Forensic Interviews of Children: The Components of Scientific Validity and Legal Admissibility

Nancy E. Walker (*) I INTRODUCTION The problems associated with assessments of children's reports of victimization in criminal proceedings came to national attention during the 1980s and 1990s in a series of highly publicized trials of daycare staff. (1) In the McMartin Preschool case, (2) more than 350 children claimed to have been molested at the preschool and a number of public locations including a market, a car wash, and a church. (3) During interviewing, some children reported that, in addition to experiencing sexual abuse, they had been taken on plane rides and forced to drink blood and to watch animals being mutilated. (4) Prosecutors said that the suggestive techniques used to elicit retrospective reports from such young children were appropriate, whereas the defense claimed that the interviewing and videotaping procedures were inept. (5) When the trial ended in January of 1990, several jurors reported that they believed some of the children had in fact been molested but that the state had failed to prove the identity of the perpetra tor(s). (6) This three-year trial--the longest-running criminal trial in the history of the United States--cost taxpayers between thirteen and fifteen million dollars, produced no convictions, and destroyed the lives of many individuals connected to the case. (7) In the end, it was not possible to determine whether the reports provided by the children interviewed were accurate. Research completed since the McMartin trial shows that the skill of the interviewer directly influences whether a child relates a true memory, discusses a false belief, affirms details suggested by others, embellishes fantasies, or provides no information at all. (8) For example, Sena Garven and colleagues demonstrated that the coercive techniques used by interviewers in the McMartin case elicited substantially more false allegations from children than did simple suggestive questions. (9) This finding is particularly important given the fact that suggestive questions have long been known to have a negative impact on the quality of children's reports. (10) When exposed to the "McMartin techniques" for less than five minutes, children in the study conducted by Garven and colleagues showed error rates of nearly sixty percent. (11) Moreover, children subjected to social influence techniques became more acquiescent as the interview proceeded. (12) As these findings demonstrate, the specific techniques employed by an interviewer have a direct effect on the quality of the report obtained, a conclusion that has been heeded in recent appellate court opinions. (13) For example, in State v. Michaels, the New Jersey Supreme Court considered whether the state's interview techniques in the case had been "so coercive or suggestive that they had a capacity to distort substantially the children's recollections of actual events and thus compromise the reliability of the children's statements and testimony based on their recollections." (14) An amicus brief signed by forty-five scientists provided the appellate court with a summary of research relevant to issues associated with the forensic interviewing of children and demonstrated the causative link between the use of highly suggestive interviewing techniques and children's flawed memories. (15) The information presented in the brief contributed to the appellate court's decision to reverse the defendant's convicti on. (16) As the McMartin Preschool and Michaels cases illustrate, truth-finding involving assessments of children's retrospective reports may be seriously compromised, if not completely obscured, when interviewing techniques are faulty. What these cases teach is that it is necessary to establish and maintain standards for quality control in conducting and evaluating forensic interviews of children. Interviewers require information from both social science and the law, such as information on child development, memory, and communication as well as information on legal standards for assessing the admissibility of interview evidence. …