We often hear of molesters grooming their victims, but we don’t hear as much about them enlisting other perpetrators to join them in their crimes. In the Keepers, some young students in the 1970s were sought out by these molesters because they seemed easy to take advantage of. Father Maskell is the first who then encourages another priest and a Baltimore police officer to have their turns with the minors. It is horrifying to hear and these minors are now mothers and grandmothers, women trying to remember the terribly shameful abuse that their minds have done everything possible to block out. Some of the victims have NOT repressed the memories and when they finally came forward, thanks to Facebook, their accounts lend credence to the case for Jeane, a woman who struggled with the memories.

Unfortunately, Father Maskell passed away and will not be brought to ultimate justice in this life time, although he was brought to court in the 1990s before the notion of “repressed memory” was discredited. Back then, there was no Facebook to bring forth the women (and a man) who so clearly did remember the abuse. Today, there is strength in number for his victims when it comes to recalling past experiences and feeling validated after suffering psychologically for decades.

“Experts in the field of memory and trauma can provide some answers, but clearly more study and research are needed,” states the American Psychological Association website APA.org about repressed memory. “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). 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. For ethical and humanitarian reasons, memory researchers do not subject people to a traumatic event in order to test their memory of it. 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.

Some clinicians theorize that children understand and respond to trauma differently from adults. Some furthermore believe that childhood trauma may lead to problems in memory storage and retrieval. These clinicians believe that dissociation is a likely explanation for a memory that was forgotten and later recalled. Dissociation means that a memory is not actually lost, but is for some time unavailable for retrieval. That is, it’s in memory storage, but cannot for some period of time actually be recalled. Some clinicians believe that severe forms of child sexual abuse are especially conducive to negative disturbances of memory such as dissociation or delayed memory. 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. Many researchers argue, however, that there is little or no empirical support for such a theory.”

MSNBC.com