Evidence Commons^™

There is sufficient empirical evidence and consensus to begin to build guidelines, including the interview structure, setting, interviewer demeanor, children's reluctance and suggestibility, rapport development, narrative practice, introducing the topic of abuse, avoiding concepts that confuse children, instructions to children, phrasing of questions, evidence-based strategies for eliciting details, and multiple interviews.

Child witnesses present challenges for both law and psychology. The question is how to elicit statements from children without sacrificing the truth, the rights of those against whom the child is testifying, and the welfare of the child.

In 2007, Lamb, Orbach, Hershkowitz, Esplin, and Horowitz published in Child Abuse & Neglect a review of empirical research on the National Institute of Child Health and Development (NICHD) Investigative Interview Protocol in which they provided extensive research supporting the conclusion that the NICHD Protocol “comprises a useful and usable set of guidelines that allow trained interviewers to conduct investigative interviews that hew more closely than they otherwise would to universally endorsed professional guidelines” (p. 1212).

This study examined maltreated and non-maltreated children’s (N = 183) emerging understanding of ‘‘truth’’ and ‘‘lie,’’ terms about which they are quizzed to qualify as competent to testify. Four- to six-year-old children were asked to accept or reject true and false (T/F) statements, label T/F statements as the ‘‘truth’’ or ‘‘a lie,’’ label T/F statements as ‘‘good’’ or ‘‘bad,’’ and label ‘‘truth’’ and ‘‘lie’’ as ‘‘good’’ or ‘‘bad.’’ The youngest children were at ceiling in accepting/rejecting T/F statements. The labeling tasks revealed improvement with age and children performed similarly across the tasks. Most children were better able to evaluate ‘‘truth’’ …