The limitations of a prospective study of memories for child sexual abuse.

Prospective studies have been held out as a kind of Holy Grail in research about remembering or forgetting child sexual abuse. They seem to hold the perfect answer to the verification problems that plague retrospective self-reports in the clinical literature. Prospective studies begin with verified cases of abuse. Then they require detective work years later to find the participants in adulthood and clever questioning to assure that any disclosed abuse actually matches the “target case.” These studies are extremely difficult to construct and carry out. That is undoubtedly why there were only two prospective stud-