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

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... tudies are extremely difficult to construct and carry out. That is undoubtedly why there were only two prospective stud-Ross E. Cheit is Associate Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at Brown University. He directs the Recovered Memory Project, an Internet-based research project that includes an archive of at least 80 corroborated cases of recovered memory. Professor Cheit is currently working on a book about the law and politics of child sexual abuse in America.