Forensic Issues In Child Sexual Abuse Allegations

Main Category: Psychology / Psychiatry
Article Date: 07 Jan 2009 - 8:00 PDT

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Of the nearly 3.6 million children who were the subjects of a Child Protective Services investigation in 2006, maltreatment was substantiated or indicated in 28%. Nearly 9% of these substan¬tiated/indicated cases were related to sexual abuse allegations.

When sexual abuse is alleged, children may face investigative interviews, family disruptions, a change in their school environment, mental health counseling, and even trial court testimony.

This article reviews factors that affect the reliability of children's statements and provides guidelines for evaluators to help minimize the risk of their contaminating a child's report of sexual abuse.

Reliability of child sexual abuse allegations

Factors to consider when evaluating the reliability of sexual abuse allegations include an assessment of the child's memory and suggestibility. Reporting a memory requires a person to perceive the event, retain the memory, and retrieve the memory when asked to do so.

Memory can be divided into 3 categories: recognition memory, recall memory, and reconstructed memory. In general, recognition memory is the least complex form of memory: one need only recognize a single stimulus that he or she has had. Children as young as 3 years are fairly reliable at memory tasks that involve basic recognition of objects they have seen. By age 6 years, children can recognize a familiar face nearly as well as an adult.

In contrast, recall memory requires the reconstruction of what the child saw or experienced without the benefit of a prop or prompt. In this situation, a child who is interviewed may fail to report all or part of an event he experienced. This is known as an error of omission and is more commonly observed when preschoolers are interviewed than when older children are.

Charles L. Scott, MD
Dr Scott is professor of clinical psychiatry, chief of the Division of Psychiatry and the Law, and director of Forensic Psychiatry Residency at the University of California, Davis. He reports no conflicts of interest concerning the subject matter of this article.

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