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CHILDREN’S evidence about sexual abuse or other crimes can be untrustworthy,
even when interviewers use the best possible techniques, according to
psychologists in North America. “This study provides evidence that children’s
testimony can be pretty badly compromised,” says Stephen Lindsay, psychology
professor at the University of Victoria in British Columbia and one of the
report’s authors.

The reliability of children’s testimony came under scrutiny in the 1980s and
1990s after a series of sexual abuse cases in America and Britain that included
bizarre allegations about satanic rituals and animal sacrifices. Many of the
allegations were put down to interviewers prompting children to create a false
memory.

But even improved interviewing techniques can’t help if the child has already
been coached or otherwise exposed to false stories, according to the new
research.

In the study, children aged 3 to 8 were given a lesson by a man called “Mr
Science”, who showed them several entertaining experiments. About 14 weeks
later, their parents were asked to read the children a story about the lesson
with Mr Science. The story contained a mixture of true and false information,
including an account of “uncomfortable” touching during the lesson, even though
no touching at all had occurred.

More than a third of the children claimed events had happened that they had
only been told about, even in response to the kinds of non-leading, open-ended
questions that interviewers are trained to use. When asked questions that
required a yes or no response—the type of question often asked in
court—the children’s accuracy was even worse.

Even a technique called “source monitoring”, in which the interviewer tries
to prompt the child to distinguish events that they heard about from those that
they witnessed, was only partly successful. Although it helped older children to
dismiss the fiction, younger children still could not tell the difference.

“Kids can be reliable. If you ask them about an event that no one has
suggested, they are very accurate. But the kid’s statement can never be the
beginning and the end of the investigation,” says Debra Ann Poole, a
psychologist at Central Michigan University and the other author of the
study.

Stephen Cici, a psychologist at Cornell University, New York State, says that
interview protocols are not foolproof. “There’s no substitute for hard forensic
sleuthing,” he concludes.