Interviewing children who may have been sexually abused.

In recent years, allegations of child sexual abuse have been intensely scrutinized and procedures for interviewing children who may have been sexually abused have been vigorously attacked. Findings from developmental research with children who are not victims of sexual abuse or of other trauma has been applied without appropriate caution to the circumstances of interviewing children who are suspected of having been sexually abused. Yet there is little research on the process of interviewing suspected victims of sexual abuse to support or refute current criticisms of interviewing strategies in sexual abuse. As a result, while professional guidelines for the evaluation of sexual abuse allegations exist, they are not data-based. The current study is an effort to broaden our understanding of the process of interviewing children who may have been sexually abused, with a specific focus on two elements of the child interview: questioning strategies and children's disclosure patterns. To examine these issues, 76 children ages five to ten years old, referred to a multidisciplinary specialty clinic for evaluation of possible sexual abuse participated in the study. Each child received at least two interviews. Data from the first interview were analyzed according to the presence of disclosure and the kinds of questions posed by interviewers. Nine types of questions were considered, along a continuum from open-ended to leading/coercive. Results indicate that children needed to be asked many questions in order to discuss possible sexual abuse. Analyses of the types of questions employed in the initial interview demonstrate that children responded to focused questions more frequently than to open-ended queries. Furthermore, findings suggest that focused questions were particularly effective in facilitating children's disclosures about possible abuse. The relationship between available corroborative information about abuse allegations and children's disclosures suggests that questioning strategies in this study did not produce a high rate of false positives. Taken together, findings regarding questioning strategies indicate that current protocols which encourage the exclusive use of open-ended questions may not be effective in interviewing many children who have been sexually abused. Implications for clinical practice and future research are discussed.Ph.D.CommunicationCommunication and the ArtsCriminologySocial SciencesSocial workUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/129972/2/9711950.pd