Abstract
Sexually abused children provide the chief source of information about their victimization. Yet child victims are often reluctant to disclose their abuse. Investigative interviewing strategies strive for forensic balance, that is, to avoid both false negatives (failing to identify true victims of sexual abuse) and false positives (wrongly identifying children as victims who are not). Considerable progress has been made in developing forensically sound and evidence-based investigative interview structures, protocols, and guidelines in the past 35 years, resulting in a number of common principles for investigative interviewing. Most structures, protocols, and guidelines fall into the categories of scripted and semi-structured. In this chapter, the importance of Children’s Advocacy Centers in the development of investigative interviews is described. Interview structures are covered. A continuum of questions from open-ended to close-ended is presented. Controversies about the use of media in investigative interviews are discussed.
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Notes
- 1.
While an unlikely town, it was the home of space and rocket endeavors, and so had an enlightened population.
- 2.
National Children’s Advocacy Center: History - https://www.nationalcac.org/history/.
- 3.
Analogue studies are conducted in university settings with children without a known history of sexual abuse. Children experience an event that is intended to be analogous to sexual abuse, for example an encounter with a male stranger in a trailer. They are then questioned about the encounter by a researcher, who uses a variety of questioning techniques.
- 4.
High certainty cases are cases in which there is another indicator that the child has been sexually abused, for example, sexually transmitted infections, offender confession, or audio-visual evidence of abuse.
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Recommended Readings
Faller, K. C. (2007). Interviewing children about sexual abuse: Controversies and best practice. Oxford University Press.
Lamb, M., Brown, D., Hershkowitz, I., Orbach, Y., & Esplin, P. (2018a). Tell me what happened: Questioning children about abuse. Wiley Blackwell.
Newlin, C. Steele, L. C., Chamberlin, A., Anderson, J., Kenniston, J., Russell, A., Stewart, H., & Vaughan-Eden, V. (2015). Child forensic interviewing: Best practices. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, US Department of Justice. http://www.ojjdp.gov/pubs/248749.pdf.
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Faller, K.C. (2021). Investigative Interviewing of Children in Sex Abuse Cases. In: Deslauriers-Varin, N., Bennell, C. (eds) Criminal Investigations of Sexual Offenses. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79968-7_7
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