Victims of Crime Research Digest No. 13

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Talking to Young Victims and Witnesses About Repeated Abuse and Maltreatment

By Sonja Brubacher, Deborah Connolly, Martine Powell and Heather Price

Many of the experiences that bring children into contact with the criminal justice system are recurrent (e.g., witnessing domestic violence, experiencing neglect, and other forms of ongoing abuse). It is estimated that approximately half of all cases of child sexual abuse involve repeated offences (Connolly et al. 2015). In Canadian criminal courts, complainants must describe each instance of abuse in enough detail to “lift it from the general to the specific” (R. v. B. [G.] 1990). Canada is not alone in this requirement for specificity. The United States Supreme Court held “it is not sufficient that the indictment shall charge the offense in the same generic terms as in the definition; but it must state the species, – it must descend to particulars” (United States v. Cruikshank 1875, p.558). And the High Court in Australia in S v. The Queen (1989) held that an indictment must include “such particulars as to the alleged time and place of committing the offence ... as may be necessary to inform the accused person of the nature of the charge.”

The courts have interpreted these requirements to mean that complainants who report repeated abuse must describe specific instances of that abuse (Guadagno et al. 2006; Woiwod and Connolly 2017). That means that criminal justice professionals should ideally have extra training (e.g., how to direct children to specific instances), when allegations are about repeated abuse.

Researchers have shown that memories for repeated events have characteristics that are different from memories for one-time occurrences. That is why it is difficult to recall the exact details of individual instances (Roberts and Powell 2001). It remains unclear, however, how repeated instances are stored and organized in memory over time. This knowledge is necessary for developing effective guidelines to use when interviewing children about repeated abusive experiences. For example, should interviewers direct children to talk about specific instances immediately, or should they allow children to first report general information about what usually happens? Are children even capable of describing specific instances of abuse? Under what conditions might they be more or less able? What is the best way to ask children about how frequently the abuse occurs?

The authors of this article are currently conducting a large-scale project to address critical questions about how children’s memories are organized for repeated experiences. This article explains the importance of this work within the broader context of memory research and the Canadian criminal justice system. The findings will help professionals who conduct forensic interviews, as well as those who interview children in preparation for or during court.

Using Scripts to Remember Repeated Experiences

Children (and adults) have a difficult time accurately attributing specific details to particular instances of a repeated event (Woiwod et al. 2019), but they have a good memory for “what usually happens” (Brubacher et al. 2014). Imagine that you were being interviewed about your grocery shopping experiences. First, imagine being expected to describe one time: what you wore, what exactly you bought, what the total cost was, how long you were in the store, and so on. This would be a difficult task! Contrast this request with being asked general details about grocery shopping (e.g., how much you usually spend, what kinds of things you typically buy) – a much easier mental activity. The details of what usually happens make up what memory researchers call a “script” (see Brubacher and Earhart 2019 for a review).

Children begin to have scripts for their regular activities as young as the age of three, although the scripts are very simple (Nelson and Gruendel 1981). When asked what happens at a restaurant, a preschooler might exclaim, “You say what you want, you eat it, and you’re done!” As children grow older, and gain more experience, their scripts become increasingly sophisticated (Fivush 1984).

What is in a Typical Script?

The main elements of the script are made up of an ordered list of things that typically happen. For example, at a restaurant, they might include how you order (e.g., counter, waiter, drive-through), what food you eat, what you drink, and how you pay. Some of the categories and their options may vary across instances. For example, you might or might not have dessert at the restaurant, and if you do, the particular dessert might vary. Robyn Fivush, an expert on children’s memory development, wrote about script elements in 1984, in a paper titled Learning about School: The Development of Kindergartners’ School Scripts. She found that 4- and 5-year-old children had already begun to develop scripts by their second day of kindergarten. The children were interviewed again after 2, 4, and 10 weeks. Their scripts became more elaborate the longer they were in kindergarten, but their ability to recall the typical activities in the correct order was already very good on the second day of school (e.g., come to school, [then] put stuff away, [then] play in mini gym, [then] do math).

Problems with Scripts

A large body of research shows that scripts support memory recall, but they can also lead to memory errors, even about central details. Erskine and her colleagues showed 5- to 6- and 9- to 10-year-olds slide shows of a trip to McDonald’s restaurant (Erskine et al. 2001). Some children viewed a slide show where central details were not shown (e.g., waiting in a line to order the food), and other children viewed a slide show that was missing peripheral details (e.g., making a phone call). The children were interviewed either 90 minutes or 7 days after watching the slideshow. Researchers asked them 19 questions about whether they had seen certain activities. All the children were more likely to incorrectly agree that they saw the central details that had been missing from their slideshows rather than the peripheral details. Also, younger children, and children tested after 7 days, made more script-based errors than older children and children tested immediately. This finding provides further evidence that children’s reliance on scripts for memory recall increases with time, and that younger children rely more heavily on scripts than older children do.

The reason the children made mistakes in Erskine’s McDonald’s study is because people use scripts to help reconstruct the past (Myles-Worsley et al. 1986), and to make future experiences predictable (Hudson et al. 1992). People know what to expect next time if they have a script. The children in Erskine’s study used their script for what usually happens at McDonalds to reconstruct the slideshow, falsely reporting typical details that were never shown. In fact, much of memory recall involves reconstruction – inferring what must have happened based on prior knowledge and experiences (Loftus 1981). If you tried to answer the earlier questions about a specific grocery shopping trip, you might have used your script to help you. You might have estimated what you spent based on what you usually spend. Adults frequently use scripts in this way, without even thinking about it, and so do children.

Scripts are powerful mental structures, and they are quite accurate in their main elements and things that do not change from one event to the next (Hudson and Mayhew 2009). But they do not help us decide which of a set of variable options was present in any one instance. For example, when recalling a specific grocery shopping trip, you might have incorrectly paired the day you bought the pie with the day you forgot your credit card at the store.

Most of the time, estimations and minor confusions across instances are not a problem. But in legal proceedings, precision and accuracy frequently matter. If your grocery shopping trip was part of an investigation, it might not be enough for you to make estimates based on your script about the approximate time you went to the store, and confusing details across occurrences could leave your account open to challenge. Researchers have been studying children’s reports of repeated experiences for over three decades to better understand what they are capable of remembering and how to help them give complete and accurate accounts. The next section explains the typical research model used to understand this.

How the Lab Model Works in Studying Children’s Memories for Repeated Events

Researchers who study how children’s memories for repeated events develop have used a similar experimental model across studies and independent research groups. Typically, children between 4 and 11 years old participate in 3 to 6 instances of an activity that has been created for the research (e.g., play session, magic show, science experiment, scripted swimming lessons). The spacing between instances ranges from a few minutes (so that all occur in the same day) to a few days (so that all occur within a month). The most common arrangement is 4 instances presented within 1 or 2 weeks. Each instance adheres to a general script that includes a set number of activities occurring in a prescribed order. See Table 1 for an example.

Some of the details that children experience are the same every time (e.g., they complete the same puzzle each time or the magician’s wand is always silver). These are fixed details. In contrast, variable details change at each instance (e.g., children relax a different body part each day or the magician completes a different trick). A subset of research studies has included other types of details as well: high/low frequency details comprise one alternative repeated frequently (e.g., Powell and Thomson 1996; 1997), while the other is repeated infrequently; and new details are encountered during only one instance of the repeated event (e.g., Brubacher et al. 2011; Danby et al. 2019).

How to Read Table 1

Table 1 presents an example of the types of details that might occur during a staged magic show. The details in the first column are the key components of the event script (e.g., the magician always removes an item of clothing first, and then engages the children in a warm-up exercise). The next column refers to the kind of detail (fixed, variable, high/low, new). In the research studies, multiple schedules are created so that each script component can be represented as a different type of detail. For example, some children might experience the warm-up exercise as a variable detail, some might do the same exercise each instance (i.e., fixed), whereas others might only do the exercise once (i.e., new).

The four right-hand columns of Table 1 should be read down the column for the specific details for each instance. For example, in instance 4, a child experienced the magician removing his scarf, then the child warmed up by doing push-ups. Next, the magician showed the children his magic wand and pointed to the lucky letter P (in instance 4, the magician had no hat). Then he showed the children a picture of the snowy weather he experienced at his home, and let them smell the chocolate spray he used to banish the snow. Next, he brought out his stuffed dolphin assistant (this was the only time a stuffed assistant joined him) to help prepare for the trick – and so on.

Interviewing Children about Repeated Activities in Table 1

After a delay, researchers interview children about their memories for the repeated activity. Across studies, researchers have used a variety of interview methods. In the most common format, the interviewer asks children to talk about a specific instance (usually the last one), first in response to free-recall questions, and then in response to a set of specific questions about each key script component (e.g., “What was the magician’s lucky charm on the last day?”). The free-recall phase is completed by asking children one or more open-ended questions (e.g., “Tell me everything that happened the last day;” “What else happened?”). Open-ended questions invite an elaborate response, but do not dictate the expected content of the answer. In contrast, specific questions invite shorter responses and restrict interviewees’ answers to the particular information being sought by the interviewer (Powell and Snow 2007).

There are advantages to including both open-ended and specific questions in memory research. Children’s responses to the former question types tend to be more accurate than their responses to the latter (Brown et al. 2013) because open-ended questions put control of the interview in the hands of the interviewee (Hoffman 2007). By not restricting responses to what the interviewer wants to know, open-ended questions allow children to reply with whatever information comes to mind. However, children may not provide all of the information they are capable of remembering in response to open-ended questions. For that reason, memory researchers will often also ask children a set of specific questions about each item of interest (in this case, each of the key script components). Across all of the research studies, interviews have contained only open-ended questions, only specific questions, or a mixture of both.

Some researchers who study children’s memories for repeated events allow children to choose the instances they want to talk about, instead of having the interviewers decide (e.g., Brubacher et al. 2012; Danby et al. 2017). In Brubacher and colleagues’ studies, children were invited to talk about the instance they remember best. However, this research group has also shown that young children (younger than 8 or 9) may have difficulty thinking about the qualities of their own memories (Danby et al. 2017); this means that they would have trouble choosing which instance they remember better than others.

How Researchers’ Viewpoints Influence How They Interview Children

The body of research on children’s memories for repeated experiences has yielded many consistent findings (e.g., that children’s memories for fixed details are very strong and resistant to suggestion; Connolly and Lindsay 2001; Pezdek and Roe 1995), but also some differences. Many of these differences can be attributed to the ways in which children are interviewed. Indeed, child development experts around the world recognize the profound influence that interviewer questions have on shaping children’s reports (Brown and Lamb 2015). Further, research studies are designed in ways that reflect the theoretical orientations of the researchers, which may differ. For example, some researchers may believe that instances of a repeated event are still accessible in memory after a delay, whereas others may believe that the specific details of each instance are no longer connected together, making it impossible to retrieve an instance.

The current project represents a collaborative effort among international experts in this research field. Some of the present authors hold contrasting viewpoints. For example, Brubacher’s studies have focused on interviewing strategies that could help children retrieve instances. Her interpretation of the evidence is that at least some details remain connected to each other in memory (e.g., remembering that the day involving push-ups was also the same time that the magician brought the dolphin, ate an apple, and travelled by truck, while forgetting which music was playing or mistakenly reporting that there was a trumpet playing). As a result, Brubacher uses mostly or only open-ended questions in her studies. They allow children to choose the instance(s) they want to talk about. In her approach, children are capable – to some extent – of doing the work that interviewers need them to do (under the current legal requirements) with appropriate levels of adult support.

Connolly’s theoretical viewpoint, on the other hand, is that children will remember the variable details but recall them as a set of possible options (e.g., remembering that the music was violins, drums, trumpet, and guitar, but not being able to recall which one was playing the day the stickers were placed on children’s cheeks). She has focused on trying to characterize how instances of repeated events are organized in memory. Her interviews have thus mainly included specific questions about each script component, to get a complete picture of which details children retain after repeated experience. These differences in perspective across researchers can be found in many areas of social science, not just memory for repeated events.

How Laboratory Research Informs Real-World Interviews

Different theoretical perspectives exist because the phenomena being studied are complicated (e.g., human memory systems), and many factors affect them. Laboratory research, which refers to activities that take place in a controlled setting (like the staged magic show described here), helps identify these factors. The controlled setting allows researchers:

• to know exactly what happened (so that children’s memory reports can be compared with a record of fact),
• to make every child’s experience in the study as similar as possible (to allow conclusions to be drawn across the group of children), and
• to use methodologies (e.g., random assignment) that allow researchers to draw causal conclusions from the data.

To what extent can laboratory research be applied to real world events? After all, how does being interviewed about a magic show compare to being questioned about an experience of repeated abuse? Critics of laboratory research argue that memory for repeated staged events cannot be compared to memory for repeated traumatic events. Yet, many memory experts believe that the underlying memory phenomena are similar, and that “there is no ‘special’ memory mechanism for stressful or traumatic events” (Lamb and Malloy 2013, p.576). Further, there is a large body of research supporting the notion that memory for traumatic personal events would be stronger and more enduring than memory for neutral or pleasant laboratory events (see Fivush 2002, for an overview of research on trauma and children’s memory).

The Influence of Trauma on Memory

Some research has tried to take advantage of naturally occurring stressful events to evaluate the influence of trauma on memory (Fivush 2002). Price and Connolly (2007) studied 4- and 5-year-olds’ memories for four instances of swimming lessons. Approximately half of the children (n = 40) were classified as anxious and experienced observable emotional distress during the lesson. Other children were classified as non-anxious, and experienced comfort and enjoyment during the swimming lesson. Price and Connolly found no differences in anxious versus non-anxious children’s responses to free-recall questions. Anxious children were not more or less likely than non-anxious children to confuse details that varied across instances. There was only one key difference between children who experienced the swimming lessons as somewhat traumatic compared with those who did not: anxious children were less suggestible (i.e., they were less likely than non-anxious children to report false information that had been given to them after the swimming lessons). An adult case study also addressed this issue of memory for traumatic repeated events (Connolly and Price 2013). A woman who worked in the banking industry for many years was the victim of five separate armed robberies. She was interviewed about each instance on three occasions. Like children reporting about a repeated staged (non-traumatic) event, she was very clear on what details occurred during the robberies. However, she was confused about which details occurred during which instance, so her descriptions of each robbery were inconsistent.

Interviewing Children About Repeated Experiences

When children are interviewed by police and other legal professionals about repeated abuse, they are often asked to specify each instance by time, place, and other contextual details (Guadagno et al. 2006) such as clothing worn, the weather that day, or where other people were at the time of the offence. As shown earlier in this article (when you tried to recall your own shopping trips) this task is difficult and error prone. Young children are also less able than older children and adults to make accurate decisions about which specific details match which instance (Roberts 2002). In fact, the most common mistake children make when they have experienced something repeatedly is to mix up when something happened (which instance), not if it happened (Powell et al. 1999; Woiwod et al. 2019).

Connolly and her colleagues found that children’s reports of an instance of a repeated event are judged to be less credible than children’s reports of a unique event, even when the actual accuracy is similar (Connolly et al. 2008). A similar result was found for adults’ memory reports (Weinsheimer et al. 2017). This may be due, in part, to differences in report consistency and confidence. When asked to report an instance of a repeated event, children are less confident when they report variable details (Roberts and Powell 2005) and they are less consistent (Connolly et al. 2008) than children who experience an event once. The criminal justice system uses confidence and consistency as indicators of credibility (Myers et al. 1999). However, it is important to note that inconsistency is a result of confusing details actually experienced, not a result of reporting false details that never occurred. In spite of this, in a court case, inconsistencies could lead to a wrongful acquittal.

Using an Understanding of How Memory Works to Help Children

The courts in several countries, including Australia and the United States, have recognized the unique challenges involved in accurately recalling specific details about instances of repeated sexual abuse (People v. Jones 1990; Podirsky v. R. 1990). Child sexual abuse is a crime that rarely involves other witnesses and/or corroborative evidence (Cotter and Beaupré 2014; Myers 2002), so prosecution in these cases relies heavily on children’s accounts. In Australia and some US jurisdictions, courts accept charges of continuous child sexual abuse. This charge allows investigators to charge a suspect with repeated sexual abuse without requiring a child victim to describe the specifics of each individual instance (see Woiwod and Connolly 2017).

In practice, the charge of continuous sexual abuse (CSA) is used infrequently. This may be because special approval from the attorney general is required (Shead 2014) or because the courts need to be satisfied that a certain number of instances (usually three) did occur (Bah 2013; Richards 2009). This latter stipulation means that, to some extent, a victim must still explain the details of a few instances.

Further, as outlined in Woiwod and Connolly (2017), a few other significant issues arise when CSA (or any crime) is charged as a continuous offence:

1. it may be harder for the accused to raise a defence,
2. it is difficult to apply double jeopardy laws because the specific offences are not charged, and
3. the complainant’s perceived credibility may be at a disadvantage.

Nevertheless, charges of continuous sexual abuse represent a movement to bring the law into line with an understanding of human memory systems.

Despite efforts to balance the needs of the criminal justice system and defendants’ rights with victims’ capabilities, we still need a more concrete understanding of how children organize instances of repeated events in memory. Without this knowledge, criminal justice professionals will continue to rely on misunderstandings of how memory functions and will continue to ask children to produce evidence that may not only be difficult but impossible for them to access. In extreme instances, children’s cases may only move forward in the criminal justice system if they are able to report specific details of a single instance of abuse. The present research will assess the degree to which these instances can truly be accessed, for children of different ages.

Current Research

The primary objective of our research will be to analyze the responses of several thousand children who were interviewed about repeated laboratory events over the last 25 years in Canada and Australia. We expect the following outcomes:

1. to gain a clear understanding of the type, amount, and quality of information children (aged 4 to 10) can report about repeated experiences, and
2. to characterize the patterns of errors children make.

As a result of this work, the research team (headed by the authors) expects to make policy recommendations for how children should be interviewed about repeated abuse, and what types of charges may be reasonable in such cases.

The team will review these interviews to identify, specifically, children’s errors. The authors’ aim is to find out whether children seemingly recall details completely at random (i.e., do they mistakenly link together details from many different occurrences?) or whether their confusion is the result of mixing up whole instances, such as confusing the third time for the last time. With a better understanding of errors, this research can inform legal professionals about what types of details children can reasonably be expected to recall, and what types of details lead to the appearance of inaccuracy but might indeed be simply a normal memory phenomenon.

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Deborah A. Connolly. 2019. A meta-analysis of differences in children’s reports of single and repeated events. Law and Human Behavior, 43, 99-116. doi: 10.1037/lhb0000312

Cases

R. v. B. (G.), 2 S. C. R. 30. (1990).

People v Jones, 51 (Cal 3d, 1990)

Podirsky v. The Queen, 3 WAR 128 (1990).

S v. The Queen, 168 CLR 266 (1989).

United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542, 558 (1875).

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