Elsevier

Child Abuse & Neglect

Volume 38, Issue 2, February 2014, Pages 202-211
Child Abuse & Neglect

Witness recall across repeated interviews in a case of repeated abuse,☆☆

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2013.06.010Get rights and content

Abstract

In this illustrative case study we examine the three forensic interviews of a girl who experienced repeated sexual abuse from ages 7 to 11. She disclosed the abuse after watching a serialized television show that contained a storyline similar to her own experience. This triggered an investigation that ended in successful prosecution of the offender. Because this case involved abuse that was repeated on a weekly basis for 4 years we thus investigated the degree to which the child's narrative reflected specific episodes or generic accounts, and both the interviewer's and child's attempts to elicit and provide, respectively, specific details across the 3 interviews collected in a 1 month period. Across the 3 interviews, the child's account was largely generic, yet on a number of occasions she provided details specific to individual incidents (episodic leads) that could have been probed further. As predicted: earlier interviews were characterized more by episodic than generic prompts and the reverse was true for the third interview; the child often responded using the same style of language (episodic or generic) as the interviewer; and open questions yielded narrative information. We discuss the importance of adopting children's words to specify occurrences, and the potential benefits of permitting generic recall in investigative interviews on children's ability to provide episodic leads. Despite the fact that the testimony was characterized by generic information about what usually happened, rather than specific episodic details about individual occurrences, this case resulted in successful prosecution.

Introduction

The specificity of information reported in interviews with child victims of repeated sexual abuse is important because the prevalent viewpoint in these cases is that interviewers should elicit specific accounts of abusive incidents (Guadagno et al., 2006, Lamb et al., 2007). In cases of repeated abuse it is also likely that repeated interviewing may be necessary to elicit a complete account, although the dynamics of repeated interviews are controversial (La Rooy, Lamb, & Pipe, 2009) and have only been systematically examined in a few studies of forensic interviews (Cederborg et al., 2008, Hershkowitz and Terner, 2007, Leander, 2010) with even fewer published case studies illustrating their effects (La Rooy et al., 2010, Orbach et al., 2012). Taken together, the combination of repeated episodes of abuse and repeated interviews heighten the complexity of such cases. In this article we contextualize some of these issues through the presentation of a case study such that practitioners, interviewers, and others involved in dealing with similar cases, might be able to recognize their own challenges and potentially enhance practice and training.

In this case study, involving allegations of repeated sexual abuse over several years culminating in successful prosecution of the offender when the child victim was 14 years old, we discuss experimental research of memory for repeated events and why the reporting of generic information (i.e., describing what happens across the series of events) is considered problematic from a legal and psychological perspective, research-based recommendations for interviewers for obtaining particularized occurrences, and our analysis of the interviews in this case. We show, using examples from the actual interview transcripts, potential alternative prompts that may have yielded additional specific information, based on experimental research. We conclude with a discussion of the importance of securing both specific and generic details.

It is well understood that memories for events that have occurred on repeated occasions differ qualitatively from memories for single-experience events (see Roberts & Powell, 2001, for a review). After one or more exposures to an event people develop a script or general event representation about what usually happens (Hudson and Nelson, 1986, Hudson et al., 1992). Scripts are stereotypical knowledge structures that describe event actions or objects (e.g., what happens when you go to a restaurant), and often include information about temporal sequence (Abelson, 1981, Schank and Abelson, 1977), as well as which features are necessary (e.g., the restaurant script must include some manner of payment), which are optional (e.g., one may choose to consume food or only order a beverage), and which are less tightly bound to the script (e.g., food may be ordered from a counter, a drive-through window, or a server); see Nelson, 1986, for a review.

Scripts serve a purpose in helping children to learn about the world and make future experiences predictable (Nelson, 1986). Indeed, research has consistently demonstrated that children's memories are strengthened for details that are always or often present, and they are highly resistant to false suggestions about such details (e.g., Powell, Roberts, Ceci, & Hembrooke, 1999). Thus, generic accounts of “what usually happens,” despite lacking the specificity often required in legal settings, can be quite accurate and consistent.

In contrast, details that change across occurrences are often not recalled correctly with respect to when they actually occurred, known as source confusion in the psychological literature (Ackil and Zaragoza, 1995, Roberts and Blades, 1999). When Powell et al. (1999) asked 5- to 6-year-old children to recall the fourth occurrence of a repeated event the children accurately reported a remarkable 96% of details that were unchanged across the occurrences (fixed) but only reported 35% of details that had varied (variable), and they made errors with these latter details. The majority of those errors (65%) were source confusions; children reported details that truly happened, but attributed them to the wrong occurrence.

When children are asked to provide information about a specific occurrence of a repeated event they must engage in a decision-making process about which of the details they can recall actually happened during the occurrence in question, and filter out other information that was experienced on another occasion. This process is referred to as source monitoring (see Johnson et al., 1993, Roberts, 2000). Source decisions for details that vary across occurrences are especially difficult because each occurrence shares very similar perceptual information. Increasing similarity across events, and decreasing age, are both associated with greater source confusions (Lindsay et al., 1991, Roberts and Powell, 2001). Children are further impeded by their poorer temporal understanding; they may struggle to determine the order of events in time, one manner in which a source judgment might be made (Powell & Thomson, 1997).

Potential errors arising when describing specific occurrences of a repeated event are also explained by Fuzzy-Trace Theory. According to Brainerd and Reyna (2004), “verbatim traces” are integrated representations of a memory's target surface form and include contextual cues such as source. Recalling the exact features of a specific occurrence can be likened to retrieval of verbatim details. Gist information, or the general meaning/theme of a memory, on the other hand is reconstructed from the event experiences (Brainerd and Reyna, 1990, Reyna and Brainerd, 1995). Errors can be made when a retrieved detail that is gist consistent (e.g., “mum was always out of the house”) is assigned to the wrong instance of the repeated event (e.g., saying she was at work on the last time, when she actually was at the shops) because the verbatim trace containing source information has decayed. Repeatedly experiencing the event makes the “mum was always out” gist trace stronger. Thus, there can be concern that a child using gist information to reconstruct memory for a specific incident may be retrieving the wrong verbatim trace. Psychologists who research these types of recall errors in memory have emphasized the legal implications of their work.

Despite the importance of scripts to children's cognitive development and potential challenges in describing specific occurrences, there are times when a generic account of events is not desirable, such as in prosecution of child sexual abuse cases. Child sexual abuse is often repeated (Connolly and Read, 2006, Sas and Cunningham, 1995). Children are frequently the only witnesses and thus may be required to testify about their experiences (McGough, 1994). In many cases they must provide enough specific detail (e.g., time, place, clothing worn) particular to one occurrence, known as particularization (Guadagno et al., 2006, Podirsky, 1990, R.v.B., 1990, S.v., 1989).

Generic reports lacking specific episodic detail (e.g., “he always does it when my mum is at work”) can impede prosecution because they pose a challenge for determining a charge and do not allow for the possibility of an alibi. In addition, cross-examination will challenge children with respect to confusions across occurrences, or inconsistencies in their accounts (Zajac and Hayne, 2003, Zajac and Hayne, 2006, Zajac et al., 2012), and the process of cross-examination itself necessitates that at least some specific occurrences are particularized (Zajac et al., 2012). In cases where the child's interview is used as evidence in chief it is also preferable to have specific episodes elicited one at a time, producing a coherent narrative account which has positive effects on perceptions of children's credibility (Davis et al., 1999, Smith and Milne, 2011). In contrast, a lack of specific information and confusions across occurrences are associated with decreased perceptions of credibility. Connolly, Price, Lavoie, and Gordon (2008) found that children with repeated (lab) experience were generally rated as less cognitively competent, less honest, less confident, and less credible than children with a single experience, and their accounts contained more inconsistencies.

Although particularization requirements exist in many jurisdictions around the world, there have been exceptions wherein judges have ruled that a certain combination of factors such as young child age, very high frequency of abusive occurrences, and familial relationship of perpetrator would make it unreasonable for a child to provide specific accounts (e.g., People v. Jones, 1990). It is important to note that the latter two factors are characteristic of the current case study. Nevertheless, for the psychological and legal reasons described, best practice guidelines (e.g., Lamb et al., 2007) instruct interviewers to secure episodic information about specific incidents because there remain concerns about allowing a child's testimony to consist largely of generic information.

It is recommended that children give an account of the alleged events in response to open-prompts because they are more likely to provide accurate information than when asked specific questions (Kuehnle and Connell, 2009, Lamb et al., 2008). Interviewers should question children early as to whether the alleged abuse happened “one time or more than one time” and then request information about specific incidents such as the first or last time (Lamb et al., 2007). Interviewers should be aware of linguistic cues that indicate generic recall such as use of the timeless present (e.g., “he does it when mum's out”) and the impersonal “you” pronoun (e.g., “you have to keep quiet or he shouts”). In contrast, verbs in the past tense and some lexical markers (e.g., yesterday, the last time) tend to indicate episodic reports about individual occurrences (Nelson & Gruendel, 1986).

Several studies have now demonstrated that children are highly responsive to interviewer language; providing episodic information in response to episodic prompts, and generic detail when prompted generically (Brubacher et al., 2011b, Brubacher et al., 2012, Brubacher et al., 2013, Schneider et al., 2011). Even before allegations are discussed, interviewers should model effective episodic prompts in the practice interview. The practice phase serves cognitive and motivational purposes (see Roberts, Brubacher, Powell, & Price, 2011), including practice reporting episodic events and specific details. This phase should comprise of interviewers using open-prompts to elicit detailed accounts of neutral past experiences from interviewees. When practiced in this way, children learn to provide a greater amount of information in response to open prompts (Roberts et al., 2004, Sternberg et al., 1997).

Across practice and substantive phases of the interview then, prompts should remain open-ended, drawing on free recall memory, and minimize the asking of questions that draw on cued and recognition memory; this is also the recommendation of the interviewing guidelines provided by the country in which this case took place. It has also been suggested that if children are allowed to report freely, they may disclose specific episodic details that can aid particularization (Powell, Wright, & Hughes-Scholes, 2011).

Cognizant of both the caveats surrounding generic testimony, and evidence-based recommendations to interviewers, we examined the three interviews conducted with a young girl for the proportion of episodic and generic language used in the interviews, the number of times the child provided an opportunity for the interviewer to elicit specific information, and whether the interviewer used these episodic leads to prompt for incident-specific details. We provide examples from the interviews and, at various junctures, describe alternate prompts with which the interviewer could have responded to garner episodic accounts. The purpose of these suggestions is not to critique the quality of the interviews, but rather to illustrate to practitioners other potential questions that might have yielded more specific detail. Yet, despite the concerns surrounding generic reports of sexual abuse, this case was successfully prosecuted, and we conclude by discussing potential benefits of permitting children who have experienced multiple abusive episodes to describe their experiences in generic terms.

While our primary goal was to characterize issues arising when a child with experience of sexual abuse persisting for several years is interviewed on multiple occasions, we made several predictions with respect to the interviews. Given the nature of the interview guidelines employed in the country where the case took place, we expected that the interviewer would request predominantly episodic information in earlier interviews with later interviews including more generic prompts. As several studies have now demonstrated that children are responsive to interviewer language, we expected that the child in the current case would respond to episodic prompts with episodic information and to generic prompts with generic detail. Finally, it was expected that narrative information (episodic and generic details) would be provided in response to open-ended prompts while non-narrative information (contextual; e.g., names, places, addresses) would be elicited through closed questions.

Section snippets

Case materials

The interviews were selected from a larger set that were previously referred to one of the authors for quality assessment by lawyers seeking expert evaluations (La Rooy, Nicol, Halley, & Lamb, 2012). The project was reviewed and approved by the School of Social and Health Science Research Ethics Committee at Abertay University Dundee. The ethical conditions stipulated that should it be necessary to provide excerpts from individual cases as examples illustrating certain practices, the

Interview structure and question types

Table 2 demonstrates that the recommended open prompts were used and that interviewers also used specific questions. Problematically, suggestive prompts also were used in all three interviews, most notably the first two. Nevertheless, percentages for all prompt-types bear more similarity to the high-quality than low-quality interviews observed in previous research.

Discussion

The goal of the present research was to describe a case of child sexual abuse that is unique in its characteristics with respect to the psychological literature. That is, there is a paucity of research that has endeavored to examine cases of repeated experiences in combination with repeated interviews about those experiences, and in the few extant lab studies combining repeated experience with more than one interview the number of repeated experiences is small (Hudson, 1990, Powell and Thomson,

Conclusions

This particular case provides insight into how episodic leads arise in the context of generic reports, how interviewers may glean more incident-specific information from children with multiple experiences across repeated interviews, and demonstrates that testimony dominated by generic detail can be successfully prosecuted under certain conditions. The findings reported here raise new questions for both lab and field research concerning effects of recall order (generic, episodic) across multiple

References (64)

  • K.P. Roberts et al.

    Describing individual incidents of sexual abuse: A review of research on the effects of multiple sources of information on children's reports

    Child Abuse and Neglect

    (2001)
  • K.J. Sternberg et al.

    The Memorandum of good practice: Theory versus application

    Child Abuse and Neglect

    (2001)
  • K.J. Sternberg et al.

    Effects of introductory style on children's abilities to describe experiences of sexual abuse

    Child Abuse and Neglect

    (1997)
  • R. Zajac et al.

    Disorder in the courtroom? Child witnesses under cross-examination

    Developmental Review

    (2012)
  • R.P. Abelson

    Psychological status of the script concept

    American Psychologist

    (1981)
  • S.P. Brubacher

    Understanding children's representation and recall of individual occurrences of repeated events

    (2011)
  • S.P. Brubacher et al.

    Children's ability to recall unique aspects of one occurrence of a repeated event

    Applied Cognitive Psychology

    (2011)
  • S.P. Brubacher et al.

    How interviewers and children discuss and organize multiple-event memories of abuse in investigative interviews

    Applied Cognitive Psychology

    (March 2013)
  • S.P. Brubacher et al.

    Effects of practicing episodic versus scripted recall on children's subsequent narratives of a repeated event

    Psychology, Public Policy, and Law

    (2011)
  • S.P. Brubacher et al.

    Retrieval of episodic versus generic information: Does the order of recall affect the amount and accuracy of details reported by children about repeated events?

    Developmental Psychology

    (2012)
  • C.N. Carnes et al.

    Extended forensic evaluation when sexual abuse is suspected: A multisite field study

    Child Maltreatment

    (2001)
  • C.N. Carnes et al.

    Extended forensic evaluation when sexual abuse is suspected: A model and preliminary data

    Child Maltreatment

    (1999)
  • A.-C. Cederborg et al.

    Repeated interviews with children who have intellectual disabilities

    Journal of Applied Research in Intellectual Disabilities

    (2008)
  • D.A. Connolly et al.

    Perceptions and predictors of children's credibility of a unique event and an instance of a repeated event

    Law and Human Behavior

    (2008)
  • D.A. Connolly et al.

    Delayed prosecutions of historic child sexual abuse: Analyses of 2064 Canadian criminal complaints

    Law and Human Behavior

    (2006)
  • G. Davis et al.

    An assessment of the admissibility and sufficiency of evidence in child abuse prosecutions

    (1999)
  • B.L. Guadagno et al.

    Police officers’ and legal professionals’ perceptions regarding how children are, and should be, questioned about repeated abuse

    Psychiatry, Psychology and Law

    (2006)
  • I. Hershkowitz et al.

    The effects of repeated interviewing on children's forensic statements of sexual abuse

    Applied Cognitive Psychology

    (2007)
  • J.A. Hudson

    Constructive processing in children's event memory

    Developmental Psychology

    (1990)
  • J.A. Hudson et al.

    Scripts and episodes: The development of event memory

    Applied Cognitive Psychology. Special Issue: Memory in Everyday Settings

    (1992)
  • M.K. Johnson et al.

    Source monitoring

    Psychological Bulletin

    (1993)
  • Cited by (12)

    View all citing articles on Scopus

    Editor's Note: “Child Abuse & Neglect does not intend to publish case reports except in unusual circumstances. We are publishing this article because we think it has significant teaching value.”

    ☆☆

    The project was reviewed and approved by the School of Social and Health Science Research Ethics Committee at Abertay University Dundee in advance of data collection. Minor details have been changed to protect the identities of those involved in the case.

    View full text