Wed Jul 18 2001
Child Advocacy Center Studies Repeating Child Interviews
The National Children's Advocacy Center has completed a two-year study of a child abuse investigation format that permits a child to be interviewed as many as seven times. Results show that many children who did not allege abuse in the first interview did allege it in one of the next four.
The results are sure to aggravate concerns that repeated interviews induce some children to report non-existent abuse. Nearly half the children in the study were younger than six years; other studies show this age group to be the most suggestible.
The child interviewers in the study were mental health professionals, most employed at child advocacy centers. The researchers provided them training in child interviewing but acknowledge that, without tape recording, they cannot know how well the interviewers followed the training.
The researchers also acknowledge that they could not determine whether the allegations the interviewers obtained were accurate. When possible, they tracked the cases in which an interviewer obtained a credible abuse allegation to see if the legal system supported the allegation-such as by a suspect's confession to police or a criminal indictment. In 73% of those cases, the legal system did in some way support the allegation.
The report on the study, "Extended Forensic Evaluation When Sexual Abuse is Suspected: A Multisite Field Study," by Connie Nicholas Carnes, et al., appears in Child Maltreatment for August 2001 (Vol. 6, No. 3, p. 230).
Copyright © 2003 David S. Marshall
