The forensic interview process happens when children have been abused or witnessed a violent act. “Every year more than 3 million reports of child abuse are made in the United States involving more than 6 million children (a report can include multiple children) (National Child Abuse Statistics).” In the United States there are about four to seven children that die every day due to child abuse and neglect (National Child Abuse Statistics). There are many different processes to conduct the interview and a number of steps are followed so children can tell their story accurately. People conducting the interview are supposed to make the child feel comfortable in their environment so they can find out what events happened.
The first phase of the interview process is planning details of what the interview will consist of. A witness assessment is what allows interviewers to find out information about the child and what happened to the child. The interviewer collects information about the child such as the name, age, gender, ethnicity, current living situation, physical/learning disability, medications taken, emotional state, any contact with public services, and relationship to the offender (Lamb, Michael E.; La Rooy, David J.; Malloy, Lindsay C.; Katz, Carmit (2011). It’s useful to find what hobbies may interest the child to build a connection with them. It also helps to find out any misunderstandings of the event that could lead to a false accusation (Forensic Interviewing Protocol). This helps distinguish any possible missing information and if the child is being accurate with their story.
The second phase involves the interviewer making the interview room comfortable for the child. Setting up the room and any equipment before...
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...e. Retrieved from http://www.eblib.com
National Child Abuse Statistics | Childhelp. (n.d.). Retrieved March 26, 2014, from http://www.childhelp-usa.com/pages/statistics
Pipe, M., Orbach, Y., Lamb, M. E., Abbott, C.B., & Stewart, H. (2013). Do case outcomes change when investigative interviewing practices change?. Psychology, Public Policy, And Law, 19(2), 179-190. Doi: 10.1037/a0030312
State of Michigan Governor’s Task Force On Child Abuse And Neglect And Department Of Human Services. Forensic Interviewing Protocol. Retrieved March 26, 2014, from http://www.michigan.gov/documents/dhs/DHS-PUB-0779_211637_7.pdf
United States. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.,. (2002). Interviewing child witnesses and victims of sexual abuse. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Dept. of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.
Lord, V. B., & Cowan, A. D. (2011). Interviewing in criminal justice. Ontario: Jones and Bartlett.
So the question remains, Can we rely on children? Under unbiased, highly trained, standardized ways of interviewing.....the answer is yes. Clinicians who have had the training necessary to evaluate and judge are completely capable of interviewing these children because children are indeed competent and qualified to testify on the witness stand. Open ended questioning, yes-no questioning, selective questioning (man or woman) and identification questioning (what time was it?) are key ways of interviewing to provide for accurate recollection. And when a child is asked these questions in a neutral way, you can believe that they are telling the truth.
There are nine steps to the interrogation process, but before the steps are implemented, there’s an initial interview to determine guilt or innocence. During this time, the interrogator attempts to create a rapport with the suspect by using casual conversation to establish a non-threating atmosphere. Often time, people are more comfortable when they feel they can relate to the person they are talking to, so the interrogator may claim to share some common beliefs or interest. If the suspect starts talking to the interrogator about harmless things, it becomes harder to stop talking or start lying later, after when the discussion turns to crime (dying words). In the initial investigation, the investigator will observe the suspects verbal and non-verbal reactions, this information will help establish a baseline reaction before the stress commences; later on in the investigation, the baseline will help the interrogator determine if the suspect is telling the truth or lying. Now the investigation can proceed with the nine-step process. First step, direct positive confrontation, involves directly confronting the suspect with a statement that it is known that he or she committed the crime. Often, the police lie and describe nonexistent evidence that points to the suspect as the offender. The second step, theme development, is the step in which the police present a hypothesis about the
...igations today has a huge impact on false confessions. The Reid Technique is being criticized in the media because of its guilt-presumptive, aggressive, and psychologically manipulative nature. It is based on a series of assumptions that lack scientific support, and by using it they are creating hostile and coercive environment for the interrogation. The fact that they try to pass these confessions off as voluntary should also be an issue against using them since we know they are usually coerced. There are two alternatives to the Reid technique being used to interview suspects. These do not use coercion and manipulation to get confessions. The first is the PEACE Model, which is an interview technique that is more ethical, and the other technique is Cognitive interviewing which is used by police as a memory technique used to enhance the retrieval of their memory.
When children are giving eyewitness testimony’s, the investigators techniques are a little different in terms of the repetition of questions. This is sometimes to get them to remember more information from when they asked it in the first instance. Whilst law enforcement are questioning ch...
Even though I am aware that there have been great strides forward, especially within the past decade, in the implementation of safer and more constructive methods, in regards to child interviewing practices, I am appalled at the gross negligence of our justice system, in their failure to protect children from the brutal onslaught of such damaging interrogation. Not only does it fail to safeguard a child’s health and well-fare, but it also proves counterproductive in the gathering of reliable testimony, and so therefore does not ultimately serve the constructs of justice, either.
Many people think that children do not lie. It is not that they lie, they just cannot remember what happened a year or two ago when they were much younger, perhaps only a year or two old. The truth is children do lie. “One study shows that twenty three percent of abuse allegations are false and there was insufficient information to determine the truth in another twenty four percent” (Slicker W.D., 1999, Child testimony ¶ 16). Fear is also a factor in children lying or not providing adequate information. Lepore (1991) says that studies show in most abuse cases the suspect will usually bribe the child or threaten them into secrecy. This causes the child to become afraid to tell the truth, and they will begin to deny what has happened or even worse not report the abuse at all. The way an interviewer phrases a question will influence a child.
Lyon, T. D., Scurich, N., Choi, K., Handmaker, S., & Blank, R. (2012). "how did you feel?": Increasing child sexual abuse witnesses' production of evaluative information. Law and Human Behavior, 36(5), 448-457.
Forensic psychology is an area of psychology that has been rapidly gaining popularity in recent years. Entertainment media’s fascination with the intersection of crime and psychology has fueled the growing interest in the field. According to Jane Tyler Ward, PhD, forensic psychology can be defined as psychology that “emphasizes the application of research and experimentation in other areas of psychology to the legal arena.” Although forensic psychology is popular right now, it was not until 1962 that a court case set the precedent that properly trained psychologists could provide expert testimony (Page 20). Additionally, forensic psychology was not APA (American Psychological Association) certified until 2001 (Page 16). The field of forensic
For both Cognitive and Forensic interviewing, it has been found to be more effective with older children than with younger for a variety of reasons. These reasons include the natural linguistic and cognitive development of children. Older children are more likely to remember the more information about the situation they experienced through a Cognitive interview than younger children, which suggests that may be most beneficial for them. Forensic interviewing should work better with younger children than Cognitive interviewing in that it allows freedom to give unique answers and considers the child’s age and developmental level more than a Cognitive interview does. In many interviews, children with intellectual disabilities need more prompting
Regan, P.C. & Baker, S.J. (1998). The impact of child witness demeanor on perceived credibility and trial outcome in sexual abuse cases. Journal of Family Violence, 13(2), 187-195.
Finkelhor D. Hammer H. & Sedlak A. J. NISMART Bulletin: Runaway/Thrownaway Children. Sexually Assaulted Children: National Estimates and Characteristics. Retrieved from https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/ojjdp/214383.pdf
Child witnesses have provided a basis for controversy over the years in criminal justice. There are two main things that people worry about when it comes to having a child witness, one is the anxiety that is put on the child with regard to the traumatic experience and the other is dependability of the testimony. Child testimony has long been considered an important part of the case but what is to be done when there are questions regarding legal, ethical, and professional ways to interact with the children.
Beginning in the late 1800’s and the early 1900’s forensic psychology originated when a man named James McKeen Cattell conducted a study at Columbia University. During his time learning and coming up with the idea that psychology could be used as a way to solve court cases he did many experiments with his students. In one study he allowed 56 of his students practice eye witness testimonies with a series of questions. He conducted the experiment by asking the students about trees and asked the students to rate their confidence in what they saw and recall what they saw hours later. During this experiment Cattell...
More importantly, “60 percent of children who are sexually abused do not disclose and most are acquaintances but as many as 47 percent are family or extended family” (The Scope of, 2016). The prevalence of child sexual abuse is difficult to determine because it is often not reported; experts agree that the incidence is far greater than what is reported to authorities (Child Sexual Abuse, 2012). Startling statistics represent the depth of the issue. Globally, prevalence rates show that a range of 7-36% of women and 3-29% of men experience sexual abuse in childhood (The Scope of, 2016). “The U.S Department of Health and Human Services’ Children’s Bureau report child maltreatment 2010 found that 9.2% of victimized children were sexually assaulted” (Child Sexual Abuse,