Interviewing the Child Victim

Memory

"When children are interviewed skillfully and patiently, they can remember what they know. The key to unlocking children's secrets lies not in improving [their] memory but in improving the skill of adults who talk to children." Myers, (1992), p.1.

A child's memory like, that of an adult, has three functions: acquisition, storage and retrieval. The first requirement for remembering an event is to perceive it. If children pay attention at the time an event occurs, they are quite capable of perceiving and storing it. Ability to store information does not seem to be greatly associated with age (Werner & Perlmutter, 1979).

The interviewer's challenge is to help the child retrieve a memory that may be there but is not easily communicated. Young children may have trouble translating the existence and content of a memory into a verbal description (Perry, 1992).

In order to assist in the retrieval of a memory, it is important to know the three types of memory retrieval.

1. Recognition Memory

Recognition memory is the simplest form of memory recall. It only requires recognition that an event, person, or object has been previously experienced. It is within the capacity of infants and improves with age, with one interesting exception. Several studies have shown that face recognition improves with age through age 10, declines from 11 to 12 years, and picks up again at 13 (Carey, 1978; Goodman & Reed, 1986). This is a good example of why knowledge of memory development research can improve interviewing practice. The practice of using photo and "line-up" identification in assault cases would be contraindicated for children 11 to 13-years-old because of this developmental factor.

2. Reconstruction Memory

Reconstruction memory recall is a more sophisticated form of recognition that involves reconstructing the context (where, when and under what circumstances an event occurred). It requires mentally recreating a previous experience within the context of the physical and psychological surroundings. Research supports that using context reconstruction when interviewing increases the amount of detailed information that can be retrieved. This memory enhancement technique can also be facilitated by prompts and props that cue the victim's memory of the original event. The more "feature overlap," i.e., the more the prompts resemble each other or have factors that overlap the original context, the more details are retrieved. For young abuse victims, the doll house often represents the scene of the crime, stimulates memory, and provides a means to reconstruct and demonstrate what happened. Older children and adolescents can use drawings and house/room diagrams to create the context and content of their abusive experiences. This cognitive interview technique is based on this principle of "context re-instatement" (Fisher, Amador, Gesselman, 1989).

3. Free Recall

Free recall is the most complex form of memory and requires retrieval with few or no prompts. It is strongly age related. Without prompts and cues, preschool and young children can only recall one or two facts about an event, 3rd and 4th grade children about three facts, 7th and 8th grade children about six, and adults about seven or eight (Marin, Holmes, Guth & Kovac, 1979).

Young children are not proficient at free recall and applying the context reconstruction principle provides an effective memory retrieval approach. Using verbal and nonverbal prompts and props as tools for applying the approach is an integral part of Best Practice Interviewing.