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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Wiley Series in The Psychology of Crime, Policing and Law
- Sprache: Englisch
Represents a scholarly and ambitious attempt to improve the quality of interviews received by the courts and minimize the risks of miscarriages of justice, for victims and defendants
This book updates the previous review of research on children’s testimony—reexamining and readdressing how the quality of information provided by young witnesses is affected by the way they are questioned. Drawing upon both experimental and field studies conducted in different countries, it summarizes evidence supporting the effectiveness of the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Protocol and showcases the Protocol’s superiority over other current interviewing techniques for eliciting detailed and forensically useful content from child complainants.
Written with both child protection professionals and researchers in mind, Tell Me What Happened: Questioning Children About Abuse offers advice and opinions drawn from actual investigative interviews as well as academic research. Its insightful chapters cover: children’s testimony; interview and questioning strategies; how investigators typically interview alleged victims; the NICHD Investigative Interview Protocols; the impact that following the Protocol has on interviews and children’s responses; interviewing victims under the age of six; interviewing children with developmental disabilities; using tools and props to complement the Protocol; training and maintaining good interviewing practices; and more.
- Provides a primary source of guidance practitioners and professionals involved in child protection
- Updates guidance for interviewers by adding consideration of emotional and motivational factors to better understand children’s behavior during interviews
- Integrates the substantial body of research published over the last decade and reflects upon questions that the field should continue to address
Tell Me What Happened: Questioning Children About Abuse deserves to be read by all practitioners involved in child protection, whether as investigators, interviewers, judges, or lawyers.
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Table of Contents
Cover
About the Authors
Series Preface
REFERENCES
Preface
1 Interviewing Children About Abuse
THE BACKGROUND: INTERVIEWING AND CHILD DEVELOPMENT
CONCLUSION
2 Contributions to Children’s Testimony
WHAT THE CHILD BRINGS TO AN INTERVIEW
LANGUAGE SKILLS
SUGGESTIBILITY OF CHILD WITNESSES
THE EVENT
CONCLUSION
3 Contributions to Testimony: Preparation for the Interview and Questioning Strategies
HOW LONG SINCE THE DISCLOSURE?
HOW MANY INTERVIEWS?
HAS THERE BEEN ANY PRE‐INTERVIEW ASSESSMENT?
WHO HAS TALKED TO THE CHILD ALREADY?
THE IMPORTANCE OF RAPPORT
PREPARING THE CHILD FOR THE INTERVIEW—GROUND RULES
PREPARING THE CHILD FOR THE INTERVIEW—PRACTICE NARRATIVES
DEVELOPMENTAL DIFFERENCES IN RESPONSES TO INTERVIEWER QUESTIONS
HOW ARE THE QUESTIONS DISTRIBUTED?
USE OF VISUAL AIDS OR TECHNIQUES?
CONCLUSION
4 How do Investigators Typically Interview Alleged Victims?
RECOMMENDED INTERVIEWING PRACTICE
EVALUATIONS OF INTERVIEWING—DIVERGENCE FROM RECOMMENDED PRACTICE
DESCRIPTIVE STUDIES
RESEARCH BY OTHER INVESTIGATORS
CONCLUSION
5 The NICHD Investigative Interview Protocols for Young Victims and Witnesses
PRE‐INTERVIEW CONSIDERATIONS
INTRODUCTORY PHASE: EXPLAINING THE PURPOSE AND GROUND RULES
RAPPORT‐BUILDING PHASE
NARRATIVE‐TRAINING PHASE
THE SUBSTANTIVE PART OF THE INTERVIEW
THE FREE‐RECALL PHASE
FOLLOW‐UP QUESTIONS—THE PAIRING PRINCIPLE
CONCLUSION
6 When Interviewers Follow the Protocol, What Impact Does it Have on Their Interviewing and on Children’s Responding?
CHARACTERISTICS OF PARTICIPANTS IN THE FIELD STUDIES
SUMMARY OF THE FINDINGS
THE MEANING OF THESE FINDINGS
CONCLUSION
7 Interviewing Suspected Victims under Six Years of Age
CHILDREN’S REFERENCES TO TEMPORAL ATTRIBUTES
CONCLUSION
8 Interviewing Children with Developmental Disabilities
POTENTIAL SOURCES OF DIFFICULTY FOR CHILDREN WITH DEVELOPMENTAL DISABILITIES
RESEARCH ON CWID
NICHD PROTOCOL INVESTIGATIONS OF ADOLESCENTS AND ADULTS WITH ID
PERCEPTIONS OF CREDIBILITY
CONCLUSION
9 The Revised Protocol
DISCLOSURE PROCESS
WHO DO CHILDREN DISCLOSE TO?
RAPPORT AND EMOTIONAL SUPPORT
DEVELOPMENT AND EVALUATION OF THE REVISED PROTOCOL
FURTHER REVISION OF THE REVISED PROTOCOL
INTERVIEWING SUSPECTS RATHER THAN VICTIMS
CONCLUSION
10 Using Tools and Props to Complement the Protocol
DOLLS
DRAWINGS
BODY DIAGRAMS
HUMAN BODY DIAGRAMS AND THE NICHD PROTOCOL
CONTEXTUAL CUES
CONCLUSION
11 Training and Maintaining Good Interviewing Practice
CONCLUSION
12 Case‐related Outcomes When the Protocol is Used
ASSESSING CREDIBILITY
THE EFFECTS OF THE PROTOCOL ON CREDIBILITY ASSESSMENT
ALLEGATION RATES IN REVISED AND STANDARD PROTOCOL INTERVIEWS
CASE OUTCOMES
CONCLUSION
13 Progress to Date and the Challenges Ahead
THE INTERVIEW IS ONLY PART OF THE INVESTIGATION
FUTURE DIRECTIONS
CONCLUSION
Revised Investigative Interview Protocol: Version 2018
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 04
Table 4.1 Definitions and examples of interviewer prompts used in evaluations of forensic interviewing practice with children
Table 4.2 Relative prominence of the different prompts used by investigators to elicit information from alleged victims
Table 4.3 Mean numbers of details and length (in words) of children’s responses to the different types of prompts
Chapter 06
Table 6.1 Proportion of major utterance types in Protocol and non‐Protocol interviews (substantive phase only)
Table 6.2 Proportions of the total amount of information reported in response to each type of utterance in Protocol and non‐Protocol interviews (substantive phase only)
Table 6.3 Percentage of interviews including preparatory components in Sternberg et al.’s (2001) and Yi et al.’s (2016) studies
Table 6.4 Proportion of interviewer prompts of each type posed and proportion and accuracy of children’s responses to utterances of each type in laboratory analogue studies
Chapter 07
Table 7.1 Age differences in the average number of details elicited by each type of prompt
Table 7.2 Age differences in the average number of details in response to each cued invitation
Table 7.3 The relative and absolute frequencies with which different prompts were addressed to children of different ages
Table 7.4 Age differences in the rates at which children made different types of responses to different types of substantive prompts
Table 7.5 Age differences in the number of details provided by children in response to different types of substantive prompts
Chapter 09
Table 9.1 Supportive non‐suggestive techniques and utterances
List of Illustrations
Chapter 05
Figure 5.1 Hypothetical progression of an interview without and with pairing.
Chapter 09
Figure 9.1 Proportion of utterance types used by interviewers through the course of training.
Figure 9.2 Ratio of missed support opportunities to reluctant utterances.
Figure 9.3 Changing levels of appropriate and inappropriate support over the course of the training program.
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
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This newly-revised volume on interviewing children is up-to-date, comprehensive, and accessibly written, including recent scientific evidence as well as actual case studies. The authors are outstanding contributors to this field, both as scientists and practitioners. This new edition goes beyond considering children’s memory in isolation and embeds it within what is known of their social and emotional functioning. It will be a major resource for both child protection professionals and researchers.
— Stephen J. Ceci, Ph.D.,The H. L. Carr Chaired Professor of Developmental Psychology, Cornell University
Such a joy to read the new edition of “Tell Me What Happened”. For two decades Lamb and colleagues have profoundly shaped the field and practice of forensically interviewing children and adolescents through meticulous research, exceptional and sensitive presentation of information, clear guidance, and practical suggestions. Building on the early work introducing us to a structured protocol and promoting the use of retrieval prompts and strategies for mining children’s recall memory for personal experiences, the revised protocol tackles the barriers encountered by interviewers questioning reluctant children. The authors invite us to appreciate the great hurdles faced by children during the investigative process and interview, observe closely children’s active and passive forms of resistance, and provide non-suggestive support through statements and behaviors. We are encouraged once again to move into more sensitive and skillful practice.
— Linda Cordisco Steele, M.Ed., LPC,National Children’s Advocacy Center
Wiley Series inthe Psychology of Crime, Policing and Law
Series Editors
Graham M. Davies1 and Ray Bull2
1University of Leicester, UK
2University of Derby, UK
The Wiley Series in the Psychology of Crime, Policing and Law publishes concise and integrative reviews on important emerging areas of contemporary research. The purpose of the series is not merely to present research findings in a clear and readable form but also to bring out their implications for both practice and policy. Books in this series are useful not only to psychologists, but also to all those involved in crime detection and prevention, child protection, policing and judicial processes.
For other titles in this series please see www.wiley.com/go/pcpl
Tell Me What Happened
Questioning Children About Abuse
Second Edition
Michael E. Lamb, Deirdre A. Brown,Irit Hershkowitz, Yael Orbach,and Phillip W. Esplin
This edition first published 2018© 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Edition HistoryJohn Wiley & Sons Ltd (1e, 2008).
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The right of Michael E. Lamb, Deirdre A. Brown, Irit Hershkowitz, Yael Orbach, and Phillip W. Esplin to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with law.
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data
Names: Lamb, Michael E., 1953– author. | Brown, Deirdre Ann, 1973– author. | Hershkowitz, Irit, author.Title: Tell me what happened : questioning children about abuse / Michael E. Lamb, Deirdre A. Brown, Irit Hershkowitz, Yael Orbach, Phillip W. Esplin.Description: Second Edition. | Hoboken : Wiley, [2018] | Series: The psychology of crime, policing and law | Revised edition of Tell me what happened, 2008. | Includes bibliographical references and index. |Identifiers: LCCN 2018008932 (print) | LCCN 2018025471 (ebook) | ISBN 9781118881637 (pdf) | ISBN 9781118881651 (epub) | ISBN 9781118881675 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781118881637 (ePDF)Subjects: LCSH: Child abuse–Investigation. | Interviewing in child abuse. | Abused children. | Child witnesses.Classification: LCC HV8079.C46 (ebook) | LCC HV8079.C46 L36 2018 (print) | DDC 363.25/95554–dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018008932
Cover image: © ClarkandCompany/iStockphotoCover design by Wiley
We dedicate this book to the memory of Kathleen Sternberg, a passionate advocate for evidence‐based practice who died tragically young. She was integrally involved in the research leading to development of and initial evaluation of the NICHD Protocol.
About the Authors
Michael E. Lamb is Professor of Psychology at the University of Cambridge, where he moved in 2004 after serving 17 years as Head of the Section on Social and Emotional Development at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) in Bethesda, MD. It was here that he and his colleagues launched the program of research and developed some of the interview procedures outlined in this book.
Deirdre A. Brown is Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the Victoria University of Wellington. After completing her PhD and training in clinical psychology at the University of Otago, she began a postdoctoral fellowship at NICHD and the University of Lancaster, where she led the research on children with intellectual disabilities described in this book. She was appointed to her current position in 2007.
Irit Hershkowitz is Professor of Social Work at the University of Haifa. After completing her PhD at the University of Haifa, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship at NICHD, where she played a crucial role in the development of the Investigative Interview Protocol described in this book. She returned to the University of Haifa in 1994 and has since spearheaded efforts to evaluate and improve the training of investigative interviewers.
Yael Orbach worked as a Senior Researcher in the Section on Social and Emotional Development of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development for nearly 15 years. After retiring from her position as Staff Scientist in 2006, Dr. Orbach continued to conduct collaborative research with the other co‐authors, focusing on the application of cognitive and developmental research to criminal investigation of children until 2015. She was integrally involved in the development of the NICHD Investigative Interview Protocol and participated in much of the research on forensic interviewing described in this book.
Phillip W. Esplin has worked as a forensic psychologist based in Phoenix, AZ for more than 40 years. After interviewing alleged victims and evaluating interviews by other professionals, he began conducting field research designed to enhance the quality of practice and became a senior consultant to the NICHD Protocol research team in 1989. In that role, he was integrally involved in the development and evaluation of the Investigative Interview Protocol described in this book.
Series Preface
The Wiley Series in the Psychology of Crime, Policing, and the Law publishes both single and multi‐authored monographs and edited reviews of important and emerging areas of contemporary research. The purpose of this series is not merely to present research findings in a clear and readable form, but also to bring out their implications for both practice and policy. Books in this series are useful not only to psychologists, but also to all those involved in crime detection and prevention, child protection, policing, and judicial processes.
Recent years have seen a welcome increase in the number of successful prosecutions for child sexual or physical abuse in countries which employ the adversarial principles of English common law. This increase has been facilitated by the advent of video‐ and later, digital‐recording of investigative interviews of alleged victims conducted by trained police officers or social workers. In the United Kingdom and other common‐law countries, such interviews may be played to the jury at trial as the sole or principal element of the prosecution case. A properly conducted interview, where the child describes in a consistent and detailed manner the circumstances and nature of the offence allegedly committed by the defendant, can provide powerful evidence against an adult who might otherwise escape justice. However, as with all witness statements, children can misunderstand or be misled in their evidence, risking miscarriages of justice (Ceci & Bruck, 1995).
In the first edition of Tell Me What Happened (2008), Lamb, Hershkovitz, Orbach, and Esplin argued that such injustices arose primarily from poor investigative practice: In particular, research showed that interviewers used few open‐ended questions, relying instead on closed or specific questions. They argued that open‐ended questions (e.g., “And then what happened?”) encourage children to actively shape and detail their own account of events, while specific (“What color was the bedspread?”) or closed (“Were you on your back or on your front?’) questions induced a passivity and a greater readiness to agree with the interviewer’s preconceptions. To address this concern, Michael Lamb, the late Kathy Sternberg, and others at the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) in the United States fashioned a new interviewing procedure: the NICHD Protocol. The Protocol drew upon the principal authors’ extensive knowledge of children’s cognitive and social development and placed the need for children to give their own account as the central requirement. This was best fostered by the use of open‐ended questions by interviewers. This style of discourse ran counter to everyday carer‐child interactions and needed to be laboriously learned and practiced if it was to be maintained consistently in the interview room. The book summarizes the evidence for the effectiveness of the Protocol, drawing upon both experimental and field studies conducted in different countries and its superiority to other current interviewing techniques in eliciting detailed and forensically useful content from child complainants.
The first edition of Tell Me What Happened proved to be a popular and influential guide for practitioners and researchers alike and has generated a good deal of research and comment, not merely from the original research team, but from others who have been stimulated by the issues it raised. It has remained the primary source of guidance outside government publications for practitioners and professionals involved in child protection. The new edition which features the same writing team, with the addition of Deirdre A. Brown, summarizes much of this new information and features a major revision to the original Protocol: the additional consideration of emotional and motivational factors, which experience has shown can influence whether an abused child will fully disclose the nature of any abuse and the identity of the abuser. In making these additions, the Revised Protocol mirrors a wider movement within memory research to complement purely cognitive influences with consideration of social and affective factors as determinants of recall (e.g. Eysenck, Derakshan, Santos, & Calvo, 2007; Harris, Rasmussen, & Berntsen, 2014).
This new emphasis has emerged from recent research on interviewing reluctant witnesses and also provides a more comprehensive understanding of the issues faced by professionals when interviewing very young children, and those with developmental issues, including autistic spectrum disorders, which, as the authors note, are all disproportionately represented among victims of abuse. As with the original, this new book is written with child protection professionals as well as scholars in mind and offers advice and opinions drawn from actual investigative interviews as well as academic research. Like the original, the Revised Protocol requires interviewers to maintain a rigorous program of refresher training, monitoring, and feedback in order to ensure their continuing adherence to protocol requirements (Lamb, 2016). Police Child Protection Units in England and Wales who wish to adopt this new tool must fight for adequate funding to support its use against the demands of other policing priorities in a climate of ever‐shrinking budgets.
Professor Lamb’s continuing contribution to psychology and society in general and the field of investigative interviewing in particular has been internationally recognized: In 2015 he achieved a rare double when the American Psychological Society honored him with both their “Distinguished contribution to psychology in the public interest” award and the “Distinguished award for the application of psychology.” Along with his co‐authors, this new book represents a scholarly and ambitious attempt to make a difference to the general quality of interviews received by the courts and minimize the risks of miscarriages of justice, for victim or defendant. It deserves to be read by all practitioners involved in child protection, whether as investigators, judges, or lawyers.
Graham M. DaviesUniversity of Leicester
REFERENCES
Ceci, S. J., & Bruck, M. (1995).
Jeopardy in the courtroom: A scientific analysis of children’s testimony
.
Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Eysenck, M. W., Derakshan, N., Santos, R., & Calvo, M. G. (2007). Anxiety and cognitive performance: Attentional control theory.
Emotion
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, 336–353.
Harris, C. B., Rasmussen, A. S., & Berntsen, D. (2014). The functions of autobiographical memory: An integrative approach.
Memory
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, 559–581.
Lamb, M. E. (2016). Difficulties translating research on forensic interview practices to practitioners: Finding water, leading horses, but can we get them to drink?
American Psychologist
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Preface
When Tell Me What Happened first appeared in 2008, it provided a comprehensive overview of the literature on the frailties and strengths of young victim witnesses. After summarizing the results of numerous experimental and field studies, we described how a careful examination of those findings could inform practice and introduced a structured interviewing guide, the NICHD Investigative Interview Protocol, which had been successfully employed in several jurisdictions.
A decade later, our collective understanding of these issues had grown so dramatically that a revision of the book seemed necessary. Indeed, this revision is a completely new book, written with the involvement of a new author. It not only reviews the topics covered in the first edition but also incorporates a myriad of relevant findings published since the first edition went to press. This means that the book provides a comprehensive survey of both classic and new research informing best practice interviewing and reviews more recent studies exploring the utility and effectiveness of the Protocol.
Whereas the Protocol initially emphasized cognitive factors affecting the retrieval and reporting of experienced events, recent research has focused on the emotional and motivational factors that affect the willingness to disclose abuse and describe it in detail. Accordingly, this book introduces and explains the Revised Protocol, which has been developed, tested, validated, and implemented by the authors and their colleagues since publication of the first edition.
The Revised Protocol is designed to help interviewers establish the cognitive and emotional conditions that together maximize the likelihood that abused children will disclose and describe their experiences of maltreatment when formally interviewed. The revised version of Tell Me What Happened describes the Revised Protocol, as well as the research on which it is based, and shows how its use affects the behavior of interviewers and suspected victims.
Tell Me What Happened also includes a summary of recent research on the eyewitness capacities of children with intellectual and learning difficulties, Autism Spectrum Disorder, and other vulnerabilities. As we show, there is growing evidence that the Protocol and Revised Protocol are well‐suited to guide investigative interviews of such individuals, who are disproportionately likely to be victimized.
We also review research on the utility and risks associated with the widespread use of the various props and tools that are being used very frequently in the absence of a thorough understanding of what effects they might have. In general, as we show, there is little evidence that these tools help interviewers obtain evidence that could not be obtained in the course of well‐structured verbal interviews, conducted in accordance with the guidelines summarized earlier in the book.
Tell Me What Happened, like the first edition, has been written with practitioners in mind. We have made considerable efforts to ensure that our discussion is readily accessible to practitioners in the field—particularly social workers, agency staff, and police officers—as well as to academics and researchers. Although we pay close attention to the scholarly research literature, we do so in order to ensure that the advice and guidance we provide for interviewers is grounded in a thorough understanding of what we know about investigators’ characteristics and needs as well as children’s tendencies, strengths, and limitations. Our goal in writing this book is to foster improved practice, thereby ensuring that young and vulnerable victims of abuse can be protected from further harm while just outcomes are pursued for those who have maltreated them.
In writing this book, we have benefited from insights and observations made by countless professionals and researchers, as well as from feedback from the many practitioners whose own interview experiences have informed both our research and the continued development and optimization of the Investigative Interview Protocol we describe in the book. Researchers’ contributions are recognized in citations throughout the text; here we acknowledge and thank the many unsung practitioners without whose tireless efforts this book would not have been possible.
We are proud of this book, and hope that readers will find it as useful as colleagues found the first edition.
Michael E. Lamb, Deirdre A. Brown, Irit Hershkowitz,Yael Orbach, and Phillip W. EsplinDecember 2017
1Interviewing 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 (APSAC), 2012; Home Office, 2011; Lamb, La Rooy, Malloy, & Katz, 2011; Lyon, 2014; Saywitz & Camparo, 2013). Clearly, it is often possible to obtain valuable information from children, but doing so requires careful investigative procedures as well as a realistic awareness of their capacities and tendencies. Specifically, accounts elicited using open‐ended questions (“Tell me what happened”) that tap recall rather than recognition memory are typically more accurate, regardless of the children’s ages. The completeness of these initially brief accounts can be increased when interviewers use the information provided by children in their first spontaneous utterance as prompts for further elaboration (e.g., “You said the man touched you, tell me more about that touching”) (Lamb et al., 2003). Unfortunately, however, forensic interviewers frequently ask very specific questions (“Did he touch you?”) that draw upon recognition rather than recall memory. Such questions typically elicit less accurate responses than open‐ended prompts and may even cause erroneous information to be incorporated into children’s testimony. What we have learned about children’s memories and reporting capacities, as well as the implications for forensic interviewers, are the focus of Chapter 2.
In Chapter 3 we outline how children’s contributions and informativeness can be enhanced significantly by preparing them for their task as informants. Research has demonstrated the positive impact of establishing “ground rules” and conducting a brief practice interview with children before introducing the focus of enquiry. We outline some relevant caveats—for example, that children need to have the opportunity to practice ground rules for maximum effect and that practice interviews need to follow the same principles that apply to the substantive interview (namely, they should emphasize the use of open questions). We discuss research evaluating responsive interviewing and exploring the impact of interviewers’ responses to requests for clarification and “I don’t know” statements on children’s subsequent reporting. We also review evidence regarding the effectiveness of different kinds of questioning strategies.
Just as the research examining children’s capacities in forensic interviews shows remarkable consensus, so too does research evaluating the conduct of those interviews, regardless of country and training method. Unfortunately, the research‐based and expert‐endorsed recommendations are widely proclaimed but seldom followed. As discussed more fully in Chapter 4, descriptive studies of forensic interviews in various parts of the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Sweden, Finland, Norway, New Zealand, and Israel, amongst other countries, consistently highlight common and continuing challenges for forensic interviewers. Such studies show that forensic interviewers use open‐ended prompts quite rarely, even though such prompts reliably elicit more information than more focused prompts do and are universally recommended as the preferred means of eliciting information from young children (and, indeed, adults too). Interviewers often use untested or unsupported techniques in their interviews, and in doing so may exacerbate the tendency to ask more focused prompts. As well as the addition of undesirable practices, interviewers often omit recommended practices (e.g., ground rules, pre‐substantive practice narratives), known to promote children’s engagement with and contribution to interviews. To the distress of trainers, interviewers, and administrators, furthermore, deviations from “best practice” are commonly evident even when the interviewers have been trained extensively, are well aware of the recommended practices, and often believe that they were adhering to those recommendations! Both intensive and brief training programs for investigative interviewers appear to impart knowledge about desirable practices but have little if any lasting effect on the actual behavior of forensic investigators (Lamb, 2016).
Because forensic interviewers often have difficulty adhering to recommended interview practices in the field, the authors and their colleagues developed a structured interview Protocol designed to translate professional recommendations into operational guidelines that were first published as an appendix to a report by Orbach and her colleagues (2000). The structured Protocol featured in this book guides interviewers by illustrating techniques designed to maximize the amount and quality of information elicited from alleged victims. As detailed in Chapter 5, the NICHD Protocol (named after the research institute where most of the developers worked and from which they received financial support for their work) covers all phases of the investigative interview. The most recent version of the interview protocol includes guidance about how to enhance a child‐centered approach to interviewing, by improving rapport and support offered to the child throughout (this version is included at the end of the book as the Appendix). In this chapter we describe the structure and progression of interviews following the Protocol, and provide a review of the evidence‐base that has supported the Protocol’s development and implementation with children of different ages.
We then turn to field studies designed to determine whether interviewers using the Protocol indeed conduct interviews that conform better to the universally recognized “good practices” described earlier in the book, and how such practices affect children’s reporting (Chapter 6). Independent field studies in several different countries (Canada, Israel, Japan, Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States) demonstrated convincingly that interviewers using the Protocol used at least three times more open‐ended and many fewer risky and suggestive prompts than when exploring comparable incidents, involving children of the same ages, without the Protocol, and that the children, in turn, provided much more forensically relevant information (including disclosures) that was more likely to be accurate because of the ways in which it was elicited. Recent laboratory‐based studies examining children’s responses when interviewed about a known event using the Protocol have provided additional evidence of its effectiveness in eliciting accurate as well as detailed accounts with minimal interviewer input or contamination. Contrary to widespread concerns that younger children could not be helped by use of the structured Protocol, furthermore, research discussed in this chapter shows that children as young as 4 years of age benefit and are more informative when interviewed in this way. Younger and older children are different, of course, and we will explain strategies especially designed to capitalize on the capacities and tendencies of younger (3‐ to 5‐year‐old) children (Chapter 7).
Children with developmental disorders are particularly vulnerable to maltreatment. Despite this, relatively little attention has been focused on understanding the capacities of such children to provide meaningful information when forensically interviewed. In a series of studies using the Protocol we examined various aspects of testimonial capacity in children with intellectual disabilities of varying severity as well as those with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and present the findings and recommendations for practice in Chapter 8.
Most of the published research on forensic interviewing has focused on interviews with cooperative suspected victims who were ready to disclose, had often made specific allegations of abuse prior to the formal investigation, and were especially responsive to open‐ended prompts. However, there is ample evidence that many victims of abuse report the abuse belatedly, if at all, with many denying or failing to report the abuse even when they are directly asked or formally interviewed. In Chapter 9, we describe work examining interviews with reluctant victims, as well as witnesses who are not also victims (Lamb, Sternberg, Orbach, Hershkowitz, & Horowitz, 2003), and with youthful suspects (Hershkowitz, Horowitz, Lamb, Orbach, & Sternberg, 2004).
In Chapter 10 we discuss the findings of studies that have examined the effectiveness of alternative or complementary ways of eliciting information from suspected victims. The use of visual aids (e.g., dolls, diagrams, and drawing) is common in forensic interviewing, despite a relatively limited or non‐existent evidence‐base. We present research examining additional approaches interviewers might use to support children’s recall and reporting, such as mental context reinstatement, a component of the Cognitive Interview, drawing, body diagrams, and dolls, concluding that some of these techniques are unnecessarily risky.
Chapter 11 discusses how ongoing supervision and the review of interviewing practice with interviewers serves to maintain and enhance the quality of their forensic interviews. In this chapter, we reflect upon training approaches and post‐training practices that contribute to good interviewing. We also consider possible difficulties accessing supervision and consider recent innovations designed to overcome them.
Because use of the Protocol enhances the quality and informativeness of forensic interviews with suspected victims, it should enhance the value and conclusiveness of investigations into suspected incidents of sexual abuse by making it easier for investigators to judge whether victims are telling the truth (because the children provide more information in a narrative form which is more amenable to credibility assessment) and to extract more clues that may guide their search for corroborative evidence. More child‐centered interviews with multiple opportunities for children to provide their own accounts of their experiences may also influence the likelihood that clear allegations will emerge during the interviews, and the quality of the children’s testimony (and indeed, of the interviews themselves) has an impact on how cases proceed through the criminal justice system. These issues are explored more fully in Chapter 12.
The final chapter (Chapter 13) summarizes the information provided in the preceding chapters and briefly describes what we do not yet know. We believe that development of the Protocol has permitted considerable progress in the way in which children are interviewed forensically, although we hope that future research may shed further light on effective interviewing strategies and continue to inform forensic practices.
CONCLUSION
The research reviewed in this book demonstrates both 1) how much we have collectively learned about children’s communicative and memory retrieval capacities and 2) that this information can be used by interviewers to maximize the value of their investigative interviews with alleged or suspected victims of abuse. The Protocol operationalizes the principles about which there has been clear expert professional consensus and has been shown to actually improve the behavior of investigative interviewers by helping them to elicit information that is more likely to be accurate because it is recalled by the child freely rather than in response to information and probes provided by the interviewer.
Of course, the Protocol does not address all the problems facing those investigating the possible abuse of young children. Efforts are still being made to refine safe ways of providing emotional support and addressing motivational factors that make many children—more than a third of suspected victims and unknown numbers of children about whom no suspicions have been raised—reluctant to disclose abuse. Likewise we have shown that some children with developmental, intellectual, and communicative difficulties, are able to participate effectively in Protocol interviews, provided they are evaluated from a developmentally sensitive perspective. Whether children with particular types of developmental disorders (e.g., language impairments) require particular modifications to the interviewing context and strategies used remains unknown. Likewise we have not examined how well the Protocol works when used to interview adults—typically developing adults as well as those with particular mental, intellectual, or communicative challenges. There is considerable scope for further work with young suspects, and especially those who have language and/or intellectual disabilities as well.
So to return to the cases outlined at the beginning of the chapter, what does the sum of our research tell us? Let’s for a brief moment consider Ben, Sarah and Theresa, and some of the issues that their cases raise. Can very young children describe their experiences sufficiently well to inform those who must ensure their welfare or investigate possible crimes? Does the inclusion of highly improbable or fantastic details in a report irrevocably undermine the child’s reliability or credibility? What are the effects of others’ agendas on how children behave when interviewed? Our research would suggest that, with appropriate preparation and use of a child‐centered interviewing approach, even very young children can provide investigatively useful information, and that disclosures of improbable events can be clarified by follow‐up questioning using open‐ended prompts. The preparation phase of an interview can also act as a protective strategy by clearly communicating to children the interviewers’ expectations about how they should behave during the interview. The third issue is not so clear—a good interview may assist by highlighting inconsistencies or script‐like language that could indicate pre‐interview coaching or the negative influences of informal (suggestive) interviewing (e.g., from concerned parents, or doctors, teachers, and so forth) but that certainly cannot be assumed. The potentially long‐lasting effects of pre‐interview suggestions have been demonstrated in many studies, highlighting the need to conduct forensic interviews as soon as possible, to both facilitate recall and to minimize opportunities for the contamination of children’s memories.
In all, although development of the Protocol has improved the way in which some children are interviewed forensically, considerably more work is needed before we can feel confident that we are collectively doing all we can both to protect vulnerable children from further abuse and to ensure that innocent adults are not accused of crimes they did not commit because forensic interviewers failed to elicit accurate information from young informants. The Protocol remains a “work‐in‐progress” and must continue developing to accommodate the results of new research. We present here an update of this work‐in‐progress and the implications for interviewing, and children’s role in investigations, and highlight future directions for research.
2Contributions to Children’s Testimony: The Child and the Event
If we were to try to predict how well Sarah, Ben, or Theresa (Chapter 1) could contribute to the investigations that followed their comments, we would most likely focus our assessment on three broad categories of factors shown to influence children’s recall and reporting, i.e., child‐related, event‐related, and interview‐related. Examples of the kinds of factors that we would group in each category are shown in the text boxes below.
In the three cases we introduced, the children were the only available sources of information about what had happened to them; no one could provide additional or corroborative eyewitness testimony, which is a common challenge for investigations of maltreatment. As a result, the outcome of an investigation will often rest on the quality of what the child can recount in an investigative interview, with other kinds of corroborative evidence seldom available. In this chapter, we review important aspects of children’s development that affect their ability to provide useful information when interviewed about events they have experienced, and consider how characteristics of the event in question may influence what children remember and report.
Event
How many times did it happen?
How long ago did it happen?
How involved was the child?
What kind of event was it?
Child
How old?
Language skills?
Intellectual ability?
Developmental disorder?
Responsiveness to questions?
Information‐processing skills?
Theory of Mind
Source monitoring
Encoding
Processing speed
Attention
Knowledge
Strategy use
Motivation?
Interview
How long since the disclosure?
How many interviews?
Any pre‐interview assessment?
Who has talked to the child about this event already?
How was the interview explained to the child?
How was the child “prepared” for the interview?
What rapport was established?
What types of questions were asked?
How were the questions distributed throughout the interview?
Was the interview child‐led or interviewer‐led?
Were other aids or techniques used?
WHAT THE CHILD BRINGS TO AN INTERVIEW
When we think of child development, we tend to think of a range of skills and attributes that increase and become more sophisticated as children develop.
Researchers have identified typical age ranges or stages in which children first demonstrate skills or achieve mastery of them. While such estimates are helpful in understanding what we might expect from children, it is important to recognize that, in practice, the “average child” may never face an interviewer. Within any group of children, there is immense variation in the age of attainment of most skills, and it is therefore problematic to apply to any individual child group‐based age estimates of when children attain skills. For example, it is difficult to translate our knowledge of how children’s memory abilities develop into predictions of how a specific child may describe an event because multiple factors are at play. Generally speaking, there is no easy answer to the question “At what age can children …?” because, typically, the answer starts with “It depends on ….” That is, children’s performance reflects a complex interaction among a number of factors, rather than any single ability in isolation. Moreover, a single child may show various levels of different skills such as attentional or linguistic skills. That said, it is well accepted that one of the most robust predictors of children’s memory performance is age, and we provide a brief discussion of the development of memory below.
The Emergence of Long‐Term Memory in Children
There is robust scientific evidence that our earliest experiences are not available to us as adults, with very few adolescents or adults able to recall life events from before about 3 years of age This phenomenon is referred to as “infantile amnesia” and has posed a puzzle to developmental scientists, especially given substantial evidence that very young children are capable of forming autobiographical memories that they retain over days, months, or even longer, from a much younger age than 3 (Jack, MacDonald, Reese, & Hayne, 2009; Peterson, Wang, & Hou, 2009; Peterson, Warren, & Short, 2011; Tustin & Hayne, 2010). Indeed, even before the acquisition of language, very young infants clearly remember experiences, sometimes over long time periods, if appropriate nonverbal measures of memory are used (see Rovee‐Collier & Hayne, 2000, for review). Recent research has shown that the age of our earliest memories is influenced by how old we are when asked to recall them—children and adolescents may recall events from earlier ages than adults, well below the typical cut‐off of 3 years (Jack et al., 2009; Peterson et al., 2009, 2011; Tustin & Hayne, 2010). Children’s earliest memories start to become less accessible around 7 years of age; thereafter, children’s recall of early experiences begins to fall away or become less detailed, much like adults’ recall of events from this period (Bauer, 2015; Bauer & Larkina, 2014a).
Infantile amnesia occurs for memories of all kinds of early experiences—even highly distinctive events are not protected from forgetting. Although some events are more likely than others to be recalled from early ages (Fivush, Sales, Goldberg, Bahrick, & Parker, 2004; Neisser, 2004; Peterson, 2015), traumatic events are also forgotten when the events occurred very early in life.
There are several theories seeking to explain why we may have difficulty as adults retrieving early memories about our childhood. Neurobiological accounts emphasize the role of physical maturation of brain regions and neurotransmitter systems that are implicated in learning and memory (Madsen & Kim, 2016). Some researchers have suggested that infantile amnesia ends as language development begins—implying that language is an essential component for us to be able to retain and communicate our experiences. Language clearly plays a role: Memories acquired during infancy are very fragile, in part because these memories are only encoded in nonverbal modalities, involving perceptually‐based attributes (Hayne & Rovee‐Collier, 1995). In order to recall and describe nonverbal representations of events verbally, these memories must be recoded into language. The ability to translate early nonverbal experiences into a language‐based format when children have acquired the necessary vocabulary seems fragile, and dependent on contextual support—for example, the presence of objects that were part of the experience and can thus serve as cues or reminders (Bauer et al., 2004; Dahl, Kingo, & Krøjgaard, 2015). When such cues are not available, children are unable to verbally describe experiences they had prior to developing language, although they can sometimes do so through behavioral re‐enactment (Simcock & Hayne, 2002). Social‐interactionist perspectives on the emergence of autobiographical memory (Fivush, 2011) also highlight the importance of language development. For instance, Nelson and her colleagues argued that children start to form long‐term memories only when they begin talking about their experiences with others, thereby creating meaningful and enduring autobiographical records of their experiences. This social construction of personal narratives influences the quantity and quality of children’s narratives (Nelson, 2013). The emergence of memory as part of a dynamic exchange where an individual is shaped by many levels of a system (family, culture, context) is recognized in socio‐cultural perspectives on autobiographical memory development (Wang, 2016).
Other scholars have suggested that infantile amnesia dissipates with the emergence of a sense of self and an understanding that other people are separate entities from ourselves, with different thoughts, experiences, beliefs, and knowledge (Prebble, Addis, & Tippett, 2013). It is only when we understand that there is an “I” or self that is separate (Howe, 2014) that we need to process and recall information from our own experiences because we understand that others may not share them (see Howe, Courage, & Edison, 2003; Nelson & Fivush, 2004; Perner, 2000).
Still other researchers have suggested that infantile amnesia reflects basic memory processes that continue to occur throughout the lifespan (Bauer & Larkina, 2014a, 2014b). As very young infants, we encode our memories in a very primitive way that is dependent on the exact context of the experience and this is stored in a nonverbal way (because we have not yet developed language). We have limited capacity for storage and retention of these experiences, and as they become less relevant, or more automatic (less novel and informative), they are displaced by subsequent experiences. As a result, they are no longer available to us as adults. Memories encoded as we age are likely to be richer in detail and therefore likely to contain more cues that we can use to later trigger recall of them (Hayne, 2004).
How Old is the Child? Age Differences in Eyewitness Testimony
Numerous studies have shown a developmental progression in the amount of information that children report, with younger children typically reporting less than older children and adolescents (e.g., Brown, Lewis, & Lamb, 2015; Brown, Lewis, Lamb, & Stephens, 2012; Jack, Leov, & Zajac, 2014; Jack, Martyn, & Zajac, 2015). Age in itself is not sufficient to account for these differences, however, because within groups there are often younger children who do better than older children. Specifically, although measures of the average performance may show older children to be more competent, there is often overlap between adjacent age groups, such that there are high performing younger children who are better than the poorer performing older children (Geddie, Fradin, & Beer, 2000; Leichtman, Ceci, & Morse, 1997; Pipe & Salmon, 2002; Quas, Goodman, Ghetti, & Redlich, 2000; Quas, Qin, Schaaf, & Goodman, 1997). Furthermore, when the demands of the task are changed (e.g., to allow children to demonstrate knowledge in different ways) age group differences may be minimized or even eliminated (Ceci, Ross, & Toglia, 1987b; Cole & Loftus, 1987; Jones, Swift, & Johnston, 1988; Saywitz, 1987), indicating that age‐related differences in performance reflect factors other than memory ability (e.g., the way in which knowledge was assessed). In some respects, younger children may actually outperform older children—for example, younger children are less likely than older children and adults to falsely include non‐presented information that is strongly related to the theme of the to‐be‐remembered material (Brainerd & Reyna, 2012). Age, it seems, does not determine children’s ability to recount personal experiences but rather serves to encapsulate the influence of a number of variables relating to children’s abilities, the effects of which may differ across interview/recall contexts.
Responsiveness to Questions: Developmental Changes in Children’s Verbal Accounts
Once children are able to talk about their experiences, their abilities to recall events are often impressive, although significant developmental changes continue through early childhood. Young children typically recall significantly less information than older children, particularly in response to very general prompts such as “Tell me what happened,” and may not include the kinds of details that adults might mention (Strange & Hayne, 2013). What they spontaneously include in their reports, however, is as likely to be accurate as information provided by older children. Four‐ and 5‐year‐olds thus typically require more specific prompts from interviewers (Hamond & Fivush, 1991; Hershkowitz, Lamb, Orbach, Katz, & Horowitz, 2012), but in responding to such prompts their accounts may be more inaccurate than older children’s (Bjorklund, Bjorklund, Brown, & Cassel, 1998; Goodman, Quas, Batterman‐Faunce, Riddlesberger, & Kuhn, 1994). Nevertheless, recent field research shows that children as young as 4 years of age provide proportionally as much information in response to open‐ended questions as older children, although the brevity of their responses makes it necessary for interviewers to prompt for additional information, using the children’s prior responses as cues to trigger further recall (Lamb et al., 2003; Hershkowitz et al., 2012 and Chapter 7).
