Handbook On Questioning Children

Handbook on Questioning Children

Tell Me What Happened

Represents a scholarly and ambitious attempt to improve the quality of interviews received by the courts and minimize the risks of miscarriages of justice, for victims and defendants This book updates the previous review of research on children’s testimony—reexamining and readdressing how the quality of information provided by young witnesses is affected by the way they are questioned. Drawing upon both experimental and field studies conducted in different countries, it summarizes evidence supporting the effectiveness of the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Protocol and showcases the Protocol’s superiority over other current interviewing techniques for eliciting detailed and forensically useful content from child complainants. Written with both child protection professionals and researchers in mind, Tell Me What Happened: Questioning Children About Abuse offers advice and opinions drawn from actual investigative interviews as well as academic research. Its insightful chapters cover: children’s testimony; interview and questioning strategies; how investigators typically interview alleged victims; the NICHD Investigative Interview Protocols; the impact that following the Protocol has on interviews and children’s responses; interviewing victims under the age of six; interviewing children with developmental disabilities; using tools and props to complement the Protocol; training and maintaining good interviewing practices; and more. Provides a primary source of guidance practitioners and professionals involved in child protection Updates guidance for interviewers by adding consideration of emotional and motivational factors to better understand children’s behavior during interviews Integrates the substantial body of research published over the last decade and reflects upon questions that the field should continue to address Tell Me What Happened: Questioning Children About Abuse deserves to be read by all practitioners involved in child protection, whether as investigators, interviewers, judges, or lawyers.

Interviewing Children

Whether as eyewitnesses or victims, children are often interviewed to provide evidence for forensic investigations. But strategies that may work for interviewing adults often do not work on children. Because of children's incomplete language development, their greater risk of retrieving inaccurate information in response to memory cues, and their desire to say what they think the interviewer wants to hear (whether truthful or not), their testimony can be unreliable. Sometimes, the interviewer's challenge is a child who does not want to talk at all. In this book, Debra Poole introduces the science of interviewing children by explaining the problems that can arise when adults talk to children and how a forensic perspective mitigates these problems. She discusses child development considerations and presents a flexible approach to interviewing children. Through her descriptions of best practices, brief summaries of supporting research, example interview dialogs, answers to common questions from practitioners, and a final section for trainers and policymakers, Poole provides a roadmap for anyone working in a forensic context. This is essential reading for those who interview children, supervise interviewers, review interview findings, or craft local policies about interviewing children.