Challenges - interviewing Child witnesses

Adult Expectations

• Children can provide useful and accurate accounts if interviewed properly

• Reliability of statements from children decreases when interviewed wrong

• Adults, including legal professionals expect to be able to distinguish between true and false accounts – particularly children’s accounts

  • Warrant et al

    • Children interviewed soon after a serious injury requiring emergency-room treatment (truth teller)

    • Matched with 3 other children asked to fabricate a similar event

      ·       Unprepared lie (“Try to fool the interviewer”)

      • Prepared lie (24hrs to prepare)

      • Coached lie (coached by parents for 4 days prior to interview)

    • 514 students given transcript and asked to judge if they were lying

      

Controversial Case

• McMartin Case

  • Description

    • Parent tells police son was molested

    • Letters sent to parents to ask children about abuse

    • 360 children ‘diagnosed’ of abuse

    • No evidence

    • Hundreds of children led to believe they were victims of abuse

  • Analysis

    • Initial denial

    • Use of suggestive techniques

      • Leading questions

      • Conformity pressure

      • Repeating questions several times

      • Positive reinforcement

      • Intonation (stress on certain words)

        Asking child to imaging the event

Factors effecting reliability of child testimony

• Children have limited memory capacities and less communicatively competent that older children and adults

  • Less information and details reported

  • Interviewers respond to inappropriate questioning style

• Other risks

  • Interview bias (seeking confirmatory evidence)

  • Compliance to authority figures

  • Poor reality monitoring ability

• Children have higher risk of being affected by poor interview quality

• Poor interviewing victimises children

Stereotype and suggestion – Leichtman & Ceci 1995

• Participants

  • 3-4 and 5-6

• Procedure

  • 2 minuet visit from ‘Sam Stone)

  • 5 interviews

• Conditions

  • No suggestion

  • Pre-event stereotype (Sam is clumsy)

  • Suggestive interview

  • Both

• Summary

  • Indirect (stereotype) and direct suggestions negatively influence reliability of children’s report

    • More for younger children

  • Some children persistently reported false information even when challenged

    • Some evidence of embellishment

  • Follow up study found child protection professionals performed at chance levels when asked to distinguish between the accurate and inaccurate accounts

Information ‘contagion’

• Staged a classroom archaeological dig for 3 groups of children 4 years

  • Conditions

    • Target group – witnesses 2 critical activities (find being destroyed)

    • Classmate – classmates of above group but didn’t see it

    • Control – did not witness

• Summary

  • Classmate group often falsely claimed they had witnesses the events too

  • False reported created through interacting with peers

  • Large percentage claimed to remember the activity

  • Field stud – highly ecological

Confabulation and imagination inflation

• Participants

  • 3-4 and 5-6

• Procedures

  • Interview one a week for 12 weeks

  • 8 events (4 false )

    • Told that their mom said it had occurred

    • Told it was ok if they didn’t remember

  • Last session – different interviewer told the children that not all the events had happened to them

• Results

  • For both positive and negative events their was initial rejections but as the interviews went on this number of reports increased

  • Adults had no better than chance at distinguishing between accurate and inaccurate reports

Imagination paradigm with adults – wade et al

• 20 participants given 3 interviews over 2 weeks about 3 true photos and one false

• False reports increased from 35 in first interview to 50% on final

• Results

  • Imagining an event increases subjective confidence that the event actually happened

Source monitoring

• Factors contributing to source errors

  • Anything that makes it harder to tell between qualities associated with different memories can increase source errors

    • High perceptual semantic and temporal similarity between two sources

    • Poor encoding conditions – e.g. divided attention

    • Imagination inflation

• Can children monitor the source of their memory

  • In comparison to adults children are poor at source monitoring

Repeated Interviewing

• Problems with particularisation

  • Children are vulnerable to suggestion when being interviewed about events that happened more than once

• Findings

  • Decline in accuracy, certainty and consistency

  • High rate of internal intrusion errors (the source for each individual event isn’t necessarily correct)

    • Migration of details from other occurrences of the event into the occurrences being recalled

      • Did occur but maybe not int eh incident that they are currently reporting

      • This causes a problems as the other person can use evidence to prove this wrong down to a memory error

  • Lower rate of external intrusion errors (not just making things up)

    • Details not featured in any occurrence

• Implications

  • Most previous work has forces on non-experienced events

    • Underestimate suggestibility to interview suggestion after repeated experiences

    • Implications for timeline of interviewing about repeated events

  • Errors or inconsistencies in a child account of a repeated event reduce the chance of prosecution

Interviewing props and suggestibility

• Controversial

  • Used in high profile cases

  • Significant animosity between proponents and researchers

• Tension between

  • Justice for child (getting account against abuser)

  • Justice for defendant (protection against false claims)

Use of props in investigative interviews

• Interviewing (play therapy)

  • Idea that objects help bridge the gap between what children known and what they can explain

  • Allows them to response without verbalizing and provide effective retrieval cues

  • Research suggest that this assumption may be an error

• Early observations

  • Dolls provide affordances (features permitting certain behaviours)

    • Sexualised behaviour with dolls observed in non-abused children

    • Non-diagnostic of abuse

  • More controlled research (medical examination )

    • After physical exam, interviewers presented anatomical dolls

      • 27% of non-touched children falsely claimed doctor touch them (genital area)

      • 51% of touched children denied being touched

      • Interviewers then asked more suggestive questions asking the children to show how the doctor touched certain areas

        • 36% of non touched children falsely showed touching

        • Error include ‘over touching’ responses (finger insertions)

Problem with props

• Developmental issues

  • Pre-requisite for conveying information about self with a doll is representation insight (don’t understand what they dolls are for, that they are supposed to be them)

    • (understand the doll is an object but also a symbol of themselves)

  • Young children find it difficult to understand symbol-referent relations

  • Younger children suggestible in this context

• Body diagrams

  • 5-7 year olds are challenged when asked to report on body diagrams

    • Practice interview instruction – touched children on elbow and then asked them on diagram where they were touched

    • 54% of children required correction and additional explanation

  • Body diagrams are also problematic

False Report: Current research

• Emerging explanations

  • Poole et al

    • Used a Mr science paradigm but also cognitive developmental measures

    • Looked at the false report and the test on the cognitive abilities 

    • Found deficient cognitive control – the inability to reliably use internalised rules and representations to guide behaviour was a key predictor of exuberant false allegations

• Interim conclusions

  • Suggestibility is not limited to preschool children

  • Its not confined to formal interviews (peer/parental influence)

  • Children can believe that the suggestion actually happened

  • Children are susceptible to making internal intrusion errors

  • Developmental difference sin source monitoring ability and deficient cognitive control are likely reasons for both report error and false reporting

  • Popular belief that props assist children is misleading