakes and the (in)validation of recollection

ABSTRACT

Retractors are individuals who have repudiated their earlier claims of having been sexually abused. There has been relatively little research conducted with this population. The growing literature on memory verification strategies and non-believed memories provide a conceptual and empirical lens through which to revisit the accounts of these individuals to try and learn more about the process of making and retracting high stake, consequential beliefs or recollections about the past. Do people attempt to validate or invalidate beliefs and recollections of such events in the same way as they do for the moderately significant events studied to date? The paper concludes by re-emphasising the social and contextual nature of remembering and argues for the primacy of belief over recollection.

KEYWORDS:

• Retraction
• sexual abuse
• non-believed memory

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to Hartmut Blank, Alan Costall, Henry Otgaar, Vasu Reddy and two anonymous reviewers for comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Underlying data

The underlying research materials for this article can be accessed at: https://researchportal.port.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/james-ost%28633752f1-86e6-41ed-b0dd-7dd296733737%29/datasets.html

Notes

1 For work investigating recantations/retractions made by child witnesses, the reader is referred to work by Malloy, Lyon, and Quas (2007) and Lyon (2007).

2 The concept of “attitude” is, according to some (e.g., Larsen & Berntsen, 2000), an overlooked aspect of Bartlett’s theory that refers to “an interpretation of [the] event from the particular perspective of the individual” (p. 103).

3 See Edwards and Middleton (1987) and Edwards, Potter, and Middleton (1992) for an account of remembering that draws on the social aspect of Bartlett’s theory.

4 In a similar vein, Nash and Takarangi (2011) found that individuals who had experienced alcoholic blackouts were slightly more likely to seek information about events that had occurred during that blackout from someone who was similarly intoxicated at the time, rather than from someone who was sober.

5 The notion of body memories is exemplified by the work of van der Kolk (1994), and proposes that while the “mind” forgets, the “body” remembers. There is, as yet, no clear support for such a mechanism (Lynn et al., 2015). Flashbacks, of course, are a key diagnostic symptom of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. Yet, like any memories, flashbacks are subject to change and distortion (McNally, 2003). The reliability of the physical or psychological evidence that retractors reported being presented with is therefore open to question.

6 Although this scenario might be more common in cases where a long-held memory is suddenly recognized as an episode of abuse once the individual acquires an understanding of sexual behaviour (e.g., reaches puberty, receives sex education classes at school; see McNally & Geraerts, 2009)

7 Indeed anecdotal evidence suggests that there is a subset of retractors, sometimes referred to as “returners”. These are individuals who attempt to reestablish contact with the people they accused without ever publicly retracting (or in some cases talking about) their previous allegations.

8 The phrase “ontological gerrymandering” has been used to describe the “phenomenon of revising history to fit with current understandings” (Ashmore & Brown, 2010, p. 24).