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Interviewing Children About Abuse: An Overview and Introduction

A mother contacts Child Protective Services, concerned about a comment her daughter, Sarah (3 years old), made during bath time. Sarah pointed to her vagina and said “Daddy does that to me”.. Sarah’s parents recently separated, and her father lives out of town, only seeing her one weekend a month. Sarah’s class has recently been working through a trial of an educational model about “good touch, bad touch.” When Sarah was asked during an investigative interview what she was there to talk about she replied, “Mummy is mad because Daddy rubbed me there and that’s bad touch.”

Ben (4 years) recently developed an infection around his bottom. During examination his doctor noted that Ben appeared to have some partially healed abrasions that might be consistent with abuse. During the rapport building stage of an investigative interview Ben talked about his interest in pirates. During the substantive phase Ben told the interviewer that his friend Joey (8 years) “stabbed him in the butt with his sword and then I punched him in the face and he died.”

Theresa (6 years) lives with her mother and stepfather (Shane). She often stays up late with them and falls asleep on the couch while they watch television. Two weekends a month Theresa stays with her father (Steve), stepmother (Melissa), and stepsister (Molly—4 years). Melissa became concerned when she observed Theresa playing with two dolls, one on top of the other, saying “see Molly, this is how you show someone you love them, this is how you are a real special girl.” Melissa asked Theresa how she knew that, and Theresa replied “I’m Shane’s special girl.” Melissa told Theresa that grownups should not love children like that and she needed to tell her father that Shane was playing with her the wrong way. An investigation was initiated.

Imagine you were to interview Sarah, Ben, or Theresa to investigate the concerns raised. What might you be wondering about? Perhaps how well children can describe their experiences for child welfare officials or legal investigators? Or perhaps, how others’ concerns might affect how children behave in an interview? Or even whether the inclusion of highly improbable details (e.g., a claim about punching someone in the face and killing them, in the absence of a dead body) renders the entire account unreliable. These vignettes highlight just a few of the many challenges that practitioners and researchers working in the area of child maltreatment investigation must grapple with. Children’s ability to provide detailed, coherent and reliable accounts of their experiences may also be evaluated by lawyers (e.g., considering what aspects of a case might be subject to challenge), judges, and jury members, all of whom may also be wondering about children’s ability to provide reliable eyewitness testimony.

In this book, we update our previous review of research examining children’s testimony and of how the way children are questioned affects the quality of information they provide. We integrate the substantial body of research published in the ten years since the first edition was prepared and reflect upon questions that the field should continue to address. Although much has been learned about children’s competencies and shortcomings, the lessons remain difficult to translate effectively into practice. Amidst many international studies demonstrating the persistence of interviewing techniques that do not help children provide detailed and accurate accounts, studies continue to show that use of the evidence‐based NICHD Investigative Protocol is effective in that regard. In the following chapters, we review what research has demonstrated about young witnesses’ strengths and difficulties, the challenges that interviewers face when eliciting testimony from children, how to effectively prepare children to be interviewed, and the evidence showing how the NICHD Protocol can help interviewers conduct high quality, developmentally sensitive interviews with witnesses, especially those who are young or have additional vulnerabilities. As we explain in some detail, forensic interviews with children can be invaluable sources of information, but they should always be recognized as parts of the forensic investigation, not seen as synonymous with the investigation as a whole.

THE BACKGROUND: INTERVIEWING AND CHILD DEVELOPMENT

Our understanding of children’s capacities to recount their experiences has emerged from two distinct but complementary approaches to the study of eyewitness testimony. Many researchers have studied what children can tell us when interviewed in developmentally sensitive and supportive ways, whilst others have focused on how children’s accounts can be compromised by various influences, such as suggestive questioning and exposure to misinformation. Together, the resultant knowledge about the conditions which foster accurate responding, and conversely, those that promote false responding has shown us how to establish optimal conditions so that children can describe their experiences in a complete, organized, and accurate manner.

Just as there have been two broad approaches to developing key research questions about children’s testimonial ability, there have also been disparate and yet complementary methodologies employed to examine the issues. Most research examining children’s eyewitness testimony has been conducted using laboratory‐based analogue experiments. In a typical laboratory study, for example, children experience staged events, or watch short video clips, before their recall is tested using scripted questions that vary depending on the focus of the study (e.g., children’s recall vs. suggestibility). The advantages of such approaches are that researchers can systematically examine variables thought to influence recall (or suggestibility), whilst limiting the impact of confounding factors. Importantly, the accuracy or reliability of children’s statements can be evaluated against an objective record of what actually occurred. Invariably, however, such approaches are limited in the extent to which they mimic many of the features that may characterize investigations of possible maltreatment, thus their ecological validity is often questioned.

In attempts to bridge the gap between tightly controlled laboratory‐based research and actual forensic interviews, researchers have also studied children’s recall of naturally occurring events that more closely parallel aspects of maltreatment (e.g., medical procedures, traumatic events), and their recount of self‐nominated events that were emotionally salient (e.g., happy, sad, or scary events). Although the events described are presumed to have been more salient and thus memorable than staged events, there may be no objective record of them, meaning accuracy cannot be ascertained.

Researchers have also conducted field studies, examining forensic interviews of children believed to have been victims of maltreatment. Such work has illuminated interviewing practice in the absence of strict experimental control and identified areas in need of further research. Whilst field studies uniquely provide the opportunity to study the impact of interviewing techniques on children’s recall in real world settings, they are typically limited by the absence of objective records or incontrovertible corroborating evidence from which to assess the accuracy of children’s statements. The field has benefited from the combined outputs of both approaches in constructing evidence‐based practice recommendations (Lamb & Thierry, 2005). Despite very different approaches to examining the impact of interviewing strategies on children’s responses, the conclusions reached regarding children’s limitations and competencies have been remarkably consistent.

We have no litmus test to assess the accuracy of children’s accounts. What we do have is a convergent body of findings showing the range of influences that interact to shape children’s testimony. Broadly speaking, these can be grouped into factors that relate to 1) the kind of experience children are being asked to describe, 2) characteristics of the child, and 3) the way in which children are interviewed. Given the limited (if any) opportunity to intervene to mitigate the influence of factors relating to the experience itself, much attention has been focused on what the child brings to the interview context, what the interviewer brings, and how their mutual interactions shape the nature of the testimony elicited. In brief, the research reviewed at greater length later in this book has shown that, although children clearly can remember incidents they have experienced, the relationship between age and memory is complex, with a variety of factors influencing the quality of information provided. For our present purposes, perhaps the most important of these factors pertain to the interviewer’s ability to elicit information and the child's willingness and ability to express it, rather than the child's ability to remember it. Recognizing that, like adults, children can be informative witnesses, a variety of professional groups and experts have offered recommendations regarding the most effective ways of conducting forensic or investigative interviews with children (e.g., American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children...