Professional bias and confirmation prejudice in child forensic interviews

¶ … Alter the Forensic Dynamics during an Interviewing Process

In this paper, we reveal how professional's attitudes, views, and knowledge do not necessarily match forensic research findings. Witness issues will then be discussed concerning research community. The study identifies some of the key factors that can alter or improve forensic dynamics during the interviewing process. This study focuses primarily on forensic dynamics relating to the interviewing young children and the associated challenges.

Expert knowledge and attitudes

It has been proven that professionals and social researchers (biased) towards information confirming their initial beliefs by refuting established opinions. Once established, beliefs and impressions challenged to contrary proof. Thus, belief systems and generalization can create a confirmation prejudice that may result in faulty understanding and wrong presentation, adversely affecting important decisions. Regarding child victimization situations, such prejudice may result in dramatic repercussions presenting a serious risk to a person's legal rights or presenting a serious risk to a child's security (Bull, Valentine & Williamson, 2009).

Consider a professional who is requested to assess a kid in a custody case that includes accusations of child sex-related abuse. If the professional has a preconditioned idea that children hardly ever if ever lie about child sex-related abuse, the professional might ask suggestive questions or take uncertain claims or controversial behavioral signs by the kid to confirm the expert's own prejudice and thus determine that the kid is indeed a victim of sexual abuse. This could cause for the mother or father not only to loss of legal care of the kid but also to loss of reputation and freedom, because of criminal prosecution. In contrast, if the professional has a prejudice that most such situations include false accusations, he/she might discount true reports of abuse or not sufficiently sensor. This will result in the wrong determination that the kid is safe with the mother or father when, in reality, the kid is not. Therefore, the professional must try to remain as fairly neutral, impartial, and precise as possible. As mentioned next, studies suggest that experts' knowledge is not always accurate or impartial, or at least, not always reliable with scientific research.

Witness memory, accuracy, and retrieval techniques

Recent research on memory development has had a significant effect on the way kids are understood, interrogated, and believed within the judicial system. We start by talking about a common design of memory techniques because it has effects for kid's memory. Later, when talking about child memory and forensic interviews, we particularly concentrate on what is known as 'occasional memory'. The memory framework is the most appropriate for witness psychology. The occasional memory helps to arrange the types of personal encounters of interest in the forensic perspective.

Memory

Scientists have suggested that memory is not a unitary process. On the contrary, it includes multiple communicating techniques, which differentially promote our capability for encoding, saving and remembering information. Based on a kid's maturity and age, the techniques may not be equally developed. The most basic memory framework, systematic memory, is thought to contain implicit information regarding physical skills, actions, and habits. It is utilized and indicated through behavior, and recovery of such memory does not indicate verbal testing. Developmental restrictions on these memory techniques may influence the kids' abilities to recall events in ways that are acceptable in all legal frameworks (Bull, Valentine & Williamson, 2009).

Accuracy

Although we like to think that the human memory is highly accurate, available proof opposes this view. Episodic memory does not always reflect memories properly. Moreover, of significance, the performance of memory is both quantitatively and qualitatively age related. Compared with young kids, teenagers and adults have a more elaborated knowledge by which to understand events and put new information into memory, employ advanced strategies to recover information, report more memories, and are less reliant on exterior identification cues to search their memories. Younger kids are more vulnerable to suggestive influence, such as that from the use of props. When integrated with other expressive techniques like reinforcement and social pressure the impact of interviewing is improved (Bull, Valentine & Williamson, 2009).

Retrieval

Young kids are well-known to have trouble than teenagers and adults when trying to remember on command and spoken instructions. This is particularly challenging in the forensic perspective. For example, in official forensic interviews, young kids are less likely to report previous child sexual abuse. To generate younger kid's memory reports, researchers are often tempted to use leading questions, play techniques, and props in interviews, despite the known risks involved. A continuing question in child observation is the interpretation of non-verbal cues and whether they should be considered as evidence of accurate memory recovery (Bull, Valentine & Williamson, 2009). Thus, experts' understanding of non-verbal play and actions, understanding that are sometimes delivered to the legal courts, must be analyzed seriously by legal authorities. In general, the interpretation of kid's behavior is a questionable matter, and much more analyses on this essential topic are needed.

Another issue was related to children's capability to recall the details verbally. Scientists analyzed kid's capability to convert their preverbal encounters into language following a period of six months or one year after language development. They found that not a single kid reported information vocally concerning the target encounter. This is because components of the encounter were not part of the kid's language at the duration of encoding. Thus, for recovery of previous memories, language was essential. It would be interesting know if the ?ndings will present same results for memories of stressful experiences.

Reference

Bull, R., Valentine, T., & Williamson, T. (2009). Handbook of psychology of investigative interviewing: Current developments and future directions. Chichester, UK: Wiley and Sons, Inc.