Nation Institute of Justice report: A better way to interview child victims of sexual abuse.

Child protection authorities substantiated 68,000 cases of child sexual abuse in 2008, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. In many child sexual abuse cases, there is no witness other than the child and no corroborating evidence — the entire case can hang on a child's recollection of the alleged abuse. One way to help avoid false accusations and ensure justice in these cases is to strengthen law enforcement's ability to elicit accurate information from children. As the authors of the study discussed in this article note, "The quality of forensic interviewing practices is of utmost importance if child victims are to be protected, at the same time as the rights of the innocent suspects are to be upheld."

We have gained considerable knowledge in the last two decades about child development, memory and cognition, and researchers have developed several techniques for improving the way child victims of sexual abuse are interviewed. One technique that showed promise in a laboratory has now been tested in the field in Utah's criminal justice system. The interview protocol was developed by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). The NICHD began developing its interview protocol in the 1990s. According to Margaret-Ellen Pipe, a member of the team that has developed and tested the protocol, "In the '80s people started recognizing children could provide reliable evidence. There had been real skepticism prior to that whether you would believe children."

In an NIJ-funded study, a team of researchers led by Pipe investigated how the NICHD protocol might affect prosecution outcomes. Their findings make it clear that the training and NICHD protocol elicit more information from possible victims. The findings cannot, of course, determine whether the information is more accurate — that is, the findings cannot definitively confirm details of what happened. But it is clear that after the protocol was introduced, prosecutors accepted more cases; and more cases that went to trial resulted in conviction than before the protocol was introduced.

At the beginning of the conversation, the child and the interviewer discuss expectations and set ground rules: this is the introductory phase. Interviewers then ask children to talk about events unrelated to the suspected abuse; the idea is to encourage the child to be comfortable leading the conversation by developing this rapport. In this phase, the "child learns the conversational rules, because they are different from many conversations in which children take part," Pipe explained.

Later, interviewers encourage children to recall the target incident and talk about it in a narrative stream, as opposed to answering directed questions about it, one after another. Evidence indicates open-ended prompts draw out more accurate information than ones that simply elicit a child's recognition. The techniques discourage suggestive leads or questions with yes/no or either/or answers: "Where were his clothes?" for example, is preferred over, "Were his clothes on the floor?"


Link:
http://www.nij.gov/nij/journals/267/child-victim-interview.htm#note1