Research to provide a better understanding of the mechanism by which accurate or inaccurate recollections of events may be created This controversy has demonstrated that there are areas of research which should be pursued among them are the following: Many questions are at this point unanswered. The controversy over the validity of memories of childhood abuse has raised many critical issues for the psychological community. Many researchers argue, however, that there is little or no empirical support for such a theory.

Many clinicians who work with trauma victims believe that this dissociation is a person's way of sheltering himself or herself from the pain of the memory. Some clinicians believe that severe forms of child sexual abuse are especially conducive to negative disturbances of memory such as dissociation or delayed memory. That is, it's in memory storage, but cannot for some period of time actually be recalled. Dissociation means that a memory is not actually lost, but is for some time unavailable for retrieval. These clinicians believe that dissociation is a likely explanation for a memory that was forgotten and later recalled. Some furthermore believe that childhood trauma may lead to problems in memory storage and retrieval. Some clinicians theorize that children understand and respond to trauma differently from adults. Because the issue has not been directly studied, we can not know whether a memory of a traumatic event is encoded and stored differently from a memory of a nontraumatic event. For ethical and humanitarian reasons, memory researchers do not subject people to a traumatic event in order to test their memory of it. Also, although laboratory studies have shown that memory is often inaccurate and can be influenced by outside factors, memory research usually takes place either in a laboratory or some everyday setting. However, experienced clinical psychologists state that the phenomenon of a recovered memory is rare (e.g., one experienced practitioner reported having a recovered memory arise only once in 20 years of practice). What we do know is that both memory researchers and clinicians who work with trauma victims agree that both phenomena occur. Experts in the field of memory and trauma can provide some answers, but clearly more study and research are needed.

These questions lie at the heart of the memory of childhood abuse issue.

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