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Error Rates in Forensic Child Sexual Abuse Evaluations

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Abstract

When mental health, medical, and social work professionals and paraprofessionals make false positive or false negative errors in their judgments about the validity of allegations of child sexual abuse, the consequences can be catastrophic for the affected children and adults. Because of the high stakes, practitioners, legal decision makers, and policy makers should have some idea of the magnitude and variability of error rates in this domain. A novel approach was used to estimate individual error rates for 110 professionals (psychologists, physicians, social workers, and others) who conduct or participate in forensic child sexual abuse evaluations. The median estimated false positive and false negative error rates were 0.18 and 0.36, respectively. Estimated error rates varied markedly from one participant to the next. For example, the false positive error rate estimates ranged from 0.00 to 0.83. These estimates are based on participants’ self-reported substantiation rates and on their subjective frequency distributions for the probability of truth for the abuse allegations they evaluate.

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Notes

  1. Psychiatrists, other physicians, and nurses collect and evaluate both medical evidence (the physical signs of abuse) and psychosocial evidence (verbal reports during interviews with the alleged child victim and others, documentation of past verbal reports, opinions of other professionals, and behavioral observations). This article focuses on psychosocial evaluations. To the extent that medical personnel evaluate the validity of abuse allegations on the basis of psychosocial data, they are performing psychosocial evaluations.

  2. The verb to substantiate and the adjective substantiated are used throughout this article in the sense that is familiar in this context: to describe a data collection and evaluation process which culminates in an MHP’s judgment that there is enough evidence that an allegation of sexual abuse is true to warrant State intervention. This usage may be misleading and confusing to those not familiar with child abuse jargon, because it is not consistent with the general meaning of the verb to substantiate. The Oxford English Dictionary defines substantiate as to “provide evidence to support or prove the truth of” (Soanes and Stevenson 2005). However, there are many cases in which MHPs “substantiate” abuse allegations that are not supported by any evidence other than the child’s report. In other words, in many cases that they “substantiate,” MHPs do not actually find or provide any new evidence that “supports or proves the truth of” an abuse allegation. In essence, “substantiation” often boils down to an MHP expressing an opinion that a child is telling the truth. Despite this fundamental definitional problem, for the sake of convenience and readability, the terms to substantiate and substantiated are used throughout this article in the familiar way.

  3. This phrase comes from the well-known US Supreme Court decision, Daubert vs. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (1993).

  4. See Lamb et al. (2008) for a discussion of situations in which modifications to the protocol may be necessary.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Hawaii at Hilo, 200 West Kawili Street, Hilo, HI, 96720, USA

    Steve Herman & Tiffany R. Freitas

Authors
  1. Steve Herman
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  2. Tiffany R. Freitas
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Correspondence to Steve Herman.

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This research was supported in part by grant #P20MD001125 from the National Institutes of Health.

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Herman, S., Freitas, T.R. Error Rates in Forensic Child Sexual Abuse Evaluations. Psychol. Inj. and Law 3, 133–147 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12207-010-9073-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12207-010-9073-0

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