AMICUS BRIEF FOR THE CASE OF NJ V. MICHAELS
PRESENTED BY COMMITTEE OF CONCERNED SOCIAL
SCIENTISTS
PREPARED BY MAGGIE BRUCK & STEPHEN J. CECI
In the past decade, there has been an exponential increase in
research on the accuracy of young children's memories and the
degree to which young children's memories and reports can be
molded by suggestions implanted by adult interviewers. Although
some of these studies document the strengths of young children's
memories, increasing numbers of studies highlight their
weaknesses when they are interviewed under certain conditions.
As will be explained, these same interview conditions, which
have a high risk of contaminating young children's reports,
characterize the available investigative interviews carried out
with the 20 child witnesses in the Kelly Michaels case.
In this brief, we present a summary of the pertinent social
science research that addresses the issues of children's
suggestibility. Our primary focus is on the conditions under
which preschool children are most suggestible. Referring to
interviews used with Wee Care children, we conclude that the
procedures of interviewing these children were so faulty that
they may have substantially increased the risk that the children's
subsequent reports were mere reflections of the interviewers'
suggestions.
This brief also contains a summary of some of the conditions
which have been shown to increase the reliability of young
children's reports, and which act as a safeguard against the
production of false reports. The Wee Care children were not
interviewed under these safer conditions.
Finally, we will argue that the failure to record the initial
interviews with any of the child witnesses rules out the
possibility of ever reaching any firm conclusion as to whether
any abuse actually occurred. In other words, the primary
evidence has been destroyed.
A. Research on Children's Suggestibility
Children's suggestibility has been a focus of research since the
turn of the twentieth century. There have been many studies that
examine the influence of a single misleading suggestion on
children's recall of an event; generally, these studies indicate
that in a variety of conditions, young children are more
suggestible than adults with preschoolers being more vulnerable
than any other age group (see attached article by Ceci and Bruck,
1993a for the most recent review of this literature).
In the past 5 years, there has been a major paradigmatic shift
in this research in an attempt to make it more forensically
relevant. As more and more children are called to court to
provide uncorroborated testimony, especially in cases involving
child sexual abuse, social scientists have turned their attention
from studying the effects of a single misleading question on
children's recall of neutral, nonscripted, and often uninteresting
events, to examining the accuracy of children's testimony under a
range of conditions that are characteristic of those that bring
children to court. One important area of study concerns the
effects of different interviewing techniques on the reliability of
children's reports. These studies go beyond the examination of
how a single misleading question influences children's reports;
rather, they examine the effects of a host of implicit and explicit
suggestive techniques that can be woven into the fabric of the
interview through the use of bribes, threats, repetitions of
certain questions, and the induction of stereotypes and
expectancies (Ceci & Bruck, 1993a).
It is important to understand that this is a rapidly expanding
area of inquiry. Reviews of the literature that were published
only a few years ago, are now out-of-date. For example, in 1989,
Cornell University hosted an international conferences which
called together major researchers in the area of child testimony
(J. Doris ed. 1991). At that conference some researchers made
the following types of statements
(m)ost research on children as eyewitnesses has relied upon
situations that are very different from the personal involvement and
potential trauma of sexual abuse. Researchers have used brief
stories, films, videotapes or slides to simulate a witnessed event. A
few have used actual staged events but these events are also
qualitatively different from incidents of child abuse (Goodman &
Clarke-Stewart, p. 92-93).
As will become clear in our presentation, this statement no longer
characterizes the relevant research. Researchers have developed
paradigms to examine children's reports of salient and
personally-experienced events that involve their own bodies. No
longer do older maxims hold that when children are inaccurate in
their reporting about such events it is because they make errors
of omission (i.e, they fail to report important events) rather than
errors of commission (i.e. they insert inaccurate details). Rather
the newer research indicates that under certain conditions, young
children also make errors of commission about personally
experienced events involving their own bodies.
In the section below, we summarize some of the major findings
of this area of research. We also provide examples of how
different suggestive interview techniques were used in the
investigative interviews with the Wee Care children.
1. The Effects of Interviewer Bias on Children's Reports
A review of interviews of children suspected of sexual abuse
reveals that some interviewers blindly pursue a single hypothesis
that sexual abuse has occurred. In such interviews, the
interviewer typically fails to rule out rival hypotheses that
might explain the behavior of the child and as a result often
concludes that the child was sexually abused.
Some investigative and therapeutic interviewers claim that
such techniques are necessary because sexually abused children
are so scared or embarrassed that they will never willingly or
spontaneously tell any interviewer, including their own parents
of the past abuses. Therefore, they claim, it is necessary to use
all available strategies to get the child to reveal sexual abuse.
These strategies include the use of repeated leading questions,
repeated interviews, bribes or threats, and the induction of
stereotypes and expectancies (Ceci & Bruck, 1993a). Such
strategies may prove successful when the child has been sexually
abused; that is, the interviewer will be successful in drawing out
a report of sexual abuse from the child. However, as we document
below when interviewers have strong preconceived impressions
of what happened, these biases can also result in the generation
of false confessions from children.
The following three studies show that interviewers, who are
given false information about certain events, often shape
children's reports to be consistent with their inaccurate beliefs
about what happened through the use of leading questions and
other implicit suggestive techniques.
Clarke-Stewart, Thompson and Lepore (1989) conducted a study
in which 5- and 6-year-olds viewed a staged event that could be
construed as either abusive or innocent. Some children interacted
with a confederate named Chester as he cleaned some dolls and
other toys in a playroom. Other children interacted with Chester
as he handled the dolls roughly in a mildly abusive manner.
Chester's dialogue reinforced the idea that he was either cleaning
(e.g., "This doll is dirty, I had better clean it"), or playing with the
doll in a rough suggestive manner (e.g., "I like to play with dolls.
I like to spray them in the face with water").
The child was then questioned about this event several times,
on the same day, by different interviewers who differed in their
interpretations of the event. The interviewer was either 1)
accusatory in tone (suggesting that the janitor had been
inappropriately playing with the toys instead of working), 2)
exculpatory in tone (suggesting that the janitor was just cleaning
the toys and not playing), or 3) neutral and non-suggestive in
tone. In the first two types of interviews, the questions changed
from mildly to strongly suggestive as the interview progressed.
Following the first interview, all children were asked to tell in
their own words what they had witnessed (this is referred to as
"free recall"). They were then asked some factual questions (e.g.,
"Did the janitor wipe the doll's face?"), and some interpretive
questions regarding the janitor's activities (e.g., "Was the janitor
doing his job or was he just being bad?"). Then, each child was
interrogated by a second interviewer who either reinforced or
contradicted the first interviewer's tone. Finally, children were
asked by their parents to recount what the janitor had done.
When questioned by a neutral interviewer, or by an interviewer
whose interpretation was consistent with the activity viewed by
the child, children's accounts were both factually correct, and
consistent with the janitor's script. However, when the
interviewer contradicted the script, children's stories quickly
conformed to the suggestions or beliefs of the interviewer; by the
end of the first interview, 75% of children's remarks were
consistent with the examiner's point of view, and 90% answered
the interpretive questions in agreement with the interviewer's
point of view, as opposed to what actually happened. Children
changed their stories from the first to second interviews only if
the two interviewers differed in their interpretation of the
events; thus, when the second interviewer contradicted the first
interviewer, the majority of children then fit their stories to the
suggestions of the second interviewer. If the interviewer's
interpretation was consistent across two interviews, the
suggestions planted in the first session were quickly taken up and
mentioned by the children in the second session. Moreover, when
questioned by their parents, the children's answers were
consistent with the interviewers' biases. Finally, although the
effects of the interviewers' interpretations were most
observable in terms of the children's responses to the
interpretive questions about what the janitor had done, 20% of
the children also made errors on the factual questions in the
direction suggested by the biased interpretation, even though no
suggestions had been given regarding these particular details.
On a more practical level, these results suggest that if children
experience an ambiguous event (e.g., touching), depending on the
interviewers' beliefs about the touching, and how these beliefs
get translated into questions, children may relate that it was
good touching ("my teacher was only rubbing my back"), or bad
touching ("my teacher was rubbing my bum").
Pettit, Fegan and Howie (1990) examined how interviewers'
beliefs about a certain event affects (a) their style of
questioning children about those events and (b) the accuracy of
children's subsequent reports. Two actors, posing as park
rangers, visited the classes of preschool children to ask them to
help a bird find a nest for her eggs. During the presentation, one
of the rangers accidently knocked a cake onto the floor. When the
cake fell and shattered on the floor, there was an abrupt silence
and a halt to all activities. Seven children, who were members of
the class, did not view this event but had been taken to other
parts of the school. Two weeks later, all children were
questioned about the event.
Interviewers' beliefs about the event were manipulated. Some
interviewers had full accurate knowledge of the event. Some
were given inaccurate information (i.e. false beliefs). Other
interviewers were given no information about the event. The
interviewers were told to question each child until they found out
what happened, and to avoid the use of leading questions.
Despite the warning to avoid leading questions, 30% of all
interviewers' questions could be characterized as leading, and
half of these were misleading. Interviewers with inaccurate
knowledge (false beliefs) asked four to five times as many
misleading questions as the other interviewers. Overall, children
agreed with 41% of the misleading questions, and children who
were interviewed by biased interviewers gave the most
inaccurate information. Thus if an interviewer's belief is
contrary to what the child actually experienced, the interview is
characterized by an overabundance of misleading questions which
results in children providing highly inaccurate information.
A similar finding was reported by Ceci, Leichtman & White (in
press). Here, preschoolers were exposed to a touching-game, and
then were interviewed one month later. The interviewer was
given a one-page report containing information about what might
have occurred. Some of the information was accurate and some
was inaccurate. The interviewer was asked to conduct an
interview to determine how much information the child could, in
fact, still recall. The only instruction given to the interviewer
was that she should begin by asking the child for a free narrative
of what had transpired, avoiding all forms of suggestions and
leading questions. Following this, the interviewer was instructed
to use whatever strategies she felt necessary to elicit the most
factually accurate report from the child.
When the interviewer was accurately informed, she got children
to recall correctly most of the events that had transpired.
Importantly, there were no false reports when the interviewer
was correctly informed. However, when she was misinformed,
34% of the 3- to 4-year-olds and 18% of the 5- to-6-year-olds
corroborated one or more false events that the interviewer
erroneously believed had transpired. Thus, in the misinformed
condition, the children made errors of commission. After two
such interviews, children continued to give detailed, but false,
accounts of bodily touching (e.g., some falsely claimed that their
knees were licked and that marbles were inserted into their
ears). Finally, the children in the misinformed condition
seemingly became more credible as the interview unfolded. Many
initially stated details inconsistently, or with reluctance or even
denial, but as the interviewer persisted in asking about
nonevents, some children abandoned their denials and hesitancy.
These studies provide important evidence that interviewers'
beliefs about an event can influence their style of questioning,
which in turn can affect the accuracy of children's testimony The
data highlight the dangers of having only one hypothesis about the
event in question--especially when this hypothesis is incorrect.
Interviewers' biases, their blind pursuit of a single hypothesis,
and their failure to test alternate, equally believable,
explanations of the children's behavior are rife in the interviews
conducted with the Wee Care Children. These biases are revealed
in the interviewers' persistently maintaining one line of inquiry
(through the use of repeated leading questions, bribes and
threats) even when children consistently replied that the
questioned events never occurred. Interviewers' biases are also
revealed in their failure to follow-up on some of the children's
inconsistent or bizarre statements, for doing so might disconfirm
their primary hypotheses. A long section of interaction shown on
pages (PUT IN CORRECT NUMBERS circa 38-41) illustrates some of
these claims as do the following shorter pieces of dialogue in
which the interviewer (Q) engages one child (A) in the following
interactions during one of the initial investigatory interviews.
Q: Do you think that Kelly was not good when she was hurting you
all?
A: Wasn't hurting me. I like her
Q: I can't hear you, you got to look at me when you talk to me.
Now when Kelly was bothering kids in the music room
A: I got socks off
--------------------------
Q: Did she make anybody else take their clothes off in the music
room?
A: No
Q: Yes
A: No
--------------------------
Q: Did you ever see Kelly have blood in her vagina?
A: This is blood
Q: Kelly had blood in her vagina
A: Yeah
Q: She did? Did you ever get any of that blood on your penis?
A: No. Green blood
Q: Did you ever see any of your friends get blood on their penis
from her vagina?
A: Not green blood but red blood
--------------------------
Q: Tell me something, tell me about the piss box. The piss box
that's in the music room?
A: No, up there. All the way up there
Q: Is the piss box the bench at the piano? When you open up the
bench: is that the piss box?
A: Yeah
Q: It is?
A: Yeah
Q: And what happened, she would open it up?
A: And, popped it up
A: She popped it up and then what would you do?
A: Jump in it?
Q: Jump in it?
A: Yeah
Q: And would you have to pee in it?
AL Yeah
(about 10 questions later, the topic comes up again)
Q: So the pee-pee box is the bench at the piano and you flip it open?
A: No
Q: What is the pee-pee box?
A: This is the pee-pee box
Q: That's not a pee-pee box. That's a crayon box
--------------------------
Q.: Did Kelly ever make you kiss her on the butt?
A: No
Q: Did Kelly ever say--I'll tell you want. When did Kelly say these
words? Piss, shit, sugar?
A: Piss, shit sugar?
Q: Yeah, when did she say that, what did you have to do in order
for her to say that?
A: I didn't say that.
Q: I know, she said it, but what did you have to do?
--------------------------
(In this section, the child is asked to use anatomically detailed
dolls and different utensils)
Q: Okay, I really need your help on this. Did you have to do
anything to her with this stuff?
A: Okay. Where's the big knife at. Show me where's the big knife
at.
Q: Pretend this is the big knife because we don't have a big knife
A: This is a big one
Q: Okay, what did you have to do with that? What did you have
to...
A: No..take the peanut-put the peanut butter
Q: You put what's that, what did you put there?
A: I put jelly right here
Q: Jelly
A: And I put jelly on her mouth and on the eyes
Q: You put jelly on her eyes and her vagina and her mouth
A: On her back, on her socks
Q: And did you have to put anything else down there?
A: Right there, right here and right here and here
Q: You put peanut butter all over? And where else did you put the
peanut butter?
A: And jelly
Q: And jelly?
A: And we squeezed orange on her.
Q: And you had to squeeze an orange on her?
A: Put orange juice on her
Q: And did anybody--how did everybody take it off? How did she
make you take it off?
A: No. Lick her all up, eat her all up and lick her all up
Q: You had to lick her all up?
A: And eat her all up
Q: Yeah? What did it taste like?
A: Yucky
Q: So she made you eat the peanut butter and jelly and the orange
juice off of the vagina too?
A: Yeah
Q: Was that scary or funny?
A: Funny, funny and scary.
--------------------------
This interview is one of many that shows how interviewers did
not seriously consider any evidence that was contrary to their
primary beliefs. Thus when children's responses contained
discrepant, inconsistent, incomprehensible or no information, the
investigators only considered these responses to be consistent
with the fact that abuse had taken place or else they chose to
ignore these statements. We are struck by the inconsistencies
and the bizarre statements made by the children in response to
the interviewers' questions. Most adults interacting with
children in these situations would try to figure out just what the
child was thinking about or why the child might be so confused to
make such statements. Yet this simply did not happen. The
children were never asked common sense questions such as: "Did
this happen to you or are you just pretending that it happened to
you?" or "Did you see this happen or did someone tell you that it
happened?" Children were never challenged about their
statements, "Are you sure that this happened or are you telling
me a joke?" Competent investigative interviewers would have
used such techniques in order to understand how the alleged acts
could actually be carried out in a short period of time in a very
public place.
Our contention that the Wee Care interviewers held
preconceived biases that these children were abused is not an
inference, but is based on their statements justifying the use of
their interviewing procedures. These interviewers believed that
their major objective was to get the children to admit to sexual
abuse.
Dr Susan Esquilin, a child therapist, presided over two heavily
attended parent meetings when allegations were first made. She
conducted five group therapy sessions with the Wee Care
children and eventually assessed or treated 13 of the 20 child
witnesses. She stated that her goal was to induce the children to
discuss sexual abuse. In the first group therapy session, she told
the children that they were assembled together because of some
of the things that had happened at the Wee Care and with Kelly.
Based on courtroom testimony, it seems that 4 children made
allegations after their contacts with Esquilin. (5C, 11C, 14C, and
20C)
Lou Fonolleras, an investigator from the Division of Youth and
Family Services (DYFS), conducted 82 interviews with Wee Care
children and 19 interviews with Wee Care parents, between May
22 and July 8 1985. At trial, Fonolleras described his
interviewing techniques as follows, "The interview process is in
essence the beginning of the healing process." To rationalize his
use of persistent questions with the children, he stated, "because
it is my professional and ethical responsibility to alleviate
whatever anxiety has arisen as a result of what happened to
them." Fonolleras justified his telling children about other
children's allegations by saying, " children who needed some
reassurance...(that) they were not alone". Finally one other detail
is of importance in understanding the bias and pursuit of a single
hypothesis in Fonolleras' interviews. He himself had been abused
as a child. And in at least one recorded interview he uses this to
lead the child's testimony. At least 10 children made initial
allegations after their interviews with Fonolleras.
Eileen Treacy, an expert for the prosecution, also interviewed
these children several times between November 1985 and
February 1987. At trial she testified on her interviewing
techniques, "So you open the interview in an effort to
disempower Kelly of these super powers that she allegedly has or
that the kids thought she had and also to let the children know
that telling about these things was okay and they would be safe."
Finally, we do not limit our consideration of interviews to
those held between children with legal and therapeutic
professionals, but also extend these to conversations between
parents and their children. Although we do not have any
recordings or descriptions of the structures of these
conversations, parents were soon instilled with the belief that
abuse had taken place. Two weeks after 16C made the initial
allegation, Peg Foster a sex abuse consultant told the parents at a
school meeting that three children had been abused and urged
them to discover whether their own children had been abused.
Having documented that interviewer expectancies lead
preschoolers to respond in ways that are compatible with these
expectancies, and that the Wee Care interviewers possessed
strongly held expectancies that the children were abused, we now
review the components of suggestive biased interviews that have
the largest impact on producing inaccurate reports from young
children.
2. The Effects of Repeated Questions
A number of studies have shown that asking children the same
question repeatedly within an interview and across interviews,
especially a yes/no question (e.g., Poole & White, 1991), often
results in the child changing her original answer. Preschoolers
are particularly vulnerable to these effects. Children often do
this because they seem to reason, "The first answer I gave must
be wrong, that is why they are asking me the question again.
Therefore I should change my answer". At other times, children
may change their answer to please the adult who is questioning
them; they reason that the "adult must not have liked the first
answer I gave so I will give another answer". At other times,
children's answers may change because the interviewer's previous
suggestions become incorporated into their memories.
For example, Cassel and Bjorklund (1993) questioned children
and adults about a videotaped event they had viewed one week
earlier. The subjects were asked leading questions and if they
did not fall sway to the lead, then they were asked a more
suggestive follow-up question. Kindergarten children were most
affected by this manipulation. As expected, compared to adults
and older children, they were most inaccurate in answering the
first misleading questions; but also when the second more
suggestive question was asked, they were more likely than older
subjects to change their answers and to incorporate the desired
answer into their second responses.
Interviewers of the Wee Care children frequently repeated
questions. They repeated questions when a child denied abuse or
when then the the child's answer was inconsistent with what the
interviewers believed. Although there are instances when
children tenaciously rejected the interviewer's persistent
suggestive questions, upon repetition of a question children
often changed their answers to ones that were consistent with
sexual abuse.
Q: When Kelly kissed you, did she ever put her tongue in your
mouth?
A: No
Q: Did she ever make you put her tongue in her mouth?
A: No
Q: Did you ever have to kiss her vagina?
A: No
Q: Which of the kids had to kiss her vagina?
A: What's this?
Q: No that's my toy, my radio box.
Which kids had to kiss her vagina?
A: Me
3. The Effects of Repeating Misinformation across Interviews
In most earlier studies of children's suggestibility,
misinformation was planted only one time. However, our review
of available transcripts reveals that not only is misinformation
repeated within interviews, but it is commonly repeated across
many different interviews.
A number of studies show that if children are repeatedly given
misleading information in a series of interviews, this can have
serious effects on the accuracy of their later reports (for a
review, see Poole & White, in press). Not only can the
misinformation become directly incorporated into the children's
subsequent reports (they use the interviewers' words in their
inaccurate statements), but it can also lead to fabrications or
inaccuracies which do not directly mirror the content of the
misleading information or questions.
For example, Bruck, Ceci, Francouer & Barr, (submitted) found
that children will give highly inaccurate reports about a previous
visit to a pediatrician's office if they are given multiple
suggestions in repeated interviews. The children in this study
visited their pediatrician when they were five years old. During
that visit, a male pediatrician gave each child a physical
examination, an oral polio vaccine and an inoculation. During that
same visit, a female research assistant, talked to the child about
a poster on the wall, read the child a story and gave the child
some treats.
Approximately one year later, the children were re-interviewed
four times over a period of a month. During the first three
interviews, some children were falsely reminded that the
pediatrician showed them the poster, gave them treats, and read
them a story, and that the research assistant gave them the
inoculation and the oral vaccine. Other children were given no
information about the actors of these events. During the final
interview, when asked to recall what happened during the original
medical visit, children who were not given any misleading
information were highly accurate in their final reports. They
correctly recalled which events were performed by the
pediatrician and by the research assistant. In contrast, the
misled children were very inaccurate; not only did they
incorporate the misleading suggestions into their reports, with
more than half the children falling sway to these suggestions
(e.g., claiming that the female assistant inoculated them rather
the pediatrician), but 45% of these children also included non-
suggested but inaccurate events in their reports by falsely
reporting that the research assistant had checked their ears and
nose. None of the control children made such inaccurate reports.
Thus, when suggestions are implanted and incorporated, young
children use these in highly productive ways to reconstruct and
distort reality (see Chester Study above by Clarke-Stewart et al.,
and Sam Stone Study below by Leichtman & Ceci for similar
results).
Unfortunately, we do not have any of the initial interviews with
the Wee Care children and thus we cannot ascertain the degree to
which the allegations that emerge in much later taped
investigatory interviews reflect earlier implanted suggestions.
It is also possible that some of the allegations that occurred in
these investigatory interviews reflect suggestions implanted
from earlier conversations with parents who were urged by
professionals and by other parents to look for signs of abuse in
their children.
It is also important to note that the suggestive interviews did
not end in July 1985 with the completion of Fonelleras'
investigation. Children were interviewed before they appeared
before the grand jury. Children were questioned by therapists,
and they were questioned by members of the prosecutors' office
leading up to trial. These children were also questioned by the
prosecution and the defense attorneys at the trial. (FOOTNOTE.
We have no precise figures on the number of times that each child
was interviewed between May 1, 1985 and the present time.
Appendix 1 represents an attempt to reconstruct the
interviewing schedule for each child. These figures are clearly
underestimates). A consideration of the research findings
suggests that if the children had not been abused, then this
magnitude of repeated suggestive interviews could have the
effect of increasing and cementing false reports.
4. Emotional Tone of the Interview
Children are quick to pick up on the emotional tones in an
interview and to act accordingly. There is much information that
can be conveyed in the emotional tone including, implicit or
explicit threats, bribes, and rewards. For example, in some
studies when an accusatory tone is set by the examiner, (e.g. "we
know something bad happened", or "it isn't good to let people kiss
you in the bathtub", or "you'll feel better once you tell", or "don't
be afraid to tell"), then children in these studies are likely to
fabricate reports of past events even in cases when they have no
memory of any event occurring. In some cases, these fabrications
are sexual in nature (see review in Ceci & Bruck, 1993b).
For example, four years after children played with an
unfamiliar research assistant for five minutes while seated
across a table from him, Goodman and her colleagues asked these
same children to recall the original experience, and then asked
them a series of questions, including abuse-related suggestive
questions about the event (Goodman, Wilson, Hazan & Reed, 1989;
also described in Goodman & Clarke-Stewart, 1991). At this
time, the researchers created what they described as "an
atmosphere of accusation", by telling the children that they were
to be questioned about an important event and by saying such
things as, "Are you afraid to tell? You'll feel better once you've
told". Although few children had any memory for the original
event from four years earlier, their performance on the
suggestive abuse questions was mixed. Five out of the fifteen
children incorrectly agreed with the interviewer's suggestive
question that they had been hugged or kissed by the confederate,
two of the fifteen agreed that they had their picture taken in the
bathroom, and one child agreed that she or he had been given a
bath. The important conclusion of this study is that children may
begin to give incorrect information to misleading questions about
events for which they have no memory, when the interviewer
creates an aura (emotional tone) of accusation.
There are many other studies in the social science literature to
show that reinforcing children for certain behaviors regardless of
the quality of the behaviors also increases the frequency of these
types of behaviors. Telling children "you are a really good boy" is
one of example of this. In some situation, when used
appropriately, these types of supportive statements make
children feel at ease and make children more responsive and
accurate than when they are provided with no feedback or support
(e.g., . Goodman, Rudy, Bottoms, & Aman, 1990). However, if used
inappropriately, these types of statements can also produce
inaccurate statements. Thus, it has also been found that when
interviewers are overly supportive of children, then children tend
to produce many inaccurate as well as many accurate details (e.g.,
Geiselman, Saywitz & Bornstein, 1990). Certainly, there appears
to be some trade-off in the effect of positive and neutral support
on the accuracy of children's reports.
Although the quality and quantity of positive support and
reinforcement provided in many of the research studies exemplify
good interviewing techniques, ones that most interviewers would
use, the types of "encouraging" statements made by some of Wee
Care children's investigators would never be considered as
acceptable examples of how children should be encouraged in an
interview:
McGrath: Do you want to sit on my lap? Come here. I am so proud
of you. I love big girls like you that tell me what happened -- that
aren't afraid because I am here to protect you. Did you ever see
what's this right here?...You got such pretty eyes. You are going to
grow to be a beautiful young lady. I'm jealous, I'm too old for you.
Detective McGrath rationalized this behavior by saying "this
way she may feel more comfortable and more at ease." However,
these statements may have far greater consequences; they may
change the balance of accuracy in children's reports.
Threats and bribes also influence the emotional tones of
interviews. However, these elements have never been
systematically investigated, because it would be ethically
impermissible to include such statements in research interviews
with young children. But from everything we know about the
principles of child development and about principles of
punishment and reward, these statements should dramatically
decrease the accuracy of children's statements.
In the Wee Care interviews, there are numerous examples of
bribes. Some children were given police badges in exchange for
their incriminating statements. Sometimes the bribe took the
form of promises to terminate the interviews ("Well, we can get
out of here real quick if you just tell me what you told me last
time we met" or, " Tell me what Kelly did to your hiney and then
you can go."). Sometimes uncooperative children were explicitly
threatened ("Now listen you have to behave" or, "You are acting
like a baby").
The Wee Care interviewers often created an atmosphere of
conspiracy and tried to enlist the children's cooperation. For
example:
Your mommy tells me that you guys are interested in busting this
case wide open with us, is that right?
---------
That's why I need your help, especially you older kids...because
you can talk better than the younger kids...and you will be helping
to keep her in jail longer so that she doesn't hurt anybody. Not to
mention that you'll also feel a lot better once you start.
---------
These statements on the part of the Wee Care interviewers
reflect their biases and their attempts to get children to admit
abuse. And as we have argued, such statements may have
deleterious effects on the subsequent accuracy of young
children's reports.
5. The Effects of Peer Pressure or Interaction on Children's
Reports
The effects of letting children know that their friends have
"already told" is a much less investigated area in the field of
children's testimonial research. In addition, suggestions or
misleading information may also be planted by peers. However,
there are at least three relevant studies. First, Binet (1900)
found that children will change their answers to be consistent
with those of their peer group even when it is clear that the
answer is inaccurate.
In the Pettit et al study described above, there were seven
children who were absent from their classrooms when the target
event (the cake falling off the piano) occurred. Yet when
questioned two weeks later, six of these children indicated that
they were present. One presumes that these six children gave
false reports so that they would feel they were part of the same
group as their friends who did participate. Importantly, this
study also shows how the peer group's actual experiences in an
event can contaminate non-participants reports or fabricated
memories of the event.
Finally, Pynoos and Nader (1989) studied people's recollections
of a sniper attack. On February 24, 1984, from a second story
window across the street, a sniper shot repeated rounds of
ammunition at children on an elementary school playground.
Scores of children were pinned under gunfire, many were injured,
and one child and passerby were killed. Roughly l0% of the
student body, 113 children, were interviewed 6 to l6 weeks later.
Each child was asked to freely recall the experience and then to
respond to specific questions. Some of those children who were
interviewed were not at the school during the shooting, including
those already on the way home and those on vacation. Yet, even
the non witnesses had memories: "One girl initially said that she
was at the school gate nearest the sniper when the shooting
began. In truth she was not only out of the line of fire, she was
half a block away. A boy who had been away on vacation said that
he had been on his way to the school, had seen someone lying on
the ground, had heard the shots, and then turned back. In
actuality, a police barricade prevented anyone from approaching
the block around the school." (p. 238). One assumes that children
heard about the event from their peers who were present during
the sniper attack and they incorporated these reports into their
own memories.
The investigators constantly told the Wee Care children that
their friends had already told.
"All the other friends I talked to told me everything that happened.
29C told me. 32C told me...And now it's your turn to tell. You
don't want to be left out, do you?"
-----------------------------------
"Boy, I'd hate having to tell your friends that you didn't want to
help them"
Parents also told their children that they had been named as
victims by other children. Child 1C finally disclosed to his
mother after she had told him that others had mentioned him as a
participant. The above evidence suggests that this strategy may
co-opt children into making false reports.
6. The Effects of being Interviewed by Adults with High Status
Young children are sensitive to the status and power of their
interviewers and as a result are especially likely to comply with
the implicit and explicit agenda of such interviewers. If their
account is questioned for example, children may defer to the
challenges of the more senior interviewer. To some extent, it is
this power differential and its recognition by the child that is
one of the most important explanations for children's increased
suggestibility. Children are more likely to believe adults than
other children, they are more willing to go along with the wishes
of adults, and to incorporate adults' beliefs into their reports.
This fact has long been recognized by researchers since the turn
of the century and has been demonstrated in many studies (Ceci &
Bruck, 1993a for review).
The Wee Care children were interviewed by law enforcement
agents or by social workers who made reference to their
connection to law enforcement agents. The children were
explicitly made aware of the status of their interviewers by such
comments as:
"I'm a policeman, if you were a bad girl, I would punish you
wouldn't I? Police can punish bad people"
-------------------------
"I'm going to introduce you to one of the men who arrested Kelly
and put her in jail."
A recent study by Tobey and Goodman (1992) suggests that
interviews by high status adults who make such statements may.
have negative effects on the accuracy of children's reports. In
their study, 4-year-olds played a game with a research assistant
who was called a "baby-sitter". Eleven days later, the children
returned to the laboratory. Half of the children met a police
officer who said
"I am very concerned that something bad might have happened the
last time that you were here. I think that the babysitter you saw here
last time might have done some bad things and I am trying to find
out what happened the last time you were here when you played
with the babysitter. We need your help. My partner is going to
come in now and ask you some questions about what happened."
A research assistant dressed-up as a police officer then
questioned these children. The other children never met the
police officer; they were only questioned by a neutral interviewer
about what happened with the baby-sitter. When the children
were asked to tell everything they could remember, the children
in the police condition gave fewer accurate statements and more
inaccurate statements than children in the neutral condition.
Two of the 13 children in the police condition seemed to be
decisively misled by the suggestion that the baby sitter had done
something bad. One girl said to her mother, "I think the baby-
sitter had a gun and was going to kill me." Later, in her free
recall, the same child said, "That man he might try to do
something bad to me....really bad, yes siree." The second child
inaccurately reported his ideas of what something bad might be,
by saying "I fell down, I got lost, I got hurt on my legs, and I cut
my ears."
Goodman (1993) summarizes these findings as follows:
"One should be concerned not only with the actual questions but
also with the context of the interview. An accusatory or intimidating
context leads to increased errors in children's reports (p. 15)."
(FOOTNOTE. Note the discrepancy between Goodman's interpretations of
her own results and that of the district attorney (see p. 45
supplemental brief).
Another feature of some of the Wee Care interviews was that
there was often more than one adult questioner present in the
interview. One might argue that this might be a safe-guard to
ensure that the child tells the truth--especially if one of the
adults is the child's parent. However, it also seems that
additional adults merely multiply the number of questions that
the child is asked about the same theme-"Tell us how you were
sexually abused by Kelly". And these increased questions may
increase children's willingness to defer to the adults' agenda
rather than to their own memories of whether an event actually
occurred.
In the following 13C is interviewed by Fonelleras (L) and
Detective Mastroangelo (R)
L: What little girls did she do that to?
13C: (names a child)
L: Who?
13C: (repeats)
L: really
R: You want to show us again what she did with the fork?
L: Show us again what you just showed us
R: She put the fork where?
13C: The vagina
R: OK, whose vagina?
13C: um
R: Do you know. Who, honey?
13C: Down there.
L: OK but who's this little girl?
13C: Huh?
7. The Effects of Stereotype Inducement
As we have argued above, suggestions do not have to
necessarily be in the form of an explicit (mis)leading question
such as, "Show me how she touched your bottom." One component
of a suggestive interview involves the induction of stereotypes.
That is, if a child is repeatedly told that a person "does bad
things", then the child may begin to incorporate this belief into
his or her reports. As the following two studies demonstrate,
stereotype induction can have a very powerful effect on children's
subsequent reports.
In the first study (Lepore & Sesco, in press), children ranging in
age from 4- to 6-years old played some games with a man called
Dale. Dale played with some of the toys in a researcher's
laboratory room and he also asked the child to help him take off
his sweater. Later, an interviewer asked the child to tell her
everything that happened when Dale was in the room. For half the
children, the interviewer maintained a neutral stance whenever
they recalled an action. For the remaining children, the
interviewer re-interpreted each of the child's responses in an
incriminating way by stating, "He wasn't supposed to do or say
that. That was bad. What else did he do?" Thus, in this
incriminating condition, a negative stereotype was induced. At
the conclusion of these incriminating procedures, the children
heard three misleading statements about things that had not
happened ("Didn't he take off some of your clothes, too?", "Other
kids have told me that he kissed them, didn't he do that to you?"
and, "He touched you and he wasn't supposed to do that, was he?")
All children were then asked a series of direct questions,
requiring "yes" or "no" answers, about what had happened with
Dale.
Children in the incriminating condition gave many more
inaccurate responses to the direct yes-no questions than children
in the neutral condition. Interestingly, 1/3 of the children in the
incriminating condition embellished their responses to these
questions, and the embellished responses were always in the
direction of the incriminating suggestions. The question that
elicited the most frequent embellishments was: "Did Dale ever
touch other kids at the school?" Embellishments to this question
included information about who Dale touched (e.g., "He touched
Jason, he touched Tori, and he touched Molly."), where he touched
them (e.g., "He touched them on their legs."), how he touched them
(e.g., "....and some he kissed....on the lips"), and how he took their
clothes off ("Yes, my shoes and my socks and my pants. But not
my shirt."). When they were re-interviewed one week later,
children in the incriminating condition continued to answer the
yes/no questions inaccurately and they continued to embellish
their answers.
The second study also demonstrates the powerful effects of
stereotype inductions especially when these are paired with
repeated suggestive questioning. A stranger named Sam Stone
paid a two-minute visit to preschoolers (aged 3 to 6 years) in
their daycare center (see Leichtman & Ceci, in press). Following
Sam Stone's visit, the children were asked for details about the
visit on 4 different occasions over a 10-week period. During
these 4 occasions, the interviewer refrained from using
suggestive questions. She simply encouraged children to describe
Sam Stone's visit in as much detail as possible. One month
following the fourth interview, the children were interviewed a
fifth time, by a new interviewer who asked about two "non-
events" which involved Sam doing something to a teddy bear and a
book. In reality, Sam Stone never touched either one. When asked
in the fifth interview: "Did Sam Stone do anything to a book or a
teddy bear?" most children rightfully replied "No." Only 10% of
the youngest (3 to 4-year- old) children's answers contained
claims that Sam Stone did anything to a book or teddy bear. When
asked if they actually saw him do anything to the book or teddy
bear, as opposed to "thinking they saw him do something," or"
hearing he did something," now only 5% of their answers
contained claims that anything occurred. Finally, when these 5%
were gently challenged ("You didn't really see him do anything to
the book/the teddy bear, did you?") only 2.5% still insisted on the
reality of the fictional event. None of the older (5 to 6-year-old)
children claimed to have actually seen Sam Stone do either of the
fictional events.
A second group of preschoolers were presented with a
stereotype of Sam Stone before he ever visited their school. Each
week, beginning a month prior to Sam Stone's visit, these children
were told a new Sam Stone story, in which he was depicted as
very clumsy. For example:
You'll never guess who visited me last night. [pause] That's right.
Sam Stone! And guess what he did this time? He asked to borrow
my Barbie and when he was carrying her down the stairs, he tripped
and fell and broke her arm. That Sam Stone is always getting into
accidents and breaking things!
Following Sam Stone's visit, these children were given 4
suggestive interviews over a ten-week period. Each suggestive
interview contained two erroneous suggestions, one having to do
with ripping a book and the other with soiling a teddy bear (e.g.,
"Remember that time Sam Stone visited your classroom and
spilled chocolate on that white teddy bear? Did he do it on
purpose or was it an accident?" and "When Sam Stone ripped that
book, was he being silly or was he angry?").
Ten weeks later, when a new interviewer probed about these
events ("Did anything happen to a book?" "Did anything happen to a
teddy bear?"), 72% of the youngest preschoolers claimed that Sam
Stone did one or both misdeeds, a figure that dropped to 44% when
asked if they actually saw him do these things. Importantly, 21%
continued to insist that they saw him do these things, even when
gently challenged. The older preschoolers, though more accurate,
still included some children (11%) who insisted they saw him do
the misdeeds.
Stereotype induction was rampant in the initial Wee Care
interviews. The interviewers explicitly repeated in various
interviews that Kelly was bad. Based on analyses of the existing
interviews, the investigator told 15 of the 34 interviewed
children that Kelly was in jail because she had done bad things.
The investigators told the children that they needed their help to
keep Kelly in jail. The investigators also promoted fear by asking
leading questions about whether Kelly had threatened them or
their families if they were to tell on her. Sometimes the
investigators suggested that she had claimed to have
supernatural powers ("Kelly said a lot of things to some kids and I
think that she might have said them to you too, like she had some
special powers like she can come through a wall and she could
lift our bed and stuff like that..."). The investigators constantly
told the children that they were now safe and could talk because
Kelly was in jail.
It is interesting that despite these statements that pervaded
the interviews, in the early interviews at least, the children did
not completely incorporate the suggested stereotypes of Kelly.
Sixteen of the 34 children never said they were afraid of her and
the remaining children never volunteered that information. Some
children claimed that Kelly was bad, but these claims were never
completely justified by the children. For example, in one of the
few examples we have of two transcribed interviews for the
same child, we see that in the first of the transcribed interviews
(but not the first interview) the child is repeatedly asked about
bad things that Kelly did. She denies that Kelly did anything bad
to her. In the next (transcribed) interview, the following
exchange takes place:
Q: Was Kelly a good girl or a bad girl?
A: She was a bad girl.
Q: She was a bad girl. Were there any other teachers who were bad?
A: No
Q: Kelly was the only bad girl? What did Kelly do that made her a
bad girl?
A: She readed
Q: She what?
A: She readed and she came to me and I said no, no, no.
Q: Did she hurt you?
A: I hurted her.
Q: How did you hurt her?
A: Because I didn't want to write and she write and I said no, no,
no, no and I hit her.
When other children made statements that Kelly was bad, it is
impossible to tell whether these statements reflect the fact that
Kelly actually did bad things or whether these reports reflect the
children's adoption of the interviewers' suggested stereotypes of
Kelly, an indeterminacy exacerbated by the general absence of
recorded initial interviews.
8. The Use of Anatomically Detailed Dolls
Anatomically detailed dolls are frequently used by
professionals, including child therapists, police, child protection
workers, and attorneys, when interviewing children about
suspected sexual abuse. They were used repeatedly in the
interviews with the Wee Care children.
One rationale for the use of anatomical dolls is that they allow
children to manipulate objects reminiscent of a critical event,
thereby cuing recall and overcoming language and memory
problems. Another rationale is that their use is thought to
overcome motivational problems of embarrassment and shyness.
The dolls have also been used as projective tests. Some
professionals claim that if a child actively avoids these dolls,
shows distress if they are undressed, or shows unusual
preoccupation with their genitalia, this is consistent with the
hypothesis that the child has been abused (see Mason, 1991).
The use of anatomically detailed dolls has raised scepticism,
however, among researchers and professionals alike. Two related
arguments are frequently invoked against their use. The first is
that the dolls are suggestive, that they encourage the child to
engage in sexual play even if the child has not been sexually
abused (e.g., Gardner, 1989; Terr, 1988). A child, for instance,
may insert a finger into a doll's genitalia simply because of its
novelty or "affordance," much the way a child may insert a finger
into the hole of a doughnut. Another criticism is that it is
impossible to make firm judgments about children's abuse status
on the basis of their doll play because there are no normative
data on nonabused children's doll play. Over the past several
years, researchers have conducted a number of studies to address
these concerns.
In several studies, researchers have compared the doll play of
children suspected of having been sexually abused with children
not suspected of having been abused. In addition, there have been
a score of studies examining the doll play of non-abused children.
Reviews of this literature (Berry & Skinner, 1993; Ceci & Bruck,
1993a; Wolfner, Faust, & Dawes, 1993) indicate that many of the
studies are methodologically inadequate and do not allow for firm
interpretations about the potential usefulness or risks of using
dolls. Furthermore, other data indicate that some of the play
patterns thought to be characteristic of abused children, such as
playing with the dolls in a suggestive or explicit sexual manner,
or showing reticence or avoidance when presented with the dolls,
also occur in samples of nonabused children.
More recent studies have focused on how accurately young
preschoolers use dolls to represent themselves. For example,
DeLoache (1993) used dolls to interview 2.5-, 3-, and 4-year-old
children about a play session they had had with a male
experimenter. The dolls did not help the children report their
experiences. The younger children in particular gave fuller and
more accurate accounts of where they had been touched without
the dolls than they did with the dolls. When asked to place
stickers on the doll in the same places that stickers had been
placed on their own bodies, the younger children were not very
successful. Indeed, many of the children did not seem to realize
that they were supposed to treat the doll as a representation of
themselves. Further, several children in this and a subsequent
on-going study rejected the suggestion that they "pretend that
this doll is you." This last finding is important, since a
reluctance to play with dolls in forensic or therapeutic interview
sessions is often taken as a possible indicant of abuse. Generally
these results indicate that very young children may not have the
cognitive sophistication to use a doll to represent their own
experiences. Hence, the use of dolls may actually impede or
distort, rather than facilitate and clarify, their ability to provide
accurate testimony.
Two studies have examined how accurately non-abused children
use the dolls to show how they were touched during a pediatric
visit. In both studies, half the children received genital
examinations and half did not. If the dolls provide children with a
tool that will allow them to overcome their shyness, and
embarrassment concerning sexual matters, then reports of
genital touching should be more accurate when children are
allowed to re-enact events with the dolls. The results of both
studies fail to support this hypothesis. The first study included
5- and 7-year old girls (Saywitz, Goodman, Nicholas & Moan,
1991). When the children were asked for a verbal report of their
genital examination, 78% of the children who had received a
genital examination failed to disclose genital touching. When
given the opportunity to provide the same information with the
dolls ("Show me with the dolls what happened"), 83% of these
children failed to disclose genital touching. However, when the
experimenter pointed to either the genitalia or buttocks of the
doll and asked a direct question, "Did the doctor touch you here?",
only 22% of the responses were incorrect denials. Children who
did not receive a genital examination never made a false report in
the verbal free recall or doll enactment conditions. However,
when the experimenter pointed to the genital or anal region of the
doll and asked, "Did the doctor touch you here?", 9% of these
children inaccurately claimed that they had been touched. These
results indicate that regardless of interviewing technique, 5-
and 7- year old children rarely make false reports about genital
touching. These data also indicate that the dolls do not assist the
children to divulge potentially embarrassing material, unless the
interviewer uses highly directive questioning. As the next study
shows, however, a very different pattern of results is obtained
for younger children.
Three-year old children visited their pediatrician for their
annual check-up (Ceci & Bruck,1993b). Half the children received
a genital examination where the pediatrician gently touched their
buttocks and genitals. The other children were not touched in
these areas. Immediately after the examination, an experimenter
pointed to the genitalia or buttocks of an anatomically detailed
doll and asked the child, "Did the Doctor touch you here?" Only
45% of the children who received the genital exam correctly
answered yes; and only 50% of the children who did not receive a
genital exam correctly answered "No" (i.e. 50% of these children
falsely reported touching). When the children were simply asked
to "Show on the doll" how the doctor had touched their buttocks or
genitalia, accuracy did not improve. Now only 25% of the children
who had received genital examinations correctly showed how the
pediatrician had touched their genitals and buttocks. Accuracy
decreased in part because a significant number of female
subjects inserted their fingers into the anal or genital cavities of
the dolls; the pediatrician never did this. Only 45% of the
children who did not receive genital examinations were accurate
by not showing any touching. That is 55% of the children who did
not receive genital examinations falsely showed either genital or
anal touching when given the dolls. Thus these data indicate that
three-year-old preschool children are inaccurate when reporting
how and where they were touched, even when the touching
occurred five minutes prior to the interview. Children who were
not touched demonstrated on the dolls that they were touched and
children who were touched either refused to admit that they were
touched, or at the other extreme they showed penetration when
none had occurred. The use of the dolls increases this type of
inaccurate reporting in three-year-old children.
The interview procedures in this study also elicited a number
of other behaviors that adults might interpret as sexual. When
the children were given a stethoscope and asked to show what the
doctor did with it, some children incorrectly showed that he used
the instrument to examine their genitals. The children were also
shown a small spoon and asked whether the doctor had used it
(the doctor had not used a spoon). A number of the children were
inaccurate, stating that he had given them medicine with it. The
children were then asked one time, "How might he use this
spoon?" A small but significant number of children (18%)
inserted the spoon into the genital or anal openings or hit the
doll's genitals.
These "sexualized" behaviors do not reflect three-year-old
children's sexual knowledge or experiences but two other factors.
First, the types of questions and props used in the interviews
(asking children to name body parts, including genitals, showing
children anatomically detailed dolls and asking children to
manipulate these dolls) make the children come to think that it is
not only permissible but it is expected to respond to the
interviewers' questions using these same terms. Second, the
children insert fingers or objects into the dolls openings for the
same reasons they would insert a finger into the hole of a
doughnut; it is there, it is something to manipulate.
In the initial interviews with the Wee Care children,
anatomically detailed dolls were shown to the children before
they said anything about abuse in 24 of the 39 interviews. Most
of the leading and suggestive aspects of the transcribed
interviews involve the interviewers' interactions with the dolls
and their asking children sexualized questions in the contexts of
the demonstrations with the dolls. In 17 of the 39 sessions
silverware was given to the children with dolls. The children
were asked such questions as:
Interviewer: Did Kelly ever do anything to you with a knife that hurt
you ?
Child: No.
Interviewer: Did she ever do bad things or hurt you with a spoon?
Child: No.
Interviewer: Did she ever do bad things or hurt you with a knife?
Child: No.
Interviewer Okay. What about a wooden spoon?
Child: No.
Children were asked to speculate about how silverware could
have been used.
Interviewer: Why don't you show me how you think a little girl can
be hurt by the fork?
And
Interviewer: Why don't you show me what Kelly did with the big
wooden spoon.
Often, as shown above, the children resisted these suggestions,
but sometimes after much repetition, the children responded by
poking the silverware into the genitalia or buttocks of the doll:
Interviewer: Can you think of a way somebody might have used
this to hurt little girls?
Child: (indicates the tummy)
Interviewer: Where else do you think a little girl could have gotten
hurt with a wooden spoon?
Child: The belly button.
Interviewer: Where else do you think a little girl might get hit with a
wooden spoon? How do you think Kelly used this fork to hurt little
girls?
Child: Belly button.
Interviewer: Where else?
(finally after many more persistent questions)
Child:.Bottom.
Researchers Bruck & Ceci, were much more successful than the
Wee Care interviewers in eliciting sexualized reports from
children when they were first asked how one might use a spoon!
Remember, the three-year-old children in the Bruck and Ceci
study were only asked one time about how a spoon might be used.
There are difficulties in drawing parallels between the
behaviors of children in research studies and the behaviors of
children in actual forensic contexts or clinical settings.
Transcripts of some of these sessions with children suspected of
having been sexually abused reveal the following practices by
interviewers: naming the dolls after defendants (In 12 of the
transcribed interviews, Wee Care investigators named a doll
Kelly rather than allowing the child to do so); berating the dolls
for alleged abuses against the child (e.g., shaking a finger at the
male doll who has been named after the defendant, and yelling:
"You are naughty for hurting Jennifer!"); assuming the role of
fantasy characters in doll play; creating a persistent atmosphere
of accusation; and asking a stream of suggestive questions that
reflect the sexual knowledge of the adult interviewer (ROBERT
PUT IN EXAMPLES OF THESE). Non-abused children in research
studies were never subjected to such highly suggestive
experiences; they were never given prior motivation to play with
the dolls suggestively or aggressively. If they had been, it is
possible that their play with the dolls would contain many
explicit sexual events, reflecting prior interviewing techniques
rather than sexual abuse.
Because the initial interviews with the Wee Care children
were not recorded, we cannot determine how Wee Care children
were first interviewed with the dolls and how they responded to
their introduction. But we do know from comments in the later
transcribed interviews that children had interacted with the
dolls on previous occasions. This raises the issue of whether any
sexualized behavior or sexualized reports in the transcribed
interviews reflects the children's prior exposure to the dolls
rather than their attempt to demonstrate how they were sexually
abused. That is, the dolls may serve as a nonverbal suggestive
device which promotes subsequent sexualized play and sexualized
verbalizations, none of which are accurate indicators of past
abuse. These concerns are raised by the behavior of one non-
abused child who served as a pilot subject in a study of young
children's interactions with anatomically detailed dolls
(described in Ceci, in press and Ceci & Bruck1993b).
A three-and-a-half year old non-abused girl was examined by a
pediatrician. She was not given a genital examination.
Immediately after the examination, when interviewed by the
experimenter, she correctly said that the doctor had not touched
her genitals or buttocks. Furthermore, when shown an
anatomically detailed doll and told to show how the doctor had
touched her genitals and buttocks, she correctly stated that he
had not touched her. Three days later, the same child was given
an anatomically detailed doll and asked to show all the things
that the doctor had done in her previous visit. This time, she
inserted a stick into the vagina of the doll and said that this had
happened at the doctor's office. However, upon further
questioning, she said that the doctor did not do this. Three days
later, the child was asked to use the anatomically detailed doll
and to show her father everything that had happened at the
examination. This time, she hammered a stick into the doll's
vagina and then inserted a toy earscope into the doll's anus. When
asked if this really happened, she said "Yes it did." When her
father and the experimenter both tried to debrief her with such
statements as, "Your doctor doesn't do those things to little girls.
You were just fooling. We know he didn't do those things", the
three-year-old tenaciously clung to her prior claims that she had
just demonstrated on the doll (a videotape of this child's doll play
is enclosed with the brief. maybe). Thus, repeated exposure to
the doll, with minimal suggestions, resulted in highly sexualized
play for this one 3-year-old subject. Although this pilot
observation calls for more systematic research on the influence
of repeated exposure to anatomically detailed dolls in interviews
with sexual themes, the dramatic and startling results of this
one subject demonstrates vividly the potential suggestiveness of
anatomical dolls with non-abused 3-year-olds.
Wolfner and his colleagues (993) concluded their recent review
article on the use of anatomical dolls with the following
statement:
...we are left with the conclusion that there is simply no scientific
evidence available that would justify clinical or forensic diagnosis of
abuse on the basis of the dolls. The common counter is that such
play is "just one component" in reaching such a diagnosis based on
a "full clinical" picture....[Doll] play cannot be validly used as a
component, however, unless it provides incremental validity and
there is virtually no evidence that it does."(Wolfner, et al., p. 9).
Since this statement was written, we now have data on three-
year-old children's interactions with anatomically detailed dolls
(Ceci & Bruck, described above). If replicated, these data would
appear to suggest that dolls ought not be used in interviews with
young children, as their use promotes sexualized behavior and
false reports in non-abused children.
9. Less Invasive Methods: Source Attribution Errors
In the previous sections, we have presented some of the
elements of interviews that may produce inaccurate reporting.
To a large extent, these elements are quite salient; their
presence can be easily isolated in recorded interviews. Some
authors of this brief have recently conducted three different
types of studies that illustrate how suggestions that are
delivered in a much milder and less detectible manner can also
have repercussions on children's memories and reports.
These three studies focus on the theoretical construct of
"source attribution error". This refers to the problems that both
children and adults have in separating the sources of their
memories. In some cases, this may be particularly problematic
for some children. For example, 6- and 9- year- old children
make more errors than adults when discriminating between
actions they performed and actions they merely imagined
themselves performing (Foley & Johnson, 1985). When asked to
remember which of two people said what, preschool children have
a more difficult time than adults, if the two people speaking
share similar physical characteristics (Foley & Johnson, 1985;
Lindsay, Johnson, & Kwon, 1991).
Zaragoza and her colleagues (Ackil & Zaragoza, 1993) have used
some of these same techniques to explore the basis of children's
suggestibility. In these experiments, subjects viewed a
videotape, after which the experimenter read them a summary of
the video which contained events that were part of the video as
well as events that were not part of the video. Sometime later,
subjects were given a surprise memory test; here they were read
a list of events and asked to say whether they remembered seeing
the event on the video, or hearing the event from the summary, or
both. The youngest children (6-year-olds) were most prone to
confusing actually viewed with suggested (heard) events. These
findings suggest that suggestibility effects reflect young
children's susceptibility to serious memory errors, namely the
tendency to believe they remembered seeing details that were
only suggested to them. The next two experiments take this
paradigm closer to the field of children's testimony in the
forensic context.
In the following experiment, Poole and Lindsay (unpublished)
demonstrated how source attribution errors may occur through
subtle interventions, such as parents reading a book to their
child. In this study, preschoolers played with "Mr. Science" for 16
minutes in a university laboratory. During that time the child
participated in four demonstrations (e.g, lifting cans with
pulleys). Four months later, the parents were mailed a story book
which was specially constructed for each child. It contained a
biographical description of their child's visit to Mr. Science.
However, not all of the information was accurate; the story
described two of the experiments that the child had seen and it
also described two that the child had not seen. Furthermore, each
story finished with the following fabricated account of what
happened when it was time to leave the laboratory,
"Mr Science wiped (child's name) hands and face with a wet-wipe.
The cloth got close to (child's name) mouth and tasted really
yuckie."
The parents read the story to their children three times.
These young children were very susceptible to source
attribution errors. When later interviewed by the experimenters,
the children reported that they had participated in
demonstrations which had only been mentioned in the stories read
to them by their parents. When asked whether Mr. Science put
anything "yuckie" in their mouths, more than half of the children
inaccurately replied "yes", and these children elaborated their
"yes" answers. Moreover, inaccurate reports of having something
"yuckie" put in their mouths increased on repeated questioning;
when asked, "Did Mr. Science put something yuckie in your mouth
or did your Mom just read you this in a story?", now 71% of the
children said that it really happened. This study demonstrates
how very subtle suggestions can influence children's inaccurate
reporting of non-events which can have a sexual interpretation.
The next study, conducted by Ceci and his colleagues (Ceci,
Crotteau, Smith & Loftus, in press) was designed to pursue the
question of whether preschoolers exhibit source misattributions
when they are repeatedly encouraged to think about events that
never occurred. Each week for 10 consecutive weeks, an
interviewer asked preschoolers to think about both actual events
that they had experienced in their distant past (e.g., an accident
that eventuated in stitches) and fictitious events that they had
never experienced (e.g., getting their hand caught in a mousetrap
and having to go to the hospital to get it removed; seeing an
alligator on a bus with an apple in its mouth). Each of these
events and non-events was wri=06 on a separate card. The child
selected a card, the interviewer would read it aloud, and then ask
if the event ever happened. For example, when the child selected
the card that read: "Got finger caught in a mousetrap and had to go
to the hospital to get the trap off", the interviewer would ask:
"Think real hard, and tell me if this ever happened to you. Can you
remember going to the hospital with the mousetrap on your
finger?" (This study will be henceforth referred to as "The
Mousetrap Study".)
After 10 weeks of thinking about both real and fictitious
events, these preschool children were interviewed by a second
interviewer. Initially, the interviewer asked: "Tell me if this
ever happened to you: Did you ever get your finger caught in a
mousetrap and have to go to the hospital to get the trap off?"
Following the child=D5s reply, the interviewer asked for additional
details (e.g., "Can you tell me more?").
When exposed to these very mild manipulations, 58% of the
preschool children produced false narratives to one or more of
these fictitious events; 25% produced false narratives to the
majority of them. Furthermore, the children's reports did not
solely contain one word responses; their narratives contained
elaborated and embellished descriptions of events that never
occurred. Some accounts were internally coherent, containing not
only details and sequences of events that never occurred but also
containing descriptions of the child's affect during these non-
events (see enclosed videotape, maybe).
MAKE THIS WHOLE PARAGRAPH A FOOTNOTE: It should be noted
that subsequent work with same paradigm indicates that the
same quality of false report can be produced in half the time as
the original experiment. Furthermore, similar patterns of
results have been recently reported for adult subjects (e.g.,
Hyman et al., 1993; Loftus, 1993). END OF FOOTNOTE.
These data indicate that children can come to make false
reports about non-occurring events, even ostensibly painful
bodily events, when suggestions are mildly made in the course of
a conversation or a story-telling activity. If children are
repeatedly asked by investigators, therapists, and parents to try
to remember "how someone touched you" or "if someone touched
your vagina", will children eventually come to make statements
that they had been sexually abused, when abuse had never taken
place? Furthermore, when parents or therapists read books with
abuse themes to children, do children come to believe what
happened in the book actually happened to them? (For example, Dr.
Susan Esquilin read Where the Wild Things Are to some the the
Wee Care children. One of the pictures contains a monster with
a fork running after a child. After reading this book, some
children began reporting abuse with utensils. ROBERT IS THIS
CORRECT??) There are no data on these important issues.
However, the results of the studies that we have just reviewed
provide a theoretical and empirical framework for suspecting
that such activities lead to significant source misattributions.
Summary
We have presented a number of features that, when present in
interviews or interactions with young children, may greatly
compromise the accuracy of their reports. These factors include:
biased beliefs of the interviewer, the use of repeated questions, the
repetition of misleading information, the use of rewards, bribes,
and threats. Children's reports are at risk for being tainted if they
are interviewed by an intimidating adult, such as a police office.
Other important factors that contribute to children's unreliable
reports include the use of peer pressure, the use of anatomically
detailed dolls, and stereotype induction. Finally, some very recent
evidence indicates that merely asking children to repeatedly think
about whether an event occurred may have a profound negative
effect on their subsequent memories. These features characterize
many of the interviews of the Wee Care children. The following
excerpted interview, along with our annotated comments,
summarizes many of the points made in this section. The
interviewer, an experienced social worker, is denoted I, and he is
interviewing one child, denoted C. Occasionally a police detective
(P) joins the interview.
I:We have gotten a lot of other kids to help us since I last saw you.
C:No. I don't have to.
I:Oh come on. Did we tell you she is in jail?
C:Yes. My mother already told me.
Comment: It is obvious that this interviewer was not neutral
regarding the defendant's guilt, insinuating that because she is now
jail he need not be afraid of he r, although it is not clear that this
child was ever afraid. Also note the use of peer pressure.
I: Well, we can get out of here real quick if you just tell me what
you told me last time.
Comment: There is no desire on the part of this interviewer to test an
alternative hypothesis; rather he desires the child to reaffirm on
tape what he said in an earlier interview through the use of a bribe.
C: I forgot.
I: No you didn't, I know you didn't.
C: I did, I did.
I: No, come on.
C: I forgot.
I: I thought we were friends last time.
C: I'm not your friend any more.
I: How come?
C: Because I hate you.
I: Is it because we are talking about stuff you don't want to talk
about? What are you a monster now? Huh? ....
Comment: This interviewing borders on being coercive. There is little resp
ect for the
child's wish not to discuss this matter.
I:We talked to a few more of your buddies - we talked to everybody
now. And everyone told me about the nap room, and the bathroom
stuff, and the music room stuff, and the choir stuff, and the peanut
butter stuff, and nothing surprises me any more.
Comment: Again, further evidence that no alternative hypothesis is being te
sted. The
interviewer essentially tells the child that his friends already told on th
e defendant, and
that he, the child, should do the same.
C: I hate you.
I: No you don't...You just don't like talking about this, but you
don't hate me.
C: Yes, I do hate you.
I: We can finish this real fast if you just show me real fast what you
showed me last time.
C: No.
I: I will let you play my tape recorder....Come on, do you want to
help us out? Do you want to help us keep her in jail, huh? ...Tell
me what happened to (three other children). Tell me what happened
to them. Come on.....I need your help again, buddy. Come on.
C: No.
I: You told us everything once before. Do you want to undress my
dolly?
I: Let's get done with this real quick so we could go to Kings to get
popsicles....Did (defendant) ever tell you she could get out of jail?
Comment: The interviewer comes close to bribing the child for a
disclosure , by implying that the aversive interview can be terminated
as soon as the child repeats what he said earlier. Popsicles and
playing with a tape recorder are offere d as rewards.
Police: She could never get out.
C: I know that.
Police: Cause I got her... She is very afraid of me. She is so scared
of me.
I: She cries when she sees him (indicating the police detective)
because she is so scared... What happened to (another child) with
the wooden spoon? If you don't remember in words, maybe you
can show me.
Comment: Note the authoritative statements of the policeman. There
is no attempt to test the hypothesis that the defendant did not do
what they believed she did. Instead, we see further attempts to
vilify the defendant to make it more likely the chi ld will confirm
their hunch about her.
C: I forgot what happened, too.
I: You remember. You told your mommy about everything, about
the music room, and the nap room. And all the stuff. You want to
help her stay in jail, don't you? So she doesn't bother you any
more...Your mommy told me that you had a picture of yourself in
your room and there was blood on your penis. Who hurt you?
C; (Child names the defendant).
I: So, your penis was bleeding, oh. Your penis was bleeding. Tell
me something else: was your hiney bleeding, too?
C: No.
Comment: The child never says to this investigator that his penis was
bleeding. The investigator provides this misleading information to
the child.
I: Did (defendant) bleed, too?
C: No.
I: Are you sure she didn't bleed?
C: Yes.... I saw her penis, too.
I: Show me on the (anatomical) doll....you saw that? Oh.
C: See doodied on me...She peed on us.
I: And did you have to pee on her at all?
C: Yeah.
I: You did? And who peed on her, you and who else?
C: (Child names a male friend)
I: Didn't his penis bleed?
C: Yes.
I: It did? What made it bleed? What was she doing?
C: She was bleeding.
I: She was bleeding in her penis? Did you have to put your penis in
her penis? Yes or No?
C: Yeah...And I peed in her penis.
I: What was that like? What did it feel like?
C: Like a shot.
I: Did (friend) have to put his penis in her penis, too?
C: Yes, at the same time.
I: At the same time? How did you do that?
C: We chopped our penises off.
I: So, she was bleeding in her penis and you had your penis and
your friend's inside her penis.
C: At the same time.
Comment: This type of exchange is very common in these transcripts :
When t he child says something that is not part of the interviewer's
hypothesis (in this case, that the children chopped off their
penises), the interviewer ignores it. There is no attempt to pursue
it, probably out of fear that the child may embellish this claim with
even more incredible claims. Furthermore, in this last section, the
child finally begins to make allegations after much initial
resistance. Previous research indicate s that when children want an
interview to end, they often increase the quantity of false
statements (Pettit et al.)
At this point the child and interviewer began discussing a stream
of events in which the child alleged that the defendant urinated in
his mouth and he urinated in her mouth; he and others were made to
walk in her urine and slide on the classroom floor in her urine.
Nowhere in this interview, or numerous others by this and other
mental health professionals is there any evidence that an
alternative hypothesis was being tested. Specifically, there is no
attempt by this interviewer to try to get the child to assent to an
incompatible hypothesis, e.g., one in which the child's pediatrician
put his penis in the child's mouth, or the sheriff made him drink his
urine, or that he was just teasing about the defendant bleeding. As
can be seen, there is no attempt to encourage the child to deny that
any of this happened. Although it is not possible to know how much
of what the child is reporting is factually accurate, there is a
certain suspiciousness about his disclosures -- and this is even
more troubling in the interviews of some of his classmates. Partly,
this is due to the heavy-handed use of coercive tactics ("If you tell
me real quick, we can go get popsicles") refusal to believe that the
child has forgotten or has a legitimate motive for not wanting to
repeat an earlier remark he allegedly made to his mother, (e.g., the
child may realize the former statement is false), but partly there is
an absence of incredulity on the part of the interviewer which may
reflect some interviewers' confusion between taking everything the
child says seriously, vs. believing everything a child says.
To summarize, a consideration of the nature of the interviews
conducted with the Wee Care children raises a possibility that
their statements were in response to highly suggestive and coercive
interviewing techniques. Our analyses of the transcripts of the
initial interviews with the Wee Care children also reveal that
despite all examples of coercive and suggestive interviewing
practices, the children made relatively few accusations of sexual
abuse, and when these did occur, for the most part, these were one
word responses to investigator's suggestive questions. It is rare to
find any elaborated account by a child even after all the suggestive
interviewing practices. (An instructive exercise to support this
conclusion involves reading only the child's portions of the
interviews, deleting all of the interviewers' questions and
comments).
B. Children's Credibility
Although children's reports may be highly influenced by a number
of suggestive influences, this does not necessarily mean that the
children will appear credible when they parrot interviewers'
erroneous suggestions. Of particular concern is whether a juror, or
a child development researcher, or a child therapist can
differentiate children whose reports are accurate from those whose
reports were a product of suggestive interviews. The existing
evidence suggests that one cannot tell the difference between these
two kinds of children. The evidence is based on some of the results
from studies already discussed in this brief.
It will be recalled that in the Pettit et al study, there were
seven children who were absent from the classroom when a major
event occurred, and yet six of these children later reported that
they were present. On closer analysis, these researchers found that
the reports of three of these six absent children were
indistinguishable from those of their classmates who actually did
view the events.
Some researchers have opined that the presence of perceptual
details in reports is one of the indicators of an actual memory, as
opposed to a confabulated one (Schooler, Gerhard, & Loftus, 1986;
Raskin & Yuille, 1989). However, in the Sam Stone study for
example, the presence of perceptual details was no assurance that
the report was accurate. There was a surprising number of
fabricated perceptual details that children in the combined
stereotype plus suggestion condition provided to embellish the non-
events (e.g, claiming that Sam Stone took the teddy bear into a
bathroom and soaked it in hot water before smearing it with a
crayon; claiming that there was more than one Sam Stone; claiming
that they saw Sam Stone go to the corner store to buy chocolate ice
cream).
It is one thing to demonstrate that children can be induced to
make errors and include perceptual details in their reports, but it is
another matter to show that such faulty reports are convincing to
an observer, especially a highly trained one. To examine the
believability of the children's reports, videotapes of their final
interviews were shown to approximately 1,000 researchers and
clinicians who work on children's testimonial issues (Leichtman &
Ceci, in press). These researchers and clinicians were told that all
the children observed Sam Stone's visit to their daycare centers.
They were asked to decide which of the events reported by the
children actually transpired and then to rate the overall credibility
of each child.
The majority of the professionals were highly inaccurate.
Experts who conduct research on the credibility of children's
reports, who provide therapy to children suspected of having been
abused, and who carry out law enforcement interviews with
children, generally failed to detect which of the children's claims
were accurate and which were not, despite being confident in their
judgments. The highly credible yet inaccurate reports obtained
from the children may have resulted from a combination of repeated
interviews with persistent and intense suggestions that built on a
set of prior stereotypes. Similarly, it may become difficult to
separate credibility from accuracy when these children, after
repeated interviews, give a formal video-taped interview or testify
in court.
Similar results were obtained when psychologists who
specialize in interviewing children were shown videotapes of the
children in the Mousetrap study (Ceci, in press). Recall that these
children had been simply asked to repeatedly think about whether a
fictitious or real event had actually happened. Again, professionals
could not reliably detect which of the events in the children's
narratives were real and which were not. One reason for their
difficulty may be that they cannot imagine such plausible,
internally coherent narratives being fabricated. In addition, the
children exhibited none of the tell-tale signs of duping, teasing, or
tricking. They seemed sincere, their facial expressions and affect
were appropriate, and their narratives were filled with the kind of
low-frequency details that make accounts seem plausible, as shown
in the following account:
My brother Colin was trying to get Blowtorch (an action figure)
from me, and I wouldn't let him take it from me, so he pushed me
into the wood pile where the the mousetrap was. And then my finger
got caught in it. And then we went to the hospital, and my mommy,
daddy, and Colin drove me there, to the hospital in our van, because
it was far away. And the doctor put a bandage on this finger
(indicating)
Some researchers are developing techniques that may ultimately
be used to detect when children's reports are accurate and when
their reports are inaccurate. These involve fine-grained analyses of
the linguistic content of the statements, the gestures, voice
quality, and other affective measures. However, these techniques
have not yet been validated on children who have undergone repeated
and highly suggestive interviews. Furthermore, even if such
techniques were available, they could only be used by highly trained
professionals, not by jurors, or even by specialists in child
development. These techniques are being developed precisely
because of the difficulty that professionals and non-professionals
all share in distinguishing between children's reliable and
unreliable reporting.
To summarize, when children have undergone suggestive
interviewing or are exposed to some of the components of
suggestive interviews, they frequently appear highly credible when
they are inaccurate, even to well-trained professionals.
C. The Time-Course of Suggestibility Effects
How long-lasting are the effects of suggestions? Perhaps it
could be argued that suggestive interviewing techniques change
children's reports but only for a short time; and sometime after
suggestive interviews have ceased, then children's reports revert to
accurate accounts. Following this line of reasoning, if children's
accounts of events are consistent over long periods of time even
after the cessation of suggestive interviews, then these reports
must be faithful versions of what actually happened to the children.
This is a difficult but important issue to address. Based on some
anecdotal and scientific evidence, however, we argue that
misleading suggestions can indeed have long lasting effects; indeed,
they can sometimes give rise to life-long illusory beliefs.
The longevity of the suggestibility effects is primarily
influenced by the overall strength of the suggestions. Thus the
same factors that increase the risk of erroneous reports also
increase the longevity of these reports and beliefs. To repeat these
include such factors as: the forcefulness of the suggestions, the
perceived authority of the provider of the suggestions, the use of
threats and bribes, reinforcement for reports of abuse, negative
reinforcement or ignoring denials, retractions, or implausible
reports, creation of an accusatory atmosphere, peer pressure, and
the suggestive use of anatomically detailed dolls.
Further aspects of the social and mental life of the child may
serve to solidify and strengthen their false reports and false
beliefs long after the interviews are over. That is, if the children
continue to think about the suggested events and to talk about them
and to hear others around them talk about them, their beliefs in the
reality of these events may solidify.
These arguments are supported by numerous anecdotes of long-
lasting but erroneous memories of childhood events (e.g., see
Lindsay & Read, in press). Perhaps the most famous of these
involves the inaccurate memory of one of the great developmental
psychologists Jean Piaget (Piaget, 1962).
"..one of my first memories would date, if it were true, from my
second year. I can still see, most clearly, the following scene, in
which I believed until I was about fifteen. I was sitting in my pram,
which my nurse was pushing in the Champs Elysees, when a man
tried to kidnap me. I was held in by the strap fastened round me
while my nurse bravely tried to stand between me and the thief. She
received various scratches, and I can still see vaguely those on her
face..... When I was about fifteen, my parents received a letter
from my former nurse...she wanted to confess her past faults, and
in particular to return the watch she had been given as a
reward...She had made up the whole story...I, therefore, must have
heard, as a child, the account of this story, which my parents
believed, and projected into the past in the form of a visual
memory."
The false memories were with Piaget for at least a decade.
A second piece of evidence to support the contention that some
children maintain their beliefs about fabricated stories that are a
product of suggestive interviews, long after the suggestions of
ceased, comes from the "mousetrap" study. Several weeks after the
last interview, one of the subjects who had told about his finger
being caught in the mousetrap was re-interviewed. When his
mother brought him to the lab, she told the experimenters that both
she and her husband thought that the study was completed, and
therefore two days earlier they explained to their son that the story
about the mousetrap was fictitious and had never happened. She said
that her son initially refused to accept this debriefing, claiming
that he remembered it happening when the family lived in their
former house. She and her husband continued to explain that the
whole story was just in his imagination, that nothing like this ever
happened. Despite the debriefing, the experimenters decided to re-
interview the child. When asked if he ever got his finger caught in a
mousetrap, the child stated that he remembered this happening, and
he proceeded to supply a richly-detailed narrative. When the
interviewer challenged him, asking him if it was not the case that
his mother had already explained that this never happened, the child
protested, "But it really did happen. I remember it!" While this
child's insistence, in the presence of his mother, is not proof that
he believed what he was saying about this fictitious event, it does
suggest that he was not duping the adults for any obvious motive,
given that the demand characteristics were all tilted against his
claiming that he remembered this.
This child provides a vivid example of the long-last effects of
suggestions. His pattern of behavior is also common in other
children involved in Mousetrap studies. That is, there are also other
children who hold on to their original beliefs even when their
parents debrief them and tell them that the events were only
imagined (Ceci, Crotteau, Smith & Loftus, in press). And, there are
children who continue to say that the events occurred even when
they are told right before the final memory test that the
experimenter had it wrong (e.g. Ceci, Loftus, Leichtman & Bruck, in
press; Lindsay, Gonzales & Eso, in press).
These data suggest that the effects of suggestions may be
extremely long-lasting. Some children hold onto their beliefs long
after the suggestions have terminated.
Thus, if the Wee Care children's testimony was a product of
suggestive interviewing techniques, then their false allegations
might persist long after the interviews had terminated. It is also
important to note that these suggestive interviews continued for a
long time and still may be continuing to the present. That is,
although the investigative interviews ceased in July of 1985, all
but one of the 20 child witnesses were seen in therapy (IS THIS
CORRECT? ); some may still be in therapy. The children were
interviewed (and coached??) by the prosecutor's office before
appearing as witnesses at trial. Each child was interviewed two to
three times by Eileen Treacy before the trial; as we show below,
the interviews with Treacy were more suggestive and coercive than
those conducted at the beginning of the investigation.
ET: Let me ask you this; did she touch boys, did she touch girls,
did she touch dogs?
3C: She touched boys and girls
ET: Did she touch them with telephones? Did she touch them with
spoons? What kinda spoons?
3C: Teaspoons
ET: Can you make a mark where she hurt you?
....Make a mark. Just show me where Kelly hurt you. Then I can
show that to the judge
ET: Tell me about 7C. What happened to 7C?
3C: I don't know
ET: 7C told me about some of the stuff that happened to you
3C: (no response)
ET: She cares about you. Some of the kids told me that things
happened with knives at Wee Care. Do you remember anything
like that?
ET: I see and did the kids want Kelly to do that peanut butter stuff?
3C: I didn't even think that there was a peanut butter
ET: Well what about licking the peanut butter?
3C: There wasn't anything about peanut butter.
--------------------
ET:(brings out dolls). Ok now what about the private areas? What
happened in the private areas?
4C: I don't know
ET: That's harder to talk about?
4C: Yeah
ET: Does it make you embarrassed?
4C: I don't know
ET: Did you ever see Kelly's private spots?
4C: I am not too sure
ET: What about her boobies?
4C: I don't even really know about..
ET: There's some pictures that Sara (McArdle, the prosecutor) has
4C: What kind of pictures?
ET: Kelly like doin something to 2C and I was so surprised. What
was she doing?
4C: Um, I forgot but I know she did it.
ET: She do something with a fork to 2C?
4C: Sara would know though
ET: Now when Kelly was touchin the kids with the spoons and the
knives, did she touch them inside of their private spots or outside?
4C: I don't remember.
ET: Did Kelly ever put her elbow on your private spots?
4C: Um...maybe
-----------------
ROBERT CAN YOU PUT IN THE SECTION FOR 5C THAT IS
SUMMARIZED ON P. 35 AT THE BOTTOM OF DAN'S
SUMMARIES OF EACH CASE. IT STARTS ET LEADS LEADS
LIKE CRAZY NOW.
(after some questioning, Treacy gets 6C to say that Kelly's private
parts were the same as little girls)
ET: Did Kelly have hair?
6C: Nah, I know cause it's grown ups... I know about that
ET: So I guess that means you saw her private parts huh? Did Kelly
ask the kids to look at her private parts, or to kiss her private part
or..
6C: I didn't really do that....I didn't even do it..
ET: But she made you
6C: She made me. She made me .. But I couldn't do it...So I didn't
even really do it. I didn't do it.
ET: Did it smell good?
6C: shhh
ET: Her private parts?
6C: I don't know
ET: Did it taste good? Did it taste like chocolate?
6C: Ha, ha. No, I didn't even do it.
ET: You Wee Care kids seem so scared of her
6C: I wasn't. I'm not even.
ET: But while you were there, were you real scared?
6C: I don't know
ET: What was so fright