Debunking the Controversy Around Repressed Memories of Child Sexual Abuse

Annotated Bibliography There are many controversial and sensitive topics within psychology and the law. One of those topics is child sexual abuse. The difficult part of a child making a statement of witnessing or being a victim of sexual abuse is determining if there were outside influences on the child in making their statement. Now what if the allegations of child sexual abuse didn’t come from a child but rather an adult claiming they remember they were sexually abused as a child? These claims come from the concept of recovered or repressed memories of abuse. The authenticity of recovered or repressed memories is very questionable and has led to a lot of controversy in the field of psychology and the law. Due to the problems with memory, creation of false memories, and little evidence for these concepts, these memories are not reliable and should not be used as a credible source of evidence in court. Davis, D. and Loftus, E. (2014). Repressed Memories. In The Encyclopedia of Clinical Psychology (eds R.L. Cautin and S.O. Lilienfeld).  https://doi.org/10.1002/[phone]392.wbecp270 In the paper, Repressed Memories (Davis, D. and Loftus, E., 2014) from the, The Encyclopedia of Clinica