CHAPTER 19
The Child and the Law
MAGGIE BRUCK, STEPHEN J. CECI, and GABRIELLE F. PRINCIPE
CASE EXAMPLE AND PRESENTATION OF
RELEVANT SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE 778
Case Facts 778
Bringing Developmental Psychology to
the Courtroom 780
The Nature and Time Course of Children’s Disclosures
of Sexual Abuse 780
Research on the Effects of Suggestion on
Children’s Reports 782
Adults’ Memories for Conversations with Children 797
Impact and Criticism of Scientific Studies Cited in
Lillie-Reed 800
Since the 1980s, research in the field of children and the
law is one of the fastest growing areas in all of develop-
mental psychology mainly because it calls on the expert-
ise of researchers in such a variety of areas. Yet, despite
the diversity of topics, all share the common goal of
studying behaviors and processes that impact the legal
status of children both in and out of the courtroom. Al-
though the research is oriented toward applied issues, it
is grounded in developmental theory and in some cases
has produced innovative developmental paradigms, the-
ories, and frameworks.
The wide set of topics included in research on chil-
dren and the law reflects their importance to current
societal problems. For example, there is a growing liter-
ature on the effects of family constellations and parent-
ing on children’s adjustment, such as the effects of gay
or lesbian parenting (Golmbok et al., 2003; Patterson,
1997), effects of divorce and custody arrangements
(Amato, 2000; Bauserman, 2002; Emery, Laumann-
Billings, Waldron, Sbarra, & Dillon, 2001; Gindes,
1998; Kelly & Lamb, 2003), and adoption and foster
parenting (Goodman, Emery, & Haugaard, 1998; Hau-
gaard & Hazan, 2002). Another recent avenue of study
involves the child in the juvenile justice system when the
776
Summary 801
Final Judgment of Lillie-Reed 802
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY,
DEVELOPMENTAL DIFFERENCES, AND
MECHANISMS OF SUGGESTIBILITY 802
Children’s Memory for Traumatic Events 802
Developmental Differences in Suggestibility and
Autobiographical Recall 808
Mechanisms Underlying Children’s Suggestibility 808
FUTURE DIRECTIONS 810
REFERENCES 812
child is the perpetrator. In part, this interest is due to
rising crime in this age group and to the fact that a num-
ber of jurisdictions have become more conservative in
dealing with this group of children in the forensic area.
Some of these studies, which mainly focus on older chil-
dren, examine the extent to which they understand
the legal proceedings and their legal rights (Grisso &
Schwartz, 2000; Grisso et al., 2003; Salekin, 2002;
Steinberg & Cauffman, 1996; Steinberg & Scott, 2003).
The greatest amount of work in the field of children
and the law has focused on issues related to the maltreat-
ment of children. In 2002, an estimated 896,000 children
in the United States were determined to be victims of
child abuse. Although the annual rate of victimization
per 1,000 children in the U.S. population has dropped
from 13.4 in 1990 to 12.3 in 2002, these figures greatly
underestimate the extent of the problem because they are
based on cases reported to agencies only. A general
theme of the research in this area is the prevalence, cor-
relates, consequences of, and treatments for maltreat-
ment (Kendall-Tacket, Williams, & Finkelhor, 1993).
Issues of maltreatment have also been responsible for
perhaps the most significant area of study in children
and the law: factors related to children’s ability to pro-

vide accurate testimony about experienced events. For
several reasons, these studies have mainly focused on
young children (ages 3 to 7) and have been framed to ad-
dress issues concerned with sexual abuse. First, there
has been a growing awareness and concern about the in-
cidence of child sexual abuse in our society. In the
United States, where national archives are kept for each
type of maltreatment, the numbers are telling: For the 49
states reporting in the National Center on Child Abuse
and Neglect’s (NCCAN) 1998 national data system,
there were 103,600 cases of substantiated sexual abuse
(1.5 per 1,000 children), nearly 38% of which involved
children age 7 and younger. In 2002, the rate dropped to
1.2 per 1,000 children (Child Maltreatment, 2004).
Second, prior to the 1980s, children were rarely ad-
mitted as witnesses in the legal arena (see Ceci &
Bruck, 1995). This pattern changed as a result of soci-
ety’s reaction to the dramatic increases in child abuse1
and as a result of the ineffective prosecution of child
abuse cases. During the 1980s, all but a few jurisdic-
tions in the United States dropped their corroboration
requirement for children in sexual abuse cases, a crime
that by its nature lacks corroboration. Many states
began to allow children to testify regardless of the na-
ture of the crime, permitting the jury to determine how
much weight to give to the child’s testimony. In Canada,
with the adoption of Bill C-15, the court could now con-
vict on the basis of a child’s unsworn testimony. In En-
gland, children over 3 years of age were admitted as
witnesses in the courtroom and could provide unsworn
corroborated testimony in sexual abuse cases.
Third, in addition to those children who enter the
forensic arena for issues related to sexual abuse, there
are many others who come into contact each year with
the juvenile and criminal justice systems for other
reasons (witnesses to domestic violence, hearings for
persons in need of supervision, neglect /permanency
hearings, and custodial disputes). The numbers of young
children involved in the various parts of the justice sys-
tem become frighteningly large. In all of these situa-
tions, children may be asked to provide sworn or
unsworn statements, be deposed, and sometimes be re-
quired to testify in court proceedings. Thus, young chil-
dren represent a large and growing legal constituency,
1
Consider the rarity of perceived incest just 35 years ago:
“Incestuous sexual relations are indulged in by less than one
in every million people in English-speaking countries”
(Verville, 1968, p. 372).
The Child and the Law 777
one that possesses a special set of constraints involving
basic developmental competencies, involving cognitive,
social, and emotional domains, that may constrain their
effective participation.
Fourth, beginning in the 1980s, there were a number
of highly visible cases that came to court in which young
children claimed that their caretakers had abused them.
The claims often included a commingling of plausible
allegations with fantastic reports of ritualistic abuse,
pornography, human and animal sacrifice, multiple
perpetrators, and multiple victims (e.g., California v.
Raymond Buckey et al., 1990; Commonwealth of Massa-
chusetts v. Cheryl Amirault LeFave, 1998; Lillie and
Reed v. Newcastle City Council & Ors, 2002; New Jersey
v. Michaels, 1994; North Carolina v. Robert Fulton Kelly
Jr., 1995; State v. Fijnje, 1995). The defendants in a
number of these cases were convicted.
When these types of cases first came to trial, the
major issue before the jury was whether or not to believe
the children. Prosecutors argued that children do not lie
about sexual abuse, that the child witnesses’ reports
were authentic, and that their bizarre and chilling ac-
counts of events, which were well beyond the realm of
most preschoolers’ knowledge and experience, substan-
tiated the fact that the children had actually participated
in them. Furthermore, they argued that patterns of de-
layed disclosures and denials and recantations were typ-
ical, if not diagnostic, of sexual abuse in children.
The defense argued that the children’s reports were
the product of repeated suggestive interviews by parents,
law enforcement officials, social workers, and thera-
pists. Although the defense was able to point out some of
the potentially suggestive interview techniques that
were used in eliciting allegations with the children, in
the absence of any direct scientific evidence to support
the view that such techniques could actually lead chil-
dren to make incorrect disclosures of a sexual nature
and in light of the common belief of that time that chil-
dren do not lie about sexual abuse, many of these cases
eventuated in convictions (for details of the early cases,
see Ceci & Bruck, 1995; Nathan & Snedeker, 1995).
The issues raised by these cases were taken up by so-
cial scientists and resulted in the most heavily re-
searched topic in children and the law. There are
several major areas of study. The first concerns the ac-
curacy of children’s autobiographical memory: how
well they remembered their past and how well they re-
called traumatic events and how they disclosed the trau-
matic event of child abuse. A second related area
778 The Child and the Law
concerns the degree to which children will make false
reports of nonexperienced events as a consequence of
suggestive interviews. A third area concerns the credi-
bility of children’s statements using both a juror deci-
sion-making paradigm (e.g., McCauley & Parker, 2001;
Nightingale, 1993; Quas, Bottoms, Haegerich, & Nysse-
Carris, 2002) and, as described later in the chapter,
more objective measures of credibility, A fourth area
concerns modifications that could be made in and out-
side of the courtroom to increase the accuracy and the
safeguarding of children’s testimony. This area has re-
sulted in the development of scientifically validated in-
terviews, the examination of the positive impacts of
various courtroom modifications (closed-circuit TV),
and the pros and cons of electronically recording inter-
views with young children.
CASE EXAMPLE AND PRESENTATION OF
RELEVANT SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE
In this section of this chapter, we review the literature
on the four major areas of research spurred by the day
care cases, with a particular focus on accuracy and sug-
gestibility of autobiographical memory. We do this by
drawing on one of the actual cases, Lillie and Reed v.
Newcastle City Council & Ors,2 2002 to illustrate the ap-
plication of developmental psychology in informing the
court about some of the key issues of study in children
and the law. Because neither this nor any other case can
cover all key issues in this field, we discuss other issues
in the second section of this chapter.
Case Facts
Chris Lillie and Dawn Reed were two British day care
workers who were accused of sexually abusing 27 chil-
dren at a day care facility in Newcastle, a city in the
northeast of England. The defendants were first de-
clared innocent at their criminal trial in 1994. However,
in 1998, a special review committee set up by the town
accused them anew of abuse. In 2002, Reed and Lillie
then sued the review committee, the town counsel, and
the local newspaper for libel. The judge in that case
found them innocent of all charges and awarded them
monetary damages.
2
For a detailed account of this case, see http://www.richard-
webster.net /cleared.html.
The initial allegation was reported to the police by
Mrs. Roberts in April 1993. She claimed that her 2-
year-old son, Tim, had indicated that Chris Lillie had
touched him in the genital area. However, when inter-
viewed by the police and social services a few days
later, Tim denied that Lillie had hurt him; physical ex-
amination also failed to show any positive evidence
of abuse. Nonetheless, the investigation continued,
and Chris Lillie was suspended from his duties at the
day care. Mrs. Roberts continued to supply the police
with additional details that Tim was abused in a house
with black doors and Lillie’s coworker, Dawn Reed,
was involved.
Several weeks after Mrs. Roberts’s report, social
services met with the parents of the day care children
and announced that one of the workers had been sus-
pended because of an allegation of sexual abuse. Dawn
Reed was officially suspended from the school soon
after that meeting.
Social services contacted families to determine
whether the children had made any allegations or whether
parents were concerned. At times, they provided parents
with advice on how to question their otherwise silent
children. Approximately 25 children were interviewed at
least once by the police and social services. A number of
the children were interviewed two and even three times
to elicit allegations of abuse. In June 1993, after 4-year-
old Mandy Brown claimed that she had been vaginally
penetrated with a crayon at least 9 months previously,
Lillie and Reed were arrested. They were successfully
granted bail, but just as they were leaving their cells,
they were rearrested on the basis of the statement of a 5-
year-old child who had not attended the day care for over
1 year. At the end of her third interview, this child al-
leged that she, too, had been abused. All interviews in
this case were videotaped.
On the basis of a disciplinary hearing held by social
services in February 1994, Lillie and Reed were dis-
missed from their positions at the day care, and in July
1994, their criminal trial commenced. There were 11
counts involving 11 children (the index child, Tim, was
not a witness). It was a very short trial because the judge
dismissed the entire case on the grounds that the evi-
dence was too weak to present to a jury. Lillie and Reed
were legally free. However, due to the outrage of the par-
ents and based on the city council’s belief that that the
pair were guilty, an independent review team was set up
to determine what, if anything, went wrong in the inves-
 Case Example and Presentation of Relevant Scientific Evidence
tigation. The review team’s mandate was to examine
how the allegations of abuse arose and to investigate
specific complaints made by parents. They were not
asked to judge the guilt or innocence of Lillie or Reed.
After 4 years of investigation, in 1998 the review team
issued its report, titled Abuse in the Early Years (Barker,
Jones, Saradjian, & Wardell, 1998) and concluded,
“From the evidence we have seen it is clear that Chris
Lillie and Dawn Reed had conspired as a pair to abuse
children and it is also clear that other people outside the
nursery were involved” (p. 264). Lillie and Reed became
the objects of public hatred, in part incited by the head-
lines in the local newspaper. They went into hiding.
Eventually, due to the efforts of two journalists, they
brought suit against the city council, the local evening
newspaper (the newspaper made an out-of-court settle-
ment), and the review team itself.
There were two prongs to their case. The first was for
the original plaintiffs to show that Lillie and Reed were
indeed guilty of child abuse. The second was to show
that the plaintiffs acted in bad faith and were indeed
guilty of malice and libel toward Chris Lillie and Dawn
Reed. After a 6-month trial, the judge ruled in favor of
the complainants, awarding them the maximum penalty
of £200,000 each. The review team was found guilty
of libel; the city council was not found guilty on the
grounds of “qualified privilege.”
One of the authors of this chapter (MB) served as an
expert witness for the complainants. This involved writ-
ing a brief that was submitted to the court before the
trial and that was to serve as the basis for her cross-
examination during the trial. Major parts of the chapter
that follow are excerpts from this document that have
been updated in terms of the scientific foundation that
was presented in 2002.
We selected this case because it contains a variety of
ideas that have been examined in research in children
and the law. In addition, it shares the following set of
characteristics with other cases involving allegations of
sexual abuse in institutional settings, usually day cares,
that spurred the initial research interest in this area.
First, the children in these cases were all preschool-
ers attending day care programs; most were 3 or 4 years
olds. Second, the first child to make an allegation (the
index child) did not initially make spontaneous state-
ments but was questioned by an adult who was suspi-
cious that something had happened to the child. When
first questioned, the index child denied harm or wrong-
779
doing; however, with repeated questioning, allegations
began to emerge. Third, on the basis of the index child’s
uncorroborated allegations, parents of children in the
day care were informed that a child had been abused or
that abuse was suspected. Parents were instructed to
look for symptoms of abuse ( bedwetting, crying, night-
mares) and to question their children about specific
events. Fourth, as was the case with the index child,
children at first told their interviewers that nothing had
happened; however, after repeated questioning by par-
ents, police, social workers, and/or therapists, some of
these children also reported abuse. Sometimes it took
months of questioning for them to provide an acceptable
report. Fifth, there were a number of contaminating fac-
tors that could account for the common allegations of
the children: In each case, the same small group of
professionals interviewed all of the children, provided
therapy for them, and evaluated them for sexual abuse.
In addition, parents and children interacted with each
other and spoke about the newest claims or rumors.
Sixth, although, for the most part, there was no reliable
medical evidence of sexual abuse, most parents reported
changes in their children’s behavior around the time
of the alleged abuse, such as nightmares, bedwetting,
baby-talking, resistance to going to the bathroom alone,
refusal to attend day care, and much more. Finally, the
children’s reports became more elaborated with time;
for example, after naming a specific perpetrator, chil-
dren began to make disclosures about other workers at
the day care, and sometimes they made disclosures
about other people in the town. Over a period of time,
the children’s allegations became quite disturbing and
bizarre; they alleged that they were taken out in boats or
thrown into pools of sharks or taken to unknown places
where they were tied up in chains or hung upside down
from trees or ceiling hooks.
The most unifying characteristic of all these cases
was the methods or strategies used by interviewers to
elicit the children’s allegations of abuse. These included,
but were not limited to, the following ingredients:
• The child was given little opportunity to say in his or
her own words what, if anything, had happened.
• Interviewers quickly resorted to the use of questions
that required monosyllabic responses.
• Interviewers’ statements and questions contained sex-
ual content and details about the case that may not have
been part of children’s initial knowledge.
780 The Child and the Law
• Questions were repeated within and across interviews.
• Interviews continued or were repeated until the child
provided information consistent with sexual abuse.
• Interviewers used bribes or threats of punishment (“I
will give you a treat if you tell me” or “We can’t go
home until you tell what happened”).
• Interviewers used selective reinforcement in re-
sponse to children’s statements (rewarding the child
for abuse-consistent statements but ignoring or mak-
ing negative comments in response to denials of abuse
or related activities).
• Interviewers made “atmospheric” statements that
conveyed the theme that something bad had happened
(e.g., telling the children not to be afraid, that they
are being brave, that they are going to be protected,
or that they are helpers in an investigation).
• Interviewers invoked statements of other people
(“Your mom told me that . . .” or “All your friends
have talked about this, now it’s your turn”).
• Interviewers induced negative stereotypes of the sus-
pected perpetrator (e.g., telling the child that the sus-
pect does bad things, that he is in jail).
• Props, such as dolls, toys, sandbox enactments, and
drawings, were used to elicit statements about touching.
Bringing Developmental Psychology
to the Courtroom
The ultimate goal of presenting to the court the scien-
tific literature on memory and memory distortions is to
provide a scientific basis for evaluating the reliability of
the witnesses’ statements. In this context, reliability
refers to the trustworthiness of the evidence, not to the
honesty or credibility of a witness. Statements or re-
ports can be unreliable due to normal processes of for-
getting, of distortion, and of reconstruction. Statements
can also be rendered unreliable if they are elicited in
certain
suggestive contexts. Thus, the expert’s testimony fo-
cuses on the factors that enhance or degrade the quality
of children’s and adults’ reports. This was the primary
focus of the expert testimony presented to the court in
Lillie-Reed. Although an assessment of the credibility
( believability) of the children’s statements and a deter-
mination of whether the child witnesses were abused by
the defendants are issues within the province of the
jury, not the expert witness, the provision of informa-
tion on the reliability of the evidence to jurors or to
judges is crucial to allow them to draw conclusions
about the credibility of the children’s allegations and,
in this case, about the guilt of Lillie and Reed.
The scientific literature has little to say about the
competence of a witness. There are several reasons for
this. First, there appears to be little if any relationship
between children’s truthfulness in their recall of experi-
enced events and their performance on competence-
type interviews that are often used in the courtroom
(e.g., London & Nunez, 2002; Talwar, Kang, Bala, &
Lindsay, 2004). Second, because the competence stan-
dard is quite undemanding (witnesses are deemed com-
petent if they are sufficiently intelligent to observe,
recollect, and recount an event and have a moral sense
of obligation to speak the truth), most witnesses are
deemed competent by the judge. Thus, the expert’s
analysis is not that the children were incompetent but
that the methods used to gather information from them
rendered their statements, and thus the inherent quality
of the evidence, unreliable.
The Nature and Time Course of Children’s
Disclosures of Sexual Abuse
In this section, we first summarize the evolution and
landmarks of children’s allegations of sexual abuse in
Lillie and Reed. Next we summarize the scientific liter-
ature on how children disclose abuse and the interpreta-
tion of the pattern of disclosure in the target case.
Case Facts
In the present case, none of the children3 spontaneously
told of sexual abuse (with the possible exception of
Rosie’s statement to her mother that Lillie had touched
her privates; this statement was made in September
1992, months before the investigation began; the
mother did not know what she was talking about). Ac-
cording to the parents, when they first asked their chil-
dren if they had been abused, five of the children
denied wrongdoing. The electronically preserved
recordings of the first official forensic interviews,
3
Examples provided in this chapter focus on the index child
and the six child witnesses who were to appear in the 1994
criminal trial.
 Case Example and Presentation of Relevant Scientific Evidence
which occurred days to months after the parents’ first
questioning, show that none of the children provided
consistent allegations that Lillie or Reed had sexually
abused them. Consequently, five of the children were
interviewed a second time, during which three gave
some kind of statement consistent with sexual abuse.
One child was interviewed a third time, and only after a
very long session, with three interviewers, did she fi-
nally provide a few abuse-consistent statements.
Scientific Evidence
It is of primary importance to examine the evolution of
the children’s reports of sexual abuse. The pattern that
occurred in the present case has raised the most con-
cerns: The child is initially silent; she does not make any
unsolicited or spontaneous statements about abusive
acts. Rather, the allegations emerge once an adult sus-
pects that something has occurred and starts to question
the child. At first, the child denies the event happened,
but with repeated questioning, interviewing, or therapy,
the child may eventually make a disclosure. Sometimes,
after the disclosure is made, the child may recant, only
to later restate the original allegation after further ques-
tioning. The most popular embodiment of this idea is
Summit’s (1983) description of the child sexual abuse
accommodation syndrome (CSAAS).
Because the CSAAS model was based not on empiri-
cal data but on clinical intuitions, we recently reviewed
the literature to determine its empirical support (Lon-
don, Bruck, Ceci, & Shuman, 2005). We identified 10
studies in which adults with histories of childhood
abuse were asked to recall their disclosures in child-
hood. Across studies, an average of only 33% of the
adults remembered disclosing the abuse in a timely fash-
ion. In some studies, approximately 30% of adults re-
ported that they had never told anyone before the current
interview about their childhood abuse (Finkelhor, Hotal-
ing, Lewis, & Smith, 1990; Smith et al., 2000). These
data support the CSAAS model in that sexually abused
children are silent about their victimization and delay
disclosure for long periods of time.
Although informative on the issue of delay of report-
ing, these data are silent with regard to the phenomena
of denial and recantation, because the participants were
never asked, “As a child, did anyone ever ask you or
question you about abuse?” We simply have no way of
knowing whether these individuals denied having been
abused and then perhaps subsequently recanted their re-
781
luctant disclosures. Another set of studies provides some
data relevant to this point. We identified 17 studies that
examined rates of denial and recantation by sexually
abused children who were asked directly about abuse
when they were assessed or treated at clinics. The rates
of denial at assessment interviews were highly variable
(4% to 76%), as were the rates of recantation (4% to
27%). We found that the methodological adequacy of
each study (the representativeness of the sampling pro-
cedures and the degree to which sexual abuse was vali-
dated) was directly related to the rates of denial and
recantation: The weakest studies produced the highest
rates of denial and recantation. For the 6 methodologi-
cally superior studies, the average rate of denial was
only 14% and the average rate of recantation was 7%.
Thus, although the retrospective studies of adults show
that children often do not disclose their abuse, the stud-
ies of sexually abused children’s responses in a formal
interview indicate that if they are directly asked, they do
not deny, but rather disclose that they were abused.
In part, the myth about children’s patterns of disclo-
sure has persisted because documentation of the first
stage of the CSAAS model (children are silent and delay
disclosures) has been interpreted as evidence for the full
model, according to which denial and recantation are
common. Also, as shown by our recent review and analy-
sis, the most commonly cited studies in the literature
are those that support the model—but sadly, these are
the methodologically weakest of the studies.
Interviewers of children suspected of abuse who are
not aware of the scientific evidence, but rather follow
the clinical lore that sexually abused children are afraid
to talk, deny abuse, and then recant abuse, may not ac-
cept the child’s initial statements that nothing occurred
and continue to interview until allegations emerge. For
example, in the present case, a mother questioned her 3-
year-old child, Ned, about abuse in the spring of 1993.
He said that nothing had happened to him. As a result,
she had no concerns, until August 16, when a social
worker explained that in some cases it took children a
long time to disclose abuse. By August 18, after addi-
tional questioning, there was now enough concern to
have Ned interviewed by the investigators.
To summarize, the most consistent finding in the sci-
entific literature is that although a significant propor-
tion of sexually abused children will never report their
abuse (spontaneously), when questioned about it by au-
thorities, most will disclose and few will recant. If the
782 The Child and the Law
children in Lillie-Reed had been sexually abused, then
based on the scientific literature, one might predict
(conservatively) that at least some of them, when di-
rectly asked, would have readily admitted that abuse oc-
curred. And only a small proportion would recant
allegations once they were made.
Because the patterns of disclosure of the children in
Lillie-Reed were so discrepant from those reported in
the methodologically strongest scientific studies, it
raises the hypothesis that children’s eventual disclo-
sures were the product of suggestive influences that can
sometimes eventuate in false allegations of sexual
abuse. This hypothesis requires an analysis of the record
to document how the children were questioned and an
analysis of the scientific literature to determine the ef-
fects of such questioning techniques on the accuracy of
children’s statements. The next section undertakes such
an analysis.
Research on the Effects of Suggestion on
Children’s Reports
Until the end of the 1980s, most developmental studies
of suggestibility focused on children’s answers to lead-
ing questions or children’s incorporation of misleading
suggestions into their reports. This focus on leading
questions and misinformation did not, however, capture
the essential features of the problematic interviews that
occurred in a number of legal cases mentioned at the
outset of this chapter. Because of the discrepancy be-
tween the structure and content of interviews in scien-
tific studies and those occurring in actual cases, at the
beginning of the 1990s, the scientific model of sug-
gestibility was greatly expanded into a model of inter-
viewer bias.
Interviewer Bias
According to our model of the architecture of sugges-
tive interviews (Ceci & Bruck, 1995) interviewer bias
is the defining feature of many suggestive interviews.
Interviewer bias characterizes those interviewers who
hold a priori beliefs about the occurrence of certain
events and, as a result of such beliefs, mold the inter-
view to elicit statements from the interviewee that are
consistent with these prior beliefs. One of the hall-
marks of interviewer bias is the single-minded attempt
to gather only confirmatory evidence and to avoid all
avenues that may produce negative or inconsistent evi-
dence. The biased interviewer does not ask questions
about the allegations that might provide alternative ex-
planations that are inconsistent with his or her primary
or only hypothesis. When provided with inconsistent or
bizarre evidence, biased interviewers either ignore it or
else interpret it within the framework of their initial
hypothesis. This belief is transmitted to the child via a
range of suggestive interviewing techniques that are as-
sociated with the elicitation of false reports. Conse-
quently, the child may come to inaccurately report the
belief of the interviewer rather than the child’s own ex-
perience. Finally, it is important to note that a biased
interviewer may be a police officer, a therapist, or even
a parent.
Interviewer bias has been the focus of much study by
developmental forensic psychologists. The following two
studies provide a flavor of the methodologies and results
of some of these studies.
Chester the Janitor. Thompson, Clarke-Stewart,
and Lepore (1997) conducted a study in which children
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 and in a mildly
abusive manner. The children were then questioned
about this event. The interviewer was (a) accusatory
(suggesting that the janitor had been inappropriately
playing with the toys instead of working), ( b) exculpa-
tory (suggesting that the janitor was just cleaning the
toys and not playing), or (c) neutral and nonsuggestive.
In the first two types of interviews, the questions
changed from mildly to strongly suggestive as the inter-
view progressed. Following the first interview, all chil-
dren were asked to tell in their own words what they had
witnessed and then were asked questions about the
event. Immediately after the interview and 2 weeks
later, the 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 was biased in a
direction that contradicted the activity viewed by the
child, those children’s stories quickly conformed to the
suggestions or beliefs of the interviewer. In addition,
children’s answers to interpretive questions (e.g., “Was
he doing his job or just being bad?”) were in agreement
 Case Example and Presentation of Relevant Scientific Evidence
with the interviewer’s point of view, as opposed to what
actually happened. When asked neutral questions by
their parents, the children’s answers remained consis-
tent with the interviewers’ biases.
Surprise Party. Bruck, Ceci, Melnyk, and Finkel-
berg (1999) showed how interviewer bias can quickly
develop in natural interviewing situations, and how it
not only taints the responses of child interviewees but
also the reports of the adult interviewers. In this study,
a special event was staged for 90 preschool children in
their school. In groups of three and with the guidance
of research assistant A, the children surprised research
assistant B with a birthday party, played games, ate
food, and watched magic tricks. Another 30 children
did not attend the birthday party; in groups of two, they
simply colored a picture with research assistants A
and B. These children were told that it was assistant A’s
birthday.
Interviewers (who were recruited from university
graduate degree programs in social work or counseling
and who had training and experience in interviewing
children) were asked to question four children about
what had happened when special visitors came to the
school. The interviewers were not told about the events
but were simply told to find out from each child what
had happened. The first three children that each inter-
viewer questioned attended the birthday party and the
fourth child attended the coloring event.
Bruck, Ceci, Melnyk, et al. (1999) found that the
children who attended the coloring event and were in-
terviewed last produced twice as many errors as the
children who attended the birthday party; 60% of the
children who only colored made false claims that in-
volved a birthday party. This result suggests that the in-
terviewers had built up a bias that all the children had
attended a birthday party. By the time they interviewed
the fourth child, they structured their interviews to
elicit claims consistent with this hypothesis. Thus, if in-
terviewers have the belief that all the children they are
interviewing have experienced a certain event, it is
probable that many of the children will come to make
such claims even though they were nonparticipants (or
nonvictims). Another important finding was that even
when the fourth child denied attending a birthday party,
84% of their interviewers later reported that all the chil-
dren they interviewed had attended a birthday party.
These data suggest that regardless of what children ac-
tually say, biased interviewers inaccurately report the
783
child’s claims, making them consistent with their own
hypotheses.
These two studies and others like them provide evi-
dence that interviewers’ beliefs about an event can
influence their judgments as well as their style of ques-
tioning. This, in turn, can affect the accuracy of chil-
dren’s testimony. The data highlight the dangers of
having only one hypothesis about the event in ques-
tion—especially when this hypothesis is incorrect.
Interview Bias in Lillie-Reed
Although some children in the present case did utter
words or statements that were consistent with the hy-
pothesis that they were touched by Chris Lillie or Dawn
Reed, they also made other allegations about other
teachers or adults that seem to have been ignored.
One child told the investigative interviewer that Chris
Lillie had hurt her bum with a crayon at Lillie’s house.
When questioned further, she stated in three different
parts of the interview that her father was also present:
Interviewer: Was anybody else there?
Child: No. Daddy was . . .
Interviewer: And who did you say was there at
Chris’s house?
Child: Nobody.
Interviewer: I thought you said somebody called
dad was there?
Child: [inaudible]
Interviewer: Was it your dad from home?
Child: Yes.
Interviewer: What did he look like?
Child: He looked at me and he said I see you later.
That’s what he said. . . .
Interviewer: Do you know when you said that you’d
been to Chris’s house?
Child: I know my daddy was there.
Interviewer: Your daddy was there?
Child: My daddy [inaudible] was and my mummy
wasn’t.*
Like other children, this child also named other peo-
ple who were present or involved in the alleged abuse,
Interviews with children in all cases in this chapter were pre-
sented in court and are in the official record. Segments of
these interviews that are quoted in the present paper are
marked with an asterisk and were reported by Bruck in her
testimony before the court.
784 The Child and the Law
such as Helen, Tommy, Lynn, and the man with the
sack at the library. A classmate claimed that Diane and
other teachers had driven the children to Lillie and
Reed’s flat and that Diane had given her a bath. The
police did question each of the day care workers, who,
like Lillie and Reed, denied any knowledge of the re-
ported activities. But for some reason, whereas the de-
nials of others were accepted, Lillie and Reed were not
believed. The multitude of names provided by the chil-
dren led some to assume that there was an organized
group of pedophiles abusing all the children. However,
this ring of pedophiles also included adults explicitly
mentioned by the children such as their fathers, their
doctors, their parents’ friends, and their teachers.
The investigators seem to have ignored this discrepant
evidence.
During the videotaped interviews, at least four chil-
dren made exculpatory statements about Dawn Reed
(and some also did about Chris Lillie), but these were ig-
nored. For example:
Interviewer: What about Dawn because you had
some things to tell me about Dawn as well,
didn’t you, eh?
Child: No.
Interviewer: You said there were some silly things
about Dawn, eh?
Child: No, that was ages ago when I come here. . . .
Child: But don’t say nothing to Dawn cos she wasn’t
silly. . . . She just went into jail for nothing. Say
Dawn can come out today. Say that. Don’t let
Chris out!*
When this interviewer presented the evidence of abuse
to the disciplinary panel that subsequently dismissed
Lillie and Reed, she edited out what she thought was ir-
relevant; she omitted to tell them of this child’s denials
in two different interviews.
Investigators argued that the children remained
silent or denied abuse because they were too frightened
to tell of their actual abuse. Nowhere is there evidence
that they considered the possibility that the children re-
mained silent because there was nothing to tell. Rather,
children were interviewed until they simply could stand
it no longer (e.g., Rachel ended up moaning in her
mother’s lap; Mary whimpered; Nora begged her
mother to stop and when she did not, Nora simply left
the room). The interviewers interpreted these behav-
iors as further signs of resistance, reflected in their
continuing to question the children. For example, the
two social workers who were present during Rachel’s
interview interpreted her behavior as follows:
Social Worker 1: Towards the end of the interview,
she appeared to become restless. I had visited her
at home and not seen her display this sort of behav-
iour before. Although the interview had been
fairly long I do not think she was tired, but rather
pretending to be tired in order to avoid answering
our questions. I recall that when we went out of the
room she was running around and playful.
Social Worker 2: I recall that after the video inter-
view was over, she walked along the street holding
on to Social Worker’s hand with great relief that
she was out of the video room. My impression was
that she had been quite frightened.*
These interviewers did not consider the hypothesis that
the contents and structure of the interview were aversive
to the child rather than any trauma-induced secrecy re-
sulting from past abuse.
Behavioral symptoms pre- and postdisclosure were
viewed as primary or additional evidence of sexual
abuse. There did not seem to be any recognition that as
parents became more convinced that their children were
abused, they changed their reports on the frequency,
severity, and onset of the symptoms. There was no con-
sideration that the children’s symptoms could reflect
normal developmental patterns, that they could reflect
problems in the household (divorce, leaving of partners,
merging of new households, violence, etc.), nor was there
any realization that the symptoms may have emerged or
become exacerbated because of the manner in which the
children were interviewed or treated.
The focus on behavioral symptoms in this case was
based on the assumption that there is a common con-
stellation of symptoms that are diagnostic of sexual
abuse. However, there are no behavioral symptoms that
are diagnostic of sexual abuse. Many of the problems
cited by the parents (anxiety, enuresis, fears, night ter-
rors, and even sexual behaviors) either are common in
children of this age or can be associated with other
types of childhood behavioral disorders (see Kendall-
Tackett et al., 1993). Also, a majority of sexually
abused children are asymptomatic. Thus, the fact that
so many of these children had problems indicates that
perhaps other causes should have been examined but
they were not.
 Case Example and Presentation of Relevant Scientific Evidence
Suggestive Interviewing Techniques Used by
Biased Interviewers
Interviewer bias influences the entire architecture of in-
terviews and is revealed through a number of different
component features, some of which were listed in the
first section of this chapter (e.g., repeated questions, se-
lective reinforcement, peer pressure). As will be de-
scribed in the next sections, the results of the scientific
literature indicate that the use of these suggestive tech-
niques, especially in the hands of biased interviewers
and especially when used in combination, can bring
children to make claims about events that they have
never experienced.
Open-Ended versus Specific Questions
To confirm their suspicions, biased interviewers may not
ask children open-ended questions, such as “What hap-
pened?” but instead quickly resort to a barrage of very
specific questions, which require the child to provide
one-word answers (yes or no). Sometimes the questions
are very leading (e.g., asking the child “Where did your
teacher touch you?” is very leading if the child never
previously mentioned touching by the teacher), and often
the questions are repeated until the child provides a de-
sired response.
Although the strategy of using specific questions,
leading questions, and repeating questions ensures that
the child will provide information, it is also problematic
because children’s answers to these types of questions
are often inaccurate. For example, Peterson and Bell
(1996) interviewed children after they had been treated
in an emergency room for a traumatic injury. They were
first asked free recall questions (“ Tell me what hap-
pened”). Then, to obtain additional information, the
children were asked more specific questions (e.g.,
“Where did you hurt yourself ?” or “Did you hurt your
knee?”). Peterson and Bell found that children were
most likely to accurately provide important details in
free recall. Across all age groups, errors increased when
children were asked more specific questions. The per-
centage of errors elicited by free recall and specific
questions was 9% and 45%, respectively.
Specific questions include yes/no questions (“Did
the lady have a dog?”) and forced-choice questions
(“Was it the man or the woman?”). One reason using
these questions is risky is that children rarely reply “I
don’t know” even when explicitly told that this is an op-
tion (Peterson & Grant, 2001) and even when the ques-
785
tion is nonsensical and thus incomprehensible (Hughes
& Grieve, 1980; Waterman, Blades, & Spencer, 2000).
One of the reasons that children so willingly provide an-
swers to specific yes/no or forced-choice questions
even though they may not know the answer or under-
stand the question is that young children are coopera-
tive conversational partners, and they perceive their
adult interviewer as truthful and not deceptive. To com-
ply with a respected adult, children sometimes attempt
to make their answers consistent with what they see as
the intent of the questioner rather than consistent with
their knowledge of the event (see Ceci & Bruck, 1993,
for a review). Because of this compliant, cooperative
characteristic, and because of young children’s poor
performance on specific questions, it is particularly
important in interviews to avoid these types of ques-
tions until after the child has first provided evidence in
response to open-ended questions.
As illustrated throughout this chapter, interviewers in
Lillie-Reed rarely asked open-ended questions and
mostly asked specific questions that can be answered
with little effort in one or two words. In the following
example, the prosecution’s best witness is interviewed
by the police and social services for the third time in a
period of 3 weeks. She had told her mother in the car
prior to the interview that it was all a stupid joke. In the
first half of the interview, when bombarded with spe-
cific questions by the two interviewers (Helen and
Vanessa), she mainly replied that she did not know or did
not remember. When she did provide answers to ques-
tions, these were so disjointed that it seemed the child
had given up and decided to answer each question as it
came with no attention to the content or the sequence of
previous questions or answers.
Interviewer: Did he have anything on under-
neath his pants?
Child: Yes, underpants.
Interviewer: Did he take those down?
Child: Yes.
Interviewer: And did you see any bits of his body?
Child: Yes.
Interviewer: And what did that look like?
Child: It was big.
Interviewer: Can you remember which way it was
pointing, pointing up or pointing down.
Child: Pointing up, I mean down it was up then
down, up then down.
Interviewer: So it was going up and down all the time.
786 The Child and the Law
Interviewer: Was it doing that on its own?
Child: Yes.
Interviewer: What colour was it?
Child: Pink.
Interviewer: It was pink; it was going up all the
time, and then what?
Child: That was all, those were the only two things
that, that I had to tell to do.*
When examining transcript examples, such as this one, it
is instructive to focus simply on the child’s words to es-
timate how much the child actually said and how much
the interviewers said. As shown in this excerpt, this
child said very little besides “Yes,” “It was big,” and
“Pink ” before stating that she had fulfilled her promise
to tell about two things.
The low frequency of open-ended questions and the
high frequency of specific questions are not specific to
this one case, but appear to characterize forensic inter-
views with children in general. For example, analyses of
42 child protective services interviews with children
ages 2 to 13 years in one state revealed that 89% of the
questions about the suspected abuse were specific (War-
ren, Woodall, Hunt, & Perry, 1996).
Interviewers often state that they do not frequently
use open-ended questions because of cognitive, emo-
tional, and motivational barriers that inhibit children’s
spontaneous disclosure of abuse and because children
must be encouraged to disclose by being asked specific
questions over a period of time. Even though there are
known risks of using leading or specific questions, per-
haps these are necessary to elicit reports or details from
sexually abused children who feel frightened, ashamed,
or guilty.
This claim has recently been challenged by Lamb and
colleagues (2003), who constructed a structured inter-
view protocol and then trained interviewers in its use.
The protocol requires trained interviewers to encourage
suspected child abuse victims to provide detailed life
event narratives through the guidance of open-ended
questions (e.g., “ Tell me what happened”; “You said
there was a man; tell me about the man”). The use of
specific questions is allowed only after exhaustive free
recall. Suggestive questions are highly discouraged. In a
recent study, Lamb et al. examined the interviews of po-
lice officers trained on the protocol with 4- to 8-year-
old children who had made allegations of sexual abuse.
Lamb et al. found that 83% of all allegations and disclo-
sures were elicited through free recall questions (78%
for preschoolers), and 66% of all children identified the
suspect through open-ended questions (60% for
preschoolers). These data dispel the belief that inter-
viewers need to bombard children with suggestive
techniques to elicit details of trauma; rather, children
can provide detailed information through open-ended
prompts, and if a child denies abuse when asked di-
rectly, there is no scientifically compelling evidence
that the child must be “in denial.” As argued in the pre-
vious section, abused children usually disclose the
abuse when directly asked.
Repeating Interviews and Repeating Questions
In formal investigations, children are often interviewed
on many different occasions. There are numerous con-
cerns about the influence of these repeated interviews
on children’s reports, especially when conducted by bi-
ased interviewers. As shown next, the results of several
studies indicate that repeated questioning and inter-
viewing in suggestive interviews increase the number of
false allegations.
For example, preschool children were interviewed on
five different occasions about two true events and two
false events (Bruck, Ceci, & Hembrooke, 2002). The
two true events involved the child helping a visitor in the
school who had tripped and hurt her ankle, and a recent
incident where the child was punished by the teacher or
the parent. The two false events involved helping a
woman find her monkey and witnessing a man steal food
from the day care. In the first interview, children were
simply asked if each event had ever happened. If they
said yes, they were asked to describe the event. During
the next three interviews, the children were suggestively
interviewed (e.g., they were asked repeated leading
questions, they were praised for responses, they were
asked to try to think about what might have happened,
they were told that their friends had already told
and now it was their turn). In the fifth interview, a new
interviewer questioned each child about each event in a
nonsuggestive manner. Across the five interviews, all
children consistently and accurately assented to the true
event about helping a woman who fell in the day care.
However, children were at first reluctant to talk about
the true punishment event; many of the children denied
that the punishment had occurred. With repeated sug-
gestive interviews, increasing numbers of children
agreed that the punishment had occurred. Similar pat-
 Case Example and Presentation of Relevant Scientific Evidence
terns of disclosure occurred for the two false events;
that is, children initially correctly denied the false
events, but with repeated suggestive interviews, they
began to assent to these events. By the third interview,
most children had assented to all true and false events.
This pattern continued to the end of the study.
One of the rationales for reinterviewing children is
that it provides them additional opportunities to report
important information that was forgotten or simply not
reported in earlier interviews. Thus, it is assumed that
when children provide new details in subsequent inter-
views, these new reports are accurate memories that
were not remembered in previous interviews. Another
rationale is to allow children to rehearse so that their
memories will not fade over time. However, the results
of recent studies dispute this claim. One set of studies
consistently shows that reports that emerge in a child’s
first interview with a neutral interviewer are the most
accurate. When children are later interviewed about the
same event and report new details not mentioned in a
previous interview, the newer details are less accurate
than those repeated from the first interview (Peterson,
Moores, & White, 2001; Pipe, Gee, Wilson, & Egerton,
1999; Salmon & Pipe, 2000). In some studies, the inac-
curacy rates of new, inserted details in neutrally con-
ducted interviews rise to a level of 50% (Peterson et al.,
2001; Salmon & Pipe, 2000). Similar results are ob-
tained when children are suggestively questioned about
an actual event (Bruck et al., 2002; Scullin, Kanaya, &
Ceci, 2002). Thus, insertion of new but inaccurate de-
tails can be a natural memory phenomenon; it can be due
to prior suggestions that become incorporated into later
reports; but it can also be due to the demand character-
istics of the interview. When interviewers urge children
to tell them anything (that is consistent with the bias of
the interviewer), these requests for additional informa-
tion will sometimes result in false reports that are sup-
plied by the children to comply with their perception of
the interviewer’s wishes.
Although these studies show the detrimental effects
of repeated interviews, there is an important qualifica-
tion to this conclusion: There are a number of studies in
which children who are provided with misinformation
across multiple interviews are no more likely to incorpo-
rate this information into a later report than children
who receive only one suggestive interview. The major
factor appears to be the timing of the suggestive inter-
views: If the first suggestive interview occurs soon after
787
an event and the second interview occurs close to the
final interview, then misinformation effects are maxi-
mized (Melnyk & Bruck, 2004). There are several
points to bear in mind, however; as shown in some of the
studies in this chapter, one suggestive interview can de-
stroy the reliability of a child’s report; also, it may take
several suggestive interviews to move the child from
making simple assents to providing some elaboration to
the false allegations (see Bruck et al., 2002, in which re-
peated suggestive interviews were associated with more
elaborated narratives of false events).
Just as there are risks associated with repeated inter-
views, there are also risks associated with repeating
questions within the same interview. Biased interview-
ers sometimes repeatedly ask the same question until
the child provides a response that is consistent with their
hypothesis. Poole and White (1991) found that asking
the same question within an interview, especially a
yes/no question, often results in young children chang-
ing their original answer (see Cassel, Roebers, & Bjork-
lund, 1996, for similar effects when children are asked
repeated leading questions). Furthermore, when chil-
dren are asked the same question on numerous occa-
sions, they sound increasingly confident about their
statements even if these are false.
It also appears that when interviews contain a pre-
ponderance of (mis)leading questions, children will ini-
tially resist the suggested response, but with repeated
misleading questions (that differ in content), their re-
sistance dissipates. Garven, Wood, Shaw, and Malpass
(1998) found that preschoolers provided increasingly in-
accurate responses to misleading statements and ques-
tions as a suggestive interview proceeded. In this study,
children were suggestively interviewed for 5 to 10 min-
utes about a stranger who came to read their class a
story. As a result of the suggestive devices used by Gar-
ven and her colleagues, children falsely claimed that the
visitor said a bad word, that he threw a crayon, that he
broke a toy, that he stole a pen, that he tore a book, and
that he bumped the teacher. Of particular importance,
the children came to make more false claims as the in-
terview progressed; that is, within a short, 5- to 10-
minute interview, children made more false claims in
the second half than in the first half of the interview. It
seems that it is not simply repeating questions but
repeating questions about a specific theme (e.g., the vis-
itor doing bad things) that may compromise the reliabil-
ity of children’s reports.
788 The Child and the Law

Forced Confabulation Effects Child: Drop it.

Interviewer: That’s right! He did drop it.*
As will be seen from some of the examples of Lillie-Reed,
not only were the young child witnesses asked repeated
Two weeks later, these children were brought back to
questions within the same interview and across inter-
the laboratory and informed that the original experi-
views, but this questioning often continued until the chil-
menter had made some mistakes and had asked them
dren provided answers amid protests that they did not
questions about things that had never happened. The
know the answer (i.e., they were forced to give an an-
children were asked to report only those things that
swer). This practice raises the following question: If the
they actually saw. In this second interview, children at
children were forced to knowingly provide an inaccurate
all ages (6 to 10 years) reported that the confabulated
answer to a question, would they not correct themselves
false items had actually occurred (they saw it). For ex-
when given the next opportunity (e.g., in the next inter-
ample, 60% of the 6-year-old children now reported in
view, or in the same interview)? In other words, if a child
the second interview that they saw the handyman break
first denied abuse until he or she was coaxed to provide
the videotape.
abuse-related information and then later produced an
This is an important study because it shows that no
abuse-consistent disclosure, doesn’t this mean that the
matter how resistant to misleading questions a child
child’s second statement is unreliable?
may be in an earlier interview, with sufficient pressure
Two studies conducted by Zaragoza and colleagues
not only will he or she come to report this false infor-
(Ackil & Zaragoza, 1998; Zaragoza, Payment, Kichler,
mation in a later interview, but he or she will report that
Stines, & Drivdahl, 2001) show that when children are
it actually happened. Using a milder version of the
forced to provide an incorrect answer (confabulation),
forced confabulation interview, similarly dramatic sug-
they will not only continue to provide the same incorrect
gestibility effects have been reported (Bruck, London,
answer but will actually come to believe in the validity
Landa & Goodman, in press; Finnila, Mahlberga, Sant-
of the wrong answer. For example, in the latest study
tilaa, Sandnabbaa, & Niemib, 2003).
(Zaragoza et al., 2001), children came to a laboratory
In summary, if children’s allegations are elicited by
and played computer games; during this time, a handy-
specific leading questions that have been repeated
man came into the room and fixed some broken things.
within the same interview or across interviews, there is
Immediately after, the child was asked a number of ques-
a high risk that the children’s statements will be un-
tions about the event and was told to provide an answer
reliable. Conversely, children’s answers to open-ended
no matter what. Children were asked questions about
questions asked prior to any suggestive interviewing
things that really happened and they were asked mis-
have a high probability of being accurate.
leading questions about things that did not happen. For
Following are examples of repeated questions and re-
example, children were asked how the handyman had
peated interviews from Lillie-Reed:
broken the videotape ( he had not even touched the video-
tape). Although most children claimed that he had not
Interviewer: Did you have anything to tell me about
broken the videotape, they were told to provide an an-
the nursery?
swer anyway. Sometimes it took several rounds of coach-
Child: Not actually.
ing to get the children to provide an answer. For example:
Interviewer: Not actually or I’ve got that wrong.
Can you tell me what it is?
Interviewer: There’s a videotape on top of the VCR Child: Can’t. Don’t know what it is.
that is broken. How did he break it? Interviewer: You don’t know what it is. Okay. Is
Child: I have no clue. there anything you want to tell me about anything
Interviewer: Can you tell me how you think he that happened at nursery?
might have broken it? Child: Don’t know.
Child: I have no clue. Interviewer: Did anybody do anything at the nurs-
Interviewer: Just make something up then. ery that they shouldn’t have done?
Child: I can’t think of anything. Child: What’sthis?[aboutsomethingshehasinherhand]
Interviewer: Well, what might, what, what might Interviewer: Did anyone do anything at the nursery
someone do to break a videotape? that they shouldn’t have done?
 Case Example and Presentation of Relevant Scientific Evidence
Child: No.
[Child’s mother enters the room]
Interviewer: Did Chris do anything to you? Can’t
you tell me, ’cause I can’t hear very well. Can you
just tell me?
Mom: Will you tell me?
Child: I can’t.
Interviewer: Why can’t you tell, ’cause it’s alright
here, you know? To tell Mummy and me. Hmm?
And you won’t have to tell anyone again, will you?
You just tell us now. Hmm?
Mom: Did something happen that you didn’t like?
Child: No! Yeah!
Mom: What?
Child: Chris, Chris hit me and Jill.*
When interviewed for a second time in December 1993,
this child’s denials of abuse became allegations of abuse
after repeated specific questions and perhaps as a result
of the repeated interview:
Interviewer: What about Dawn because you had
some things to tell me about Dawn as well, didn’t
you, eh?
Child: No.
Interviewer: You said there were some silly things
about Dawn, eh?
Child: No, that was ages ago when I come here.
Interviewer: But you said that you got touched by
Dawn and can you—I just need to know where she
touched you? It’s all right.
Child: On my fairy. [Children used the term fairy to
refer to their vagina.]*
The next example shows how suggestive techniques
used in one interview may show their influence only in a
later interview.
Mom: Right, can you remember when you were sit-
ting in the house? Can you remember when you
had a sore fairy? You tell Helen [the interviewer],
right, what you said to me when you said a sore
fairy. Has anybody ever touched your fairy in the
nursery? [child shakes her head “no”] That’s not
what you told me.
Mom: Remember when you had a sore fairy?
Child: No/ What?
Interviewer: Did you have a sore fairy when you
went to nursery school?
789
Mom: Didn’t you? You used to have a sore fairy.
Did you?
Child: No.
Mom: You did. You told me you did, didn’t you? Its
ok you know, we’re not going to get a smacked bum
or anything. . . . You’re a good girl. ‘Cause you
know when you told us you had a sore fairy and I
asked you has anybody ever touched your fairy at
nursery and you said yes, didn’t you? Didn’t you?
Child: No.
Mom: [laughing] You did. Stop telling fibs. . . .
Mom: Listen, can you remember when we were talk-
ing in the house and you said you had a sore fairy?
Come here a minute, two minutes while I just ask
you this. Can you remember when we were talking
in the house and you said you had a sore fairy?
Can you remember? Hmm? [child shrugs no] You
can. Tell the truth. Be a big girl like you were,
’cause you’re not going to get wrong, you know for
a fact you’re not. And didn’t I say to you has any-
body ever touched your fairy at nursery?
Child: No. . . .
Mom: Tell Auntie who touched your fairy.
Child: I don’t think so.
Mom: You don’t think so? . . .
Mom: Well, can you remember? Can you remember
who, who touched your fairy? Can you remember?
Auntie: Are you going to tell us your secret? I’ll tell
you my secret if you tell me yours.*
In interview 2, when first asked about touching, this
child now gave the following answer:
Interviewer: So, what did you want to tell me about
this person called Chris?
Child: Touched me.
Interviewer: Can you show me where? If that was
you, where did he touch you?
Child: On my fairy.*
Although this analysis focuses mainly on the chil-
dren’s statements in the videotaped interviews, it is im-
portant to note that the children were questioned before
these official interviews were recorded. The record
shows that children had several to many sessions with
parents, friends of parents, relatives, and professionals.
For example, although one child, Mandy, first told her
parents about abuse in May 1993, her parents had ques-
tioned her a few times before. It was not until June 28,
790 The Child and the Law
however, that the parents gave permission for their
daughter to be interviewed by the officials; the major
reason was that Mandy had made more disclosures when
they were questioning her.
Another mother first suspected that her child may
have been abused in May 1993. Her child was inter-
viewed at the police station in June 1993 but made no
allegations consistent with sexual abuse. Then she was
questioned many times between June and December.
On December 1, 1993, when she was interviewed for
the second time at the police station, she made a few al-
legations consistent with abuse. Given the denial of
wrongdoing in the June interview, followed by an enor-
mous amount of repeated interviewing during the next
few months, the few allegations that emerged in the De-
cember 1 interview are not “ fresh” utterances but may
have been contaminated by multiple retellings and
questionings.
Atmospherics or Emotional Tone of the Interview
Interviewers can use verbal and nonverbal cues to com-
municate their bias. These cues can set the emotional
tone of the interview. Research shows that children are
quick to notice the emotional tones in an interview and
to act accordingly. For example, in some studies when an
accusatory tone is set by the examiner (e.g., “It isn’t
good to let people kiss you in the bathtub” or “Don’t be
afraid to tell”), children 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.
In one such study, children played with an unfamiliar
research assistant for 5 minutes while seated across a
table from him. Four years later, researchers asked these
same children to recall the original experience (Good-
man, Batterman-Faunce, Schaaf, & Kenney, 2002). The
researchers created “an atmosphere of accusation,”
telling the children that they were to be questioned about
an important event and saying things like, “Are you afraid
to tell? You’ll feel better once you’ve told.” Although few
children had any memory of the original event from 4
years earlier, 5 out of the 15 children incorrectly agreed
with the interviewer’s suggestive question that they had
been hugged or kissed by the confederate, 2 of the 15
agreed that they had their picture taken in the bathroom,
and one child agreed that he or she had been given a bath.
In other words, children may give inaccurate responses to
misleading questions about events for which they have no
memory when the interviewer creates an emotional tone
of accusation.
Rewards and punishments shape the emotional tone
of an interview and provide another means for interview-
ers to express bias. The use of rewards and punishments
in interviews with children can be beneficial by motivat-
ing children to tell the truth. On the other hand, there
may also be negative consequences; children may learn
that if they produce stories that are consistent with in-
terviewers’ beliefs, their interviewers will reward them.
A study conducted by Garven, Wood, and Malpass
(2000) illustrates how the use of rewards and punish-
ments in an interview can quickly shape the child’s be-
havior and have long-lasting consequences. Children
between the ages of 5 and 7 attended a special story
time led by a visitor called Paco. During this 20-minute
visit, Paco read the children a story, handed out treats,
and placed a sticker on the child’s back. One week after
the visit, the children were asked mundane questions
(“Did Paco break a toy?”) and fantastic questions (“Did
Paco take you somewhere in a helicopter?”). There were
two interviewing conditions. In the neutral-no rein-
forcement condition, children were simply asked a list
of 16 questions and provided no feedback after each
question. In the reinforcement condition, children were
asked the same 16 questions, but they were provided
with feedback after each question, as illustrated by the
following example:
Interviewer: Did Paco take you somewhere on a
helicopter?
Child: No. [Note this is an accurate denial]
Interviewer: You’re not doing good. Did Paco take
you to a farm?
Child: Yes. [Note this is an incorrect assent]
Interviewer: Great. You’re doing excellent now.
[The next question is asked.]*
The reinforcement had large negative effects on the ac-
curacy of children’s responses. Children in the rein-
forcement condition inaccurately assented to 35% of
misleading mundane questions and to 52% of the mis-
leading fantastic questions. The comparable rates for the
nonreinforcement group were 13% and 15%. In a second
interview, a week later, all children were asked the same
questions without any reinforcement. The same high
error rates continued for the reinforcement children.
When children were challenged and asked in the second
 Case Example and Presentation of Relevant Scientific Evidence
interview, “Did you see that or just hear about that?”
children in the reinforcement group stated that they had
personally observed 25% of the misleading mundane
events and 30% of the misleading fantastic events. Chil-
dren in the nonreinforcement group made these claims
only 4% of the time.
These findings show how quickly reinforcing
statements can shape children to provide inaccurate
responses no matter how bizarre the question. Further-
more, the inaccurate responses persist on second ques-
tioning, with a number of children claiming that they
actually observed the suggested but false event. Of
course, as shown in some of the excerpts, rewards and
punishments can take a more explicit form, such as
promising children a treat if they tell the right answer
or threatening the children if they provide an undesir-
able answer.
Examples from the Lillie-Reed Case
The following excerpts are statements by a child’s
mother and by her aunt, who were both allowed to help
investigators interview the child. There statements
were made to induce this young child to make abuse-
consistent disclosures.
Aunt: You promised to tell me your secret if I got all
the Barbie toys for you and you didn’t tell us.
Didn’t you not?
Aunt: Yes. All right, I’ll get them, but are you
going to tell me your secret, then? Because you
said you would.
Mom: If you can remember who it is, or who it was,
we’ll get you some clothes for the Barbie.
Aunt: Do you want us to take you to Fenwicks and
buy you some clothes for your Barbie?
Aunt: You tell me what you told your mummy last
week, right? Are you listening? And I’ll let you
come sleep at my house a night.
Mom: After you tell AUNT what happened, right
and then we’ll go downtown and buy your Barbie
some new clothes, eh? If you’re a good girl, if you
tell Auntie Joan.
Aunt: Do you want to tell me about the nursery,
eh, and then we’ll go to Fenwicks for a McDon-
ald’s burger.*
In addition to positive and negative reinforcement, re-
wards, and bribes, the children were repeatedly told not
to be frightened, not to be afraid, and that they were
791
brave. For example, the word “ frighten” was used 9 times
in the following excerpt, which also shows the poten-
tially damaging effect of this strategy that was repeated
by the investigator, the mother, and the mother’s friend.
Interviewer: I was wondering if maybe Grace was
frightened.
Interviewer: Do you think she’s frightened to tell me?
Friend: I think so and I think I know what she’s
frightened of.
Interviewer: Grace, have we got this bit right? Grace?
Mom: Listen, Grace, are you frightened?
Interviewer: What of ?
Grace: Chris.
Interviewer: What for? You’re safe. . . .
Interviewer: We’re all there to look after you and
there’s nothing for you to be frightened of.
Friend: So that nobody can harm her, can they not,
Grace. . . .
Friend: What did he do when he was naughty, Grace?
Interviewer: I think Grace’s still a little bit fright-
ened but she doesn’t have to be.
Mom: What did Chris tell you to be frightened of,
Grace? Why were you frightened?
Grace: Monsters.*
Stereotype Induction
Suggestions do not always take the form of explicit
(mis)leading questions, such as “Your Dad was mad,
right?” One suggestive interviewing technique involves
the induction of negative stereotypes by telling a child
that the suspect “does bad things.”
As a study by Lepore and Sesco (1994) shows, some
children will incorporate this negative information into
their reports.
In this study, children played games with a man
called Dale. Dale played with some of the toys in a re-
searcher’s laboratory room and he asked the child to
help him take off his sweater. Later, an interviewer
asked the child to tell her everything that happened with
Dale. For half the children, the interviewer maintained a
neutral stance whenever they recalled an action. For the
remaining children, the interviewer reinterpreted each
of the child’s responses in an incriminating way by stat-
ing, “He wasn’t supposed to do or say that. That was
bad. What else did he do?” Thus, in this condition, the
bias that Dale had misbehaved was induced. At the con-
clusion of these incriminating procedures, the children
792 The Child and the Law
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 ques-
tions than children in the neutral condition. Interest-
ingly, one-third of the children in the incriminating
condition embellished their responses to these ques-
tions, and the embellished responses were always in the
direction of the incriminating suggestions. The ques-
tion that elicited the most frequent embellishments was
“Did Dale ever touch other kids at the school?” Embell-
ishments 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 reinterviewed 1 week later, children in the in-
criminating condition continued to answer the yes/no
questions inaccurately and they continued to embellish
their answers.
In Lillie-Reed, the children were repeatedly told that
Chris Lillie and other people had done “silly” things and
they were constantly asked to talk about the silly things.
Interviewer: Why. Because I’ve heard some stories
about silly people at the nursery school doing silly
things. So I said to your mummy has Mary told you
anything about these silly things at nursery and
she said “Oh, yes, shall I bring her to talk to you?”
I said “Oh, please. I don’t know what all these
silly things are.” Do you? Did you tell your
mummy about them though?*
Interviewers told the children that Lillie was in jail
and asked if he had hit or hurt them.
Mom: Remember when mum and you were talking
this morning and I asked you if Chris had ever hurt
you [The child is lying on her mother’s lap and
moaning], and I said that the policeman took him
away now and he can’t ever hurt you again and
nothing bad’s going to happen to you because you
can tell now? Can you remember what you said to
me when I asked if Chris had ever hurt you?*
The children were also asked about “naughty” things
that happened or to tell about the naughty things that
Chris Lillie and Dawn Reed had done. During one
child’s first interview, the investigators used the word
“naughty” approximately 53 times. The following was
the child’s response after “naughty” had been men-
tioned 15 times:
Interviewer: Well, I don’t want him to be naughty.
You’ve told us he’s been naughty and I don’t
want him to be.
Child: Why?
Interviewer: ’Cause I don’t think he should be,
but I need—
Child: He’s been nice before and now he’s
being naughty.*
In the next exchange, “naughty” had been mentioned an-
other 9 times:
Interviewer: So it was something to do with Char-
lie. Is it something to do with some part of Char-
lie’s body?
Child: No.
Interviewer: Is it something naughty? Is it some-
thing nice?
Child: Uh-huh.
Interviewer: I’m still a bit stuck, ’cause it’s hard
guessing that.
Child: I know something naughty.
Interviewer: It was something naughty, right.
That’s the bit I cannot think. So it was something
naughty and mummy’s forgotten and now you’re
the only one who knows.
Child: I don’t know.*
And finally, after approximately 29 more repetitions
of the word “naughty,” when questioned by the
mother’s friend, the child produced the major allega-
tion of the interview:
Interviewer: He’s naughty, though, isn’t he? Why do
we say he’s naughty? ’Cause what did he do again?
Child: ’Cause he’s naughty.
Interviewer: ’Cause what did he do, though, to
make him naughty?
Child: He smacked me bum.*
 Case Example and Presentation of Relevant Scientific Evidence
Many of the children’s first allegations involved hit-
ting. Vanessa Lyon, one of the main interviewers, also
noted this trend and declared that children often begin
to disclose abuse by describing the least abusive inci-
dent, which allows them to gauge the reactions of people
they tell. But in examples such as the present one, the
children did not have to gauge the reactions of the adult,
who willingly accepted any statement of wrongdoing
that involved Chris Lillie or Dawn Reed. Thus, another
interpretation of this pattern is that it was the repeti-
tious words and concepts like “naughty” that, when
paired with questions about Chris Lillie, prompted
Grace to come up with the naughtiest answer that she
could think of: Chris smacked her bottom. In this case,
as in others, allegations of sexual abuse emerged later,
as interviewers provided the children with sexual infor-
mation that, prior to the interviews, was unfamiliar to
these children.
Peer Pressure
The effect of telling children that their friends have “al-
ready told” is a much less investigated area in the field
of forensic developmental psychology. Certainly, the
common wisdom is that a child will go along with a peer
group. But will a child provide an inaccurate response
just so he or she can be one of the crowd? The most re-
cent and most relevant studies in the literature suggest
that the answer is yes (Principe & Ceci, 2002; Principe,
Kanaya, Ceci, & Singh, in press).
Preschoolers in groups ranging in age from 6 to 8
took part in a contrived “dig” with a fictitious archaeol-
ogist named Dr. Diggs (Principe & Ceci, 2002). Dr.
Diggs led the children through an event in which they
used plastic hammers to dig pretend artifacts (e.g., di-
nosaur bones, gold coins). Dr. Diggs also showed the
children two special artifacts: a map to a buried treasure
and a rock with a secret message. The children were
warned not to touch these because they could be ruined.
All children in the study participated in or viewed these
core events. However, one-third of the children also saw
Dr. Diggs ruin the two special artifacts ( heretofore re-
ferred to as the target activities) and show upset about
their loss. A second third of the children were the class-
mates of those in the first group but did not witness the
extra target activities. The remaining children were not
the classmates of those who witnessed the target activi-
ties, nor did they witness the target activities them-
selves; they thus served to provide a baseline against
which to assess the effects of peer contact. Following
793
the dig, the children were interviewed in either a neutral
or a suggestive manner on three occasions. The sugges-
tive interviews for children who did not view Dr. Diggs
ruining the special artifacts provided children with this
information. Children in the neutral interview were not
given information about the two target events. In a later
interview, children were asked questions about the dig.
Children who had not reported the two absent special
activities were prompted to tell more by the inter-
viewer’s telling them that their friends had already told.
Children who were classmates of those who saw Dr.
Diggs ruining the two artifacts were more likely to
claim that they had viewed the target activities (i.e.,
they incorporated the misinformation from the previous
interview) than children who did not view the special ac-
tivities and were in another classroom. These data sug-
gest that there was contamination from classroom
interactions; children who had not experienced the tar-
get events learned of them from their classmates and
thus were more likely to assent to false events. Finally,
telling children that their friends had told increased
their false assent rate.
Principe et al. (in press) conducted another study in
which they found that children who overheard a child
talking were as likely to falsely claim to have seen the
event in question (a rabbit that escaped from a magician)
as were peers who actually saw it escape. Moreover, in
this study, the effect of suggestive questioning did not
notably increase their false reports; they were as likely
to report falsely if they overheard peers talking about
the rabbit, regardless of whether interviewers employed
suggestive questions.
In Lillie-Reed, Children were told that their friends
had come and talked about “silly things”:
Interviewer: You know your friends that you played
with at nursery school? I’ve been talking to them
. . . They were telling me about some silly things
that happened at the nursery. Do you know about
them things? . . .
Child: Don’t know that.
Interviewer: Shall I help you a bit? They were
telling me about their teachers, when they were in
your class.*
After the accusations of abuse, teachers in the day
care kept “disclosure logs” to record children’s state-
ments about abuse. Some of the examples show how chil-
dren talked among themselves about abusive subjects in
what seemed to be a very playful atmosphere.
794 The Child and the Law
Child 1 They had real snakes, they went SSS, they
were toys in the cage outside.
Child 2: I saw the snakes and cage, but I ran up the
steps, the snakes are called Mandy the same as
me. [Note this is the first time Mandy mentions
snakes.] . . .
Child 2: And do you know what? Chris and
Dawn kicked me.
Child 3: Why did they kick you?
Child 2: ’Cause they thought I was a pirate lady.
Child 1: And they slapped me ’cause they thought I
was a doggy. [Both Child 1 and Child 2 laugh and
begin to jump on a piece of equipment.]*
It appears that the first allegations of Child 2 and Child
3 may have emerged from these sessions.
Nonverbal Props
Because of the limited language skills of young chil-
dren, many interviewers use nonverbal props to help
children provide details of their past. These props have
been particularly used in interviews of sexually abused
children as a way to question children about how and
where they were touched. Although the use of props
seems intuitively useful, the scientific literature indi-
cates that at times, these devices will increase inaccu-
racy in children’s reports. One of the reasons for this is
because the prop is being used as a symbol and young
children are not symbol-minded. According to De-
loache (DeLoache & Smith, 1999), who has conducted
the pioneering work in this field, for the child to be-
come symbol-minded, the child must come to under-
stand that symbolic objects have a dual nature: They
represent the object itself (e.g., a doll) as well as a spe-
cific referent (e.g., the doll represents the child). Until
4 years of age, children do not have this appreciation.
One result is that they end up “playing” with the sym-
bol. In this respect, the symbol is a suggestive influ-
ence. Some examples of research on the influence of
props on children are now presented.
Anatomically detailed and undetailed dolls are fre-
quently used by professionals when interviewing young
children about suspected sexual abuse. The major ra-
tionale 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 as well as motivational problems
of embarrassment and shyness. However, research con-
ducted in the past decade has raised concerns about the
suggestiveness of the dolls and their influence on the
accuracy of children’s reports. There are several impor-
tant findings of this research. First, there is no consis-
tent evidence to suggest that there are characteristic
patterns of doll play for abused children. Many studies
show that 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 reti-
cence or avoidance when presented with the dolls, also
occur in samples of nonabused children. Second, more
recent studies indicate that use of the dolls does not im-
prove accuracy of young children’s reports, and in some
cases they decrease accuracy. For instance, we found
that 3-year-old children (Bruck, Ceci, Francoeur, &
Renick, 1995) and 4-year-old children (Bruck, Ceci, &
Francoeur, 2000) who had just completed a medical ex-
amination at their pediatrician’s office made a number
of errors when asked direct questions about where the
pediatrician had touched them and that these errors in-
creased when children were asked these same questions
in conjunction with dolls. Specifically, children inaccu-
rately showed that the doctor had touched their genitalia
or buttocks when this did not happen. These inaccurate
answers reflect the novelty of the dolls, which prompted
the children to explore the genitalia, often in very cre-
ative ways; the inaccurate answers also reflect the im-
plicit demands of the interview, which were to show and
talk about touching.
There is also a single case study that suggests that re-
peated exposure to the dolls may lead young children to
fabricate highly elaborate accounts of sexual abuse.
After a third exposure in a period of a week to an
anatomically correct doll, a nonabused 3-year-old told
her father that her pediatrician had strangled her with a
rope, inserted a stick into her vagina, and hammered an
ear scope into her anus (see Bruck, Ceci, Francoeur, &
Renick, 1995).
Researchers have examined the effects of giving
children real objects (e.g., a stethoscope) or a toy ob-
ject (e.g., a teddy bear to represent the child, or a toy
car to represent a real car) to report their past experi-
ences. In a recent review of the experimental studies
examining the use of props in interviews, Salmon
(2001) concluded that although real props increase the
amount of information that children report about an
event, they also increase the number of errors. Further,
she concluded that free access to a large number of real
 Case Example and Presentation of Relevant Scientific Evidence
props is associated with a relatively large number of er-
rors in children’s reports about touching, particularly
for younger children. For example, Pipe et al. (1999, ex-
periment 2) reported that repeated interviewing with
real props introduced a disproportionate amount of new
inaccurate information into children’s reports after a
1-year delay. Steward and Steward (1996) found that
when children had the opportunity to manipulate real
props, the situation turned from one of reporting what
actually happened to playing. Similar findings have
been found for toys or for small-scale props (i.e., giving
the child a toy piece of furniture and asking him to
show how he was sitting).
Asking the Child to Draw
In her review, Salmon (2001) concluded that asking
children to draw a picture about a specific event in
combination with nonleading verbal prompts can en-
hance the verbal reports of children over the age of
4 years, but it is less effective for younger children. She
also concluded, however, that after a long delay,
not only will drawing elicit less information than not
drawing (i.e., just asking), but it also introduces addi-
tional errors into children’s accounts. A recent study
found that when drawing is accompanied by misleading
questions, it is associated with very high error rates
in children’s subsequent reports (Bruck, Melnyk, &
Ceci, 2000).
A striking aspect of the interviews in Lillie-Reed was
the number of toys available to the children during in-
vestigative interviews. On the one hand, these seemed
to have put the children at ease and allowed them to
enjoy some of the experience. However, generally, their
presence was distracting and resulted in the children
spending more time playing with the toys than focusing
on the interview. As a result, there are times when it is
not clear if the child was actually playing or directly re-
sponding to the interviewer’s question.
Children were shown dolls and sometimes asked to
draw or point to body parts to elicit allegations of
abuse. The problem with this strategy is that it signals
to the child that the focus of concern is the touching of
certain areas of the body. Children may provide abuse-
consistent responses because they think this is what the
adults want to hear. Also, the use of these props makes
it easier for adults to ask leading questions about touch-
ing (“Show me where he touched you. What do we call
this part? Did he touch you here?”).
795
On July 12, Kristen reported in an investigative inter-
view with that Chris Lillie had hurt her bottom with a
crayon, that he had tickled her with a crayon, and that
he had put a crayon in her “ fairy.” The context of this
last disclosure is as follows. First, Kristen asked to play
with a doll and the interviewer encouraged her to un-
dress the doll and name the body parts. When directly
asked, the child denied twice that anything bad hap-
pened to her at the day care. The interviewer then
pointed to the doll and asked:
Interviewer: Has anybody ever hurt those bits
on your body?
Child: No. Chris.
Interviewer: How did Chris hurt those bits?
Child: He’s hurt mine bum and it’s sore now.
Interviewer: So you know you’re pointing to that bit
between your legs and you said Chris had hurt you.
How did he do it?
Child: He’d do it this hard. [As she says this, Kristen,
who is sitting on a child’s tiny wooden chair, lifts
her skirt and points or presses a finger or fingers
between her legs—what looks like the vagina area.]
Interviewer: And what was he using to do it with?
Child: He was . . . [there is a brief pause while she
looks at the table of toys in front of which she is
sitting and then stretches her hand out to a plastic
bucket of crayons that she was earlier using to
draw] using a crayon.*
Thus, Kristen’s disclosure that Chris Lillie had inserted
a crayon in her vagina was actually a demonstration
with props that were laid out on the table in front of her.
Perhaps she named the prop to provide an answer to a
question that she had no answer for. In research settings,
it is common for children to name surrounding props
when asked questions to which they do not know the an-
swer. For example, in the monkey-thief study (Bruck
et al., 2002), when children were asked what the thief
had stolen, a number of children named objects that
were in the interviewing room (e.g., video camera,
clock, books). When children in this study were asked to
describe the thief, they would often look at the experi-
menter and describe the very clothes she was wearing.
(Interestingly, there were children in the Lillie-Reed
case who, when asked what they were wearing when
they were abused, replied, “ These clothes that I am
wearing now.”)
796 The Child and the Law
Kristen’s claim that she had a crayon inserted in her
fairy is reminiscent of the children in the Bruck, Ceci,
Francoeur, and Renick (1995); Bruck et al. (2000)
studies; when these children were asked how the doctor
touched them, they used available props to make false
demonstrations or statements that these had been in-
serted into their buttocks or genitals. Thus, it is possi-
ble that Kristen’s initial response reflected her use of
an available object to fill in the answer to a question
with no knowable answer. It was a response that, once
elicited, she repeated and elaborated. On July 20, the
medical examiner noted that “Kristen told her ” that
Chris Lillie had put a crayon in her vulva and made her
bleed in her knickers. On the basis of her statements,
Lillie was arrested and put in prison on July 24.
Combining Suggestive Techniques
For ease of exposition, we have attempted to discretely
categorize a number of suggestive interviewing tech-
niques. As can be seen from so many of the excerpts,
these elements rarely occur in a vacuum; each interview
was filled with a variety of suggestive interviewing
techniques. The scientific literature demonstrates that
as interviews become more suggestive, the number of
false allegations increases (e.g., Bruck et al., 2002; Le-
ichtman & Ceci, 1995; Scullin et al., 2002). One reason
for this is that as the number of techniques increases, the
bias of the interviewer becomes clearer.
Generally, the interviews in the Lillie-Reed case are
so filled with suggestive interviewing techniques that
they are best described as chaotic. Children were given
toys, they were asked to draw, or the interviewer would
draw. Never was there any attempt to identify whether
the children were playing or actually describing their al-
leged abuse. In addition to the props, toys, and draw-
ings, when one interviewer could not deal with the
situation, another one was called in, and sometimes par-
ents or friends of parents were asked to join in or take
over the interview. Sometimes one of these interviewers
would leave (on the promise that the child would tell
when the interviewer left), only to reappear later in the
interview. Children were promised trips to restaurants if
they would tell. Children were told to be brave, or they
were told that they were safe because the bad people
were in jail. Children were asked leading questions or
provided with direct information about touching, about
abuse, about Lillie, about Reed, and about trips to Lil-
lie’s apartment. And all of this information was re-
peated within and across interviews, with the goal that
the children would come to make statements consistent
with the prevailing belief that they had been abused by
Lillie and Reed.
The Effects of Suggestion on the Credibility of
Children’s Reports
It is one thing to demonstrate that children can be in-
duced to make errors and include false 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. In a series of studies,
Ceci and colleagues (Ceci, Loftus, Leichtman, & Bruck,
1994; Ceci, Huffman, Smith, & Loftus, 1994; Leicht-
man & Ceci, 1995) showed videotapes to experts of
children’s reports that emerged as a consequence of re-
peated suggestive interviews. In some cases, the experts
also saw videotapes of children who resisted suggestions
and denied that anything had happened. These experts
were asked to decide which of the events reported by the
children actually transpired and then to rate the overall
credibility of each child. Experts who conduct research
on the reliability of children’s reports, who provide ther-
apy 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 confi-
dent in their judgments.
Some professionals state that they can detect sugges-
tion because the children simply parrot the words of
their investigators. However, evidence from the past
decade provides no support for this assertion. First, chil-
dren’s false reports are not simply repetitions or mono-
syllabic responses to leading questions. Under some
conditions, their answers go well beyond the suggestion
and incorporate additional details and emotions. For ex-
ample, in the Bruck et al. (2002) study, children’s false
reports contained the prior suggestion that they had seen
a thief take food from their day care; but the reports also
contained nonsuggested details such as chasing, hitting,
and shooting the thief (also see Bruck, Ceci, Francoeur,
& Barr, 1995; Ceci, Huffman, et al., 1994).
Finally, linguistic markers do not consistently differ-
entiate true from false narratives that emerge from re-
peated suggestive interviews. In the Bruck et al. (2002)
study, where children were repeatedly and suggestively
interviewed about true and false events, the children’s
narratives of the false events actually contained more
embellishments (including descriptive and emotional
terms) and details than their narratives of the true events.
 Case Example and Presentation of Relevant Scientific Evidence
Also the false narratives had more spontaneous state-
ments than the true narratives. Although for the most
part, the details in false stories were realistic, as sugges-
tive interviews continued, children inserted bizarre de-
tails into their stories, a point that we now consider.
In Lillie-Reed, some of the children’s disclosures be-
came bizarre or fantastic with repeated interviewing,
For example, after one suggestive investigative inter-
view, one of the children, Ned, reported that he had been
penetrated with a knife (there was no physical evi-
dence); that Dawn Reed had put needles into his bottom;
that Chris Lillie had urinated in his face; that Lillie and
Reed had swapped bodies, putting each other’s head on
and different hair and clothes. Ned also spoke of mon-
sters in an elevator. He said that Reed picked him up and
put him in a cupboard with no handles or windows but
that he turned into a gladiator and killed everyone.
Three hypotheses have been offered to account for
the occurrence of such bizarre details. The first is that
they are false and are the result of suggestive inter-
views (Bruck et al., 2002). Second, although reports of
fantastic or bizarre events may themselves be false,
their presence is claimed by some to be symptomatic of
trauma, and as such may be markers for narratives that
are otherwise true. According to this latter hypothesis,
as a consequence of their abuse, children may misper-
ceive actions or events or use fantasy to deal with their
anxieties and to empower themselves to regain control
over their victimization (see Everson, 1997, for a full
account of explanations). Finally, children may make
bizarre allegations because their abusers maliciously
suggest false events to the children so that they will
not be believed at all. For these reasons, reports of
abuse should not be discounted as false if they contain
fantastic or bizarre details because fantastic details
occur with some frequency in the reports of children
who were actually abused (Dalenberg, Hyland, &
Cuevas, 2002).
Some of the professionals involved in Lillie-Reed ex-
pressed belief in the children’s bizarre allegations, as
reflected by the following statement of the chief med-
ical examiner:
The bizarre nature of the abuse, almost certainly involv-
ing instrumentation, drugs and pornography, at a time
when the children’s cognitive abilities were so immature,
means that triggers are not easily recognized. For example,
a soda siphon sound in one room caused hysteric panic to
a child in another.
797
The review team argued that although the content of
each and every statement made by the children may be
incorrect, nonetheless the substance of the disclosures is
correct. Thus, statements that the children had been
penetrated with scissors or that they had been taken to
specific locations by Lillie and Reed or that Lillie and
Reed had swallowed bleach are said to contain important
kernels of truth. The argument is that either because the
children did not have the vocabulary or because they
were misinformed about specifics, there are errors in
their statements.
Although some of these arguments seem plausible,
there is strong scientific evidence to support only the
first hypothesis: that evolving bizarre disclosures re-
flect suggestive interviewing techniques. The argument
is not that interviewers suggested these bizarre details to
the children, but that it became clear to the children that
the more details they could produce, the more they
pleased their interviewers, even if they produced very
fantastic and bizarre details.
To summarize, when children have undergone sug-
gestive interviewing or are exposed to some of the
components of suggestive interviews, they can appear
highly credible when they are inaccurate, even to well-
trained professionals. Accordingly, once children have
been exposed to the suggestive influences discussed
here, it is impossible to support a claim that the re-
ports obtained from them are reliable. Demeanor, af-
fect, spontaneity, and other traditional criteria used to
determine credibility are rendered irrelevant to the
determination of the accuracy of the postsuggestion
report.
Adults’ Memories for Conversations with Children
As we have demonstrated, information on the exact word-
ing of each question asked of children during interviews,
as well as the number of times questions are repeated and
the tone of questioning, is necessary to determine whether
strategies recognized as capable of affecting the reliabil-
ity and accuracy of children’s reports were used by inter-
viewers. In Lillie-Reed the lack of such information for
the parents’, the physicians’, and other professionals’ re-
ports makes it impossible to make such a determination.
Therefore, videotaped interviews of the children must be
relied on to examine the instances when children made or
denied allegations of abuse.
It is a well-documented fact in the psycholinguistic
literature that when asked to recall conversations,
798 The Child and the Law
most adults may recall the gist (the major ideas, the
core content), but they cannot recall the exact words
used, nor the sequence of interactions between speak-
ers. This latter linguistic information rapidly fades
from memory, minutes after the interactions have oc-
curred (for a review, see Rayner & Pollatsek, 1989).
Bruck, Ceci, and Francoeur (1999) videotaped mothers
interviewing their 4-year-old children about a play ac-
tivity that had taken place in the laboratory. Three days
later, mothers were asked to recall this conversation.
The mothers could not remember much of the actual
content of the interview, omitting many details that had
been discussed, but much of what they did recall was
accurate. Of particular importance, the mothers were
especially inaccurate about several aspects of their con-
versation: They could not remember who said what
(e.g., they could not remember if they had suggested
that an activity had occurred or if the child had sponta-
neously mentioned the activity). Mothers also could not
remember the types of questions they had asked their
children (e.g., if they had used an open-ended question
or a series of leading questions to obtain a piece of in-
formation). For example, although some mothers in this
study remembered that they learned that a strange man
came into the room when the child was playing, they
could not remember if the child spontaneously gave
them this information, or if it was obtained through a
sequence of repeated leading questions that the child
assented to with monosyllabic utterances. To summa-
rize, although mothers could accurately remember
parts of the general content of the conversation, they
could not remember how or if they questioned their
child.
A similar study was conducted with mental health
trainees. This study (the birthday party study; Bruck,
Ceci, Melnyk, et al., 1999) was described earlier in the
section on interviewer bias. Mental health trainees inter-
viewed four children about an event. They were encour-
aged to make notes after each of the interviews. A few
weeks later, their memories for two of the conversations
were tested. The mental health trainees showed the same
pattern as the mothers. Even though they were allowed
to consult their notes, they could not remember who first
mentioned certain pieces of information; also, they
could not remember if the child’s statements were spon-
taneous or the result of leading questions. In addition,
these trainees mixed up which of the four children said
what. That is, they often attributed the actual report of
Child A to Child B.
Warren and Woodall (1999) obtained results similar to
those reported for mothers and mental health trainees.
These researchers studied experienced investigators who
created summaries immediately after their interview
with a child. When asked what types of questions they
had used to elicit information from the children, most of
these experienced interviewers answered that they had
asked primarily open-ended questions, few stated that
they had asked specific questions, and only one reported
asking any leading questions. Their estimates were highly
inaccurate, as most (over 80%) of the questions asked by
these interviewers were specific or leading.4 Returning to
the Bruck, Ceci, Melnyk, et al. (1999) birthday party
study, as reported earlier, the interviewers also made fac-
tual errors about the content of the children’s statements.
That is, the interviewers reported that the fourth child
had attended a birthday party when it was clear in a num-
ber of cases that the child had made no such statement. A
recent study conducted by Lamb and colleagues (Lamb,
Orbach, Sternberg, Hershkowitz, & Horowitz, 2000) in-
dicates that the findings that are obtained in the labora-
tory with mothers, mental health trainees, and skilled
interviewers generalize to investigators who interview
children suspected of sexual abuse. Verbatim contempo-
raneous accounts of 20 investigative interviews of 20 4-
to 14-year-old alleged sexual abuse victims were com-
pared with audiotaped recordings of these interviews.
More than 50% of the interviewers’ utterances and 25%
of the incident-relevant details provided by the children
were not reported in the “ verbatim” notes. The structure
of the interviews was also represented inaccurately in
these accounts. Fewer than half (44%) of the details
provided by the children were attributed to the correct
eliciting utterance type. Investigators systematically
misattributed details to more open rather than more fo-
cused prompts. In view of the quantity of errors in the
Lamb et al. study, where notes were made at the time of
the interview, one can begin to appreciate the large num-
ber of errors that can occur when adults attempt to recall
conversations that occurred days or months previously.
These data provide an empirical basis for the impor-
tance of obtaining electronic copies of interviews with
children. They suggest that summaries of interviews
4
A number of parents stated that they did not ask leading ques-
tions or put words into their children’s mouths. The scientific
literature shows how difficult it is to evaluate just how we con-
duct conversations. Our memories are probably molded by how
we would like to see ourselves rather than how we are.
 Case Example and Presentation of Relevant Scientific Evidence
based on interviewers’ notes and memories may be inac-
curate for a number of reasons. Usually, notes contain
only pieces of information that the investigator thinks
are important at the moment. If the investigator has a
bias that the child was sexually abused, this could color
his or her interpretations of what the child said or did,
and it is this interpretation that appears in the summary
rather than a factual account of what transpired. If a
number of children are interviewed and the reports are
not immediately written, the investigator may confuse
which child said what. Finally, summaries of interviews
based on interviewers’ notes are exactly that—sum-
maries. They do not contain a detailed accounting of
how many times the same question was asked or how
many times the child denied before finally assenting. No
one without stenographic training can possibly record
each and every time a question was asked that was not
answered. Thus, the literature on adults’ inability to ac-
curately recall what children told them, when paired
with the literature on forgetting, memory distortions,
and biases, highlights the real problem of relying on par-
ents’ and investigators’ reports of children’s behaviors
and statements that occurred in the past and that were
not recorded at the time of their occurrence.
Examples from Lillie-Reed
All the children in the Lillie-Reed case made their initial
disclosures to their parent(s), who were the first to ques-
tion them about abuse. The parents recollected these
conversations days, weeks, and months after they al-
legedly occurred. Some of these descriptions contain
contextual statements, such as “I asked . . .” and “He
said . . .,” but, as the literature clearly shows, the poten-
tial for error is extremely high in these recollections,
and as a result, the investigators of this case cannot de-
termine the following: (a) whether the child’s statement
was spontaneous or prompted by dozens of questions (as
was the case in the videotaped interviews); ( b) how
many questions the parent asked and how many differ-
ent times the parent questioned the child to get any re-
sponse; (c) whether the parent reported what he or she
had said or what the child had said; (d) whether the par-
ent accurately recalled the content of the child’s state-
ment; and (e) how much of the original interaction the
parent omitted either because it was forgotten or be-
cause it was considered nonessential material at the time
of recall. Because it is impossible to recapture this infor-
mation, the most reliable evidence (and maybe the only
reliable evidence) of the children’s disclosures, and the
799
amount of prompting required to make these disclo-
sures, is that obtained from the videotaped evidence.
This first example shows changes in one parent’s
memory of her child’s pretend phone call in April 1993:5
May 13 1993 Social Worker Report: Around Easter 1993,
her mother left Rachel with some friends while she went
shopping. On her return, her friend said that Rachel had
said, “My Dad did something with his willie.” Her friend
had replied “no, no.” Rachel did not say anymore when she
was questioned further.
August 17 1993 (Mother’s statement to the police). On
one occasion when Rachel was with a neighbor of mine,
she was playing with a toy telephone and pretending to
ring her Dad. She said something like someone’s willie
had been on her hand. When I tried to ask her further
about this, she totally clammed up and rushed to another
neighbor for reassurance saying, “I’m not naughty, I’m not
naughty, am I?” We reassured her that she wasn’t.
March 1994 (Signed Statement). On one occasion, I
left Rachel to be cared for by two friends. I went out shop-
ping. Jeanie had reported to me when I returned that
Rachel had been playing on a toy phone pretending to ring
her Daddy. She said that someone’s willie was on her
hand. When she realized that Jeanie was listening she put
the phone down and said, “I am not naughty am I.” The
next day I tried to talk to Rachel about it but she wasn’t
able to explain to me what she had said.
This example shows that the content of Rachel’s utter-
ance had changed from “My Dad did something with his
willie” to “she told her dad that someone’s willie was in
her hand.” With time, the statement became more con-
sistent with the idea that someone besides her father had
done something. This example also shows that although
the words “no” or “naughty” continued to be mentioned,
the specification of the speaker changed. Initially, it
was the mother’s friend, then it was Rachel in response
to her mother’s questioning, and finally it was Rachel’s
response to the adult’s listening in on her pretend con-
versation.
In another example, according to the notes of a social
worker who was present at the child’s police interview,
the child said that Chris Lillie and Dawn Reed were
married. However, this statement was not made by this
child in the interview.
Throughout their report, Abuse in the Early Years
(Barker et al., 1998, pp. 210–214), the review team
5
This interchange is a central theme in statements by
Rachel’s mother, probably because she interpreted it as
Rachel’s attempt to tell about the abuse.
800 The Child and the Law
provided examples of children’s statements such as
the following:
Boys and girls describe being sexually assaulted and wit-
nessing other children being sexually assaulted by Chris
Lillie and to a lesser extent by Dawn Reed. These assaults
were said to have taken place in the toilets, in a cupboard,
and in the play house at the nursery. For example, one boy
said that Chris Lillie had held his penis and rubbed it until
it hurt. . . . Another child describes Chris Lillie weeing on
his hair. . . . Several children told of a house with a black
door in a named road. Children also talked of being taken
in lifts to flats. . . . One child described Chris Lillie’s
willie pointing to the ceiling . . . one child described how
Chris Lillie had put his tiddler in her fairy while she was
sitting on the edge of a settee in his house . . . several chil-
dren described being given an injection which we deduce
from their descriptions contained some form of analgesic.
. . . Children variously stated that they have been shouted
at, sworn at, smacked, hit. . . . Children described how
they were threatened, they said that a boy and a girl had
been stabbed because they told their mum. . . . Other
threats that the children were able to talk about were
of monsters and a dog that would hurt you or scratch
your fairy.
If indeed these statements were spontaneous, were not
preceded by any forms of suggestion, and were the di-
rect words of the children (rather than parents’ sum-
maries of conversations or the review team’s summary
of interactions in an interview), then the children’s
words would provide important evidence to support the
hypothesis of abuse. However, a review of the case facts
show that these purported statements of the children
were often parents’ reports of their child’s statements;
in other cases, these represent a combination of mono-
syllabic responses provided to a stream of leading ques-
tions or at the end of a very suggestive interview.
To produce their report, the review team interviewed
more than 40 sets of parents/carers of children and more
than 112 other witnesses. If the interviewing began in
October 1995, these adults were recalling events, ideas,
and impressions from 3 to 4 years earlier. Examination
of the statements of parents at this last inquiry show how
much their testimony changed from their first reports of
their children’s statements. Clearly, the review team re-
lied on unreliable evidence from witnesses who deeply
believed that their children had been abused.
The review team concluded that there was no evi-
dence of suggestion in the interviews with the children.
They wrote: “ The Review Team saw the evidential
videos made by the children. These would not support
the view that the questions were in any way leading”
(Barker et al., 1998, p. 221). Their impression of the
three interviews conducted with one of the child wit-
nesses was this:
Over three video interviews, she detailed abuse of herself
and other children by Chris Lillie, to a lesser extent Dawn
Reed, and she also mentioned other nursery staff ’s names.
Her testimony in these videos, which we have seen, is ex-
tremely powerful and provided persuasive evidence of her
abuse in the nursery and elsewhere. (p. 148)
Based on the analyses of the videotape by the plain-
tiffs’ experts (including the first author of this chapter),
it is difficult to understand how the review team came to
such a conclusion; these interviews were highly sugges-
tive. The judge agreed with this assessment.
Impact and Criticism of Scientific Studies
Cited in Lillie-Reed
The child and law research conducted by developmen-
tal psychologists has had a large impact on many as-
pects of the legal arena. First, as a result of this new
scientific evidence, many of the guilty verdicts of the
1980s and early 1990s have been or are being over-
turned. On appeal, the defendants presented relevant
and appropriate scientific evidence to show how sug-
gestibility and memory distortion could produce in-
accurate statements of abuse in young children (e.g.,
New Jersey v. Michaels, 1994; People v. Scott Knif fen,
Brenda Knif fen, Alvin McCuan, and Deborah McCuan,
1996; Snowden v. Singletary, 1998; State of Washington
v. Carol M.D. & Mark A.D., 1999; State of Washington
v. Manuel Hidalgo Rodriguez, 1999). It is now rare to
find similar cases cropping up in the legal setting, at
least in North America. Second, as a result of this sci-
entific literature, there is an awareness of the impor-
tance of developing scientifically validated protocols
to be followed when interviewing children (e.g., Davies
& Westcott, 1999; Lamb et al., 2003). Third, there is a
growing awareness of the importance of videotaping
the first and all subsequent investigative interviews
with children in order to evaluate the degree to which
children’s initial statements were spontaneous and the
degree to which they were elicited by various sugges-
tive interviewing techniques.
 Case Example and Presentation of Relevant Scientific Evidence
Although this work is scientifically based, it is not
without its critics (e.g., Lyon, 1999; Meyers, 1995).
These critics claim that this area of science has created
a backlash that has undermined the credibility of chil-
dren, that focuses on the weaknesses rather than the
strengths of their memory, and that denies the reality of
child abuse. They also argue that because scientists have
based their studies and analyses on a handful of trials
(preschool multivictim, multiabuser cases) that repre-
sent the worst-case scenario in terms of interviewing
young children, the scientific analyses are overgeneral-
ized to nonproblematic interviews of children involving
sexual abuse.
However, this literature should not be viewed as an
attack on the credibility or the competence of children,
but rather on adults’ mishandling of young children and
their reports. Although it is true that the suggestibility
literature focuses on the ways adults can distort chil-
dren’s memories, it does not deny the strengths of chil-
dren’s memories when these are not tainted by
exogenous forces. For example, in cases when children
make spontaneous disclosures to parents about past
abuse and then report the same event to the police, it is
inappropriate to call on the suggestibility literature to
demonstrate that children’s reports can be tainted by in-
terviewing methods. Clearly, that would be an inappro-
priate extension of this literature. Similarly, it is just as
illogical to dwell on literature that shows how well chil-
dren can recall their past when asked neutral questions,
when the case at hand reveals a multitude of suggestive
techniques. Nothing about the strengths of children’s
memories can inform such cases other than to stress the
point that their initial disclosures prior to suggestive in-
terviewing may have been accurate.
The claim that research on suggestibility denies the
reality of sexual abuse is a straw man. Researchers who
conduct research in this field uniformly agree that most
claims that children make of sexual abuse are probably
accurate. The scientific findings merely indicate that
there are clearly defined situations in which some chil-
dren’s claims should be carefully examined. Just be-
cause there are some false allegations does not mean that
all allegations are false.
Finally, the argument that the scientific literature
rests on issues raised by the very worst of cases is also
to some degree a red herring. Cases such as Lillie-Reed
are of interest to social scientists not simply because of
their dramatic components, but also because their com-
plexity provides a vast number of examples and details
801
that are relevant to many types of cases that end up in
the legal arena. Although Lillie-Reed may be among
those “ worst-cases scenarios,” it nonetheless shares im-
portant structures or components with other cases that
commonly come to court.
Further, a specific case does not render the literature
on children’s suggestibility and autobiographical mem-
ory valid or not valid. It is the extent to which the litera-
ture is relevant to each individual case. The literature on
children’s suggestibility is applicable to any type of case
in which child witnesses make statements only after
suggestive interviewing practices; it does not matter if
the case is a day care case or if it involves allegations of
abuse by a parent, boyfriend, or stranger.
Summary
If a child’s indicting statements are made in the absence
of any previous suggestive interviewing and in the ab-
sence of any motivation on the part of the child or adults
to make incriminating statements, then the risk that the
statement is inaccurate is quite low. If, however, the
child initially denies any wrongdoing when first asked
about a criminal action but later, as a result of sugges-
tive interviewing practices, does make allegations, the
statements may be unreliable.
Errors that result from suggestive techniques involve
not only peripheral details, but also central events that
involve children’s own bodies. In laboratory studies,
children’s false reports can be tinged with sexual con-
notations. Young children have made false claims about
“silly events” that involved body contact (e.g., “Did the
nurse lick your knee? Did she blow in your ear?”), and
these false claims persisted in repeated interviewing
over a 3-month period (Ornstein, Gordon, & Larus,
1992). Young children falsely reported that a man put
something “ yuckie” in their mouth (Poole & Lindsay,
1995, 2001), and falsely alleged that their pediatrician
had inserted a finger or a stick into their genitals
(Bruck, Ceci, Francoeur, & Renick, 1995), or that
some man touched their friends, kissed their friends on
the lips, and removed some of the children’s clothes
(Lepore & Sesco, 1994). A significant number of pre-
school children falsely reported that someone touched
their private parts, kissed them, and hugged them
(Bruck et al., 2000; Goodman, Bottoms, Schwartz-
Kenney, & Rudy, 1991; Goodman, Rudy, Bottoms, &
Aman, 1990). In addition, when suggestively inter-
viewed, some children will make false allegations
802 The Child and the Law
about nonsexual events that could have serious legal
consequences were they to occur. For example,
preschoolers claimed to have seen a thief in their day
care (Bruck, Ceci, & Hembrooke, 1997).
The mix of suggestive interviewing techniques in
conjunction with the degree of interviewer bias can ac-
count for variations in suggestibility estimates across
studies. If a ( biased) interviewer uses more than one
suggestive technique, there is a greater chance for taint
than if he or she uses just one technique.
At times, suggestive interviewing techniques result in
false beliefs. Children who incorporate the suggestions
of their interviewers come to truly believe that they
were victims.
Suggestive interviewing affects the perceived credi-
bility of children’s statements. The major reason for this
lack of accurate discrimination between true and false
reports is perhaps due to the fact that suggestive tech-
niques breathe authenticity into the resulting false re-
ports. When false reports emerge as a result of
suggestive interviews, these are not simple repetitions or
monosyllabic responses to leading questions. Under
some conditions, these suggested reports become spon-
taneous and elaborate, going beyond the suggestions
provided by their interviewers. There are no valid scien-
tific tests to determine which aspects of a report or
which reports are accurate accounts of the past. There is
no scientific “Pinocchio test ” that indicates that the
child’s metaphorical nose is growing longer when his or
her statement is inaccurate.
Final Judgment of Lillie-Reed
In a 446-page judgment that reviews in detail all aspects
of the case, Judge Eady found the review team guilty of
malice on the grounds of a biased and inaccurate inves-
tigation that was based on opinion rather than scientifi-
cally based findings. As for Lillie and Reed, Judge
Eady wrote:
The allegations made against them were of the utmost
gravity and received sustained and widespread coverage. I
decided, therefore, that each Claimant was entitled to
what is now generally recognised to be the maximum
amount for compensatory damages in libel proceedings. I
award each of them £200,000. . . . What matters primarily
is that they are entitled to be vindicated and recognised as
innocent citizens who should, in my judgment, be free to
exist for what remains of their lives untouched by the
stigma of child abuse. (Approved Judgement Lillie and
Reed v. Newcastle City Council & Ors, 2002, p. 443)
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY,
DEVELOPMENTAL DIFFERENCES, AND
MECHANISMS OF SUGGESTIBILITY
In this section, we cover some topics that, although im-
portant in the field of children and the law, were not ger-
mane to the discussion of Lilly-Reed.
Children’s Memory for Traumatic Events
The discussion of Lillie-Reed focused on the suggestive
influences that can compromise reliable reporting be-
cause, as noted earlier, children in this case did not pro-
vide any abuse-related narratives before this type of
suggestive questioning occurred. Although it might be
argued that children are incapable of reporting trau-
matic events without this type of support, the literature
clearly does not support this view. Rather, as detailed
in this section, a large number of studies show that chil-
dren are capable of providing accurate, detailed, and
useful information about actual events, some of which
are traumatic. It is important to note that the studies in
this section are characterized by the neutral tone of the
interviewer, the limited use of misleading questions
(for the most part, if suggestions are used, they are lim-
ited to a single occasion), and the absence of any mo-
tive for the child to make a false report. When such
conditions are present, much, but not all, of what chil-
dren report can be quite accurate. Unfortunately, these
conditions were not present in the interviews of the
children in Lillie-Reed.
Does Memory for Trauma Differ from Memory
in General?
A widespread notion is that memory for traumatic
events operates differently from memory for everyday
experiences. The origin of this belief can be traced to
the psychiatry of the late nineteenth century. From in-
terviews with his patients, Pierre Janet (1889) con-
cluded that traumatic experiences disrupt normal
memory and become “dissociated” or split off from con-
scious awareness as the result of a psychological defense
that works to block the recall of painful events. Like
Janet, Sigmund Freud (1896/1953) asserted that trau-
matic memories are subject to “repression” and can seep
into consciousness indirectly by way of symptoms of
psychological disorders. Freud’s claim that memory for
trauma operates differently from memory for nontrau-
matic events has pervaded the clinical literature. Para-
doxically, two competing theories have emerged in
 Autobiographical Memory, Developmental Dif ferences, and Mechanisms of Suggestibility
modern clinical thought. Consistent with Freud’s origi-
nal beliefs, some have asserted that traumatic experi-
ences are too overwhelming for children to endure and
are pushed underground and remain difficult to access
(e.g., van der Kolk & Fisler, 1995). Others have argued
that traumatic experiences are so shocking that they are
indelibly fixed in memory and preserved over time in a
pristine form (e.g., Koss, Figueredo, Bell, Tharan, &
Tromp, 1996).
Two Types of Traumatic Memory?
One widely cited solution for these disparate effects of
trauma has been proposed by Terr (1991, 1994). Terr
distinguishes between two types of trauma: Type I in-
volves a single, shocking event, such as an attempted
murder or a natural disaster, and Type II deals with re-
peated, chronic traumatic experiences, such as multiple
incidents of sexual abuse. According to Terr, Type I
traumas create detailed and precise memories, whereas
Type II traumas lead to fragmented or even nonexistent
memories. After many traumatic events, children learn
to cope with the fear or pain by dissociating, or sepa-
rating themselves from the experience as it is occur-
ring, thereby causing impoverished encoding and
limited or no memory.
Evidence for this distinction comes from clinical case
reports. Most notably, Terr (1988, 1991) contrasted a
group of 5- to 14-year-old children who were kidnapped
from their school bus and buried in a truck trailer, with
20 children who were abused repeatedly before 5 years
of age. Terr reported that all of the kidnapped children
recalled the event in vivid detail after a 5-year delay,
whereas the repeatedly traumatized children exhibited
poor or no verbal recall because they had learned to re-
press their memories.
Although seemingly sensible, a careful examination
of Terr’s (1988, 1991) comparison reveals numerous
problems. First, the Type I and Type II children dif-
fered in age; the older (Type I ) children should have
better memory than the younger (Type II ) children for
any experience, not just traumatic experiences. Second,
only four of the Type II children endured repeated sex-
ual abuse, and three of them were under the age of 2
years when they were abused. Based on the empirical
literature (reviewed later), however, all events, not just
traumatic events, experienced before 2 years of age are
inaccessible to verbal recall. Third, Terr’s argument
that repeated trauma leads to alterations in memory im-
plies that well-organized memories for such occur-
rences should never be available for retrieval because
803
these were never completely registered in memory in
the first place.
Empirical Studies of Memory for Stressful Events
Given claims in the clinical literature regarding the spe-
cial nature of traumatic memories, how well have empir-
ical studies squared with these claims? As a whole, the
empirical literature on children’s recall of distressful
events is inconsistent with beliefs that memory for
trauma operates differently from memory in general.
Rather, existing evidence suggests that memory for trau-
matic events behaves very much like memory for every-
day experiences.
Recall of Traumatic Events Is Generally Accu-
rate. First, numerous investigations have demon-
strated that, like everyday experiences, traumatic
experiences can be recalled quite well, even by children
as young as 3 years of age. Studies of children’s memory
for natural disasters, such as Hurricane Andrew
(Bahrick, Parker, Fivush, & Levitt, 1998; Shaw, Apple-
gate, & Schorr, 1996) and the explosion of the space
shuttle Challenger (Warren & Swartwood, 1992), pres-
ent evidence of detailed and generally accurate memo-
ries over long delays. Likewise, examinations of
children’s recall of highly distressful medical proce-
dures, such as emergency room visits for trauma (Howe,
Courage, & Peterson, 1995; Peterson & Whalen, 2001),
bone marrow transplants (Stuber, Nader, Yasuda,
Pynoos, & Cohen, 1991), lumbar punctures (Chen,
Zeltzer, Craske, & Katz, 2000), and chemotherapy treat-
ments (Howard, Osborne, & Baker-Ward, 1997), show
that children retain enduring and largely faithful memo-
ries for these experiences.
To illustrate, research by Ornstein and his colleagues
on children’s retention of a voiding cystourethrogram
(VCUG)—a painful and stressful radiological proce-
dure involving urinary catheterization—has demon-
strated that 3- to 7-year-olds can provide highly
accurate accounts of this event over a 6-week delay
(Merritt, Ornstein, & Spicker, 1994). Related work has
shown generally accurate memory for this procedure for
children over delays of 5.5 years (Pipe et al., 1997).
Investigators who employ the VCUG paradigm to
study the effects of trauma on memory argue that the
VCUG is a forensically relevant event because in some
ways it is similar to situations of sexual abuse. Children,
some of whom are restrained, are handled by adults
while the genital area is uncovered. The event is quite
painful, as it involves passing a catheter into the urinary
804 The Child and the Law
bladder and filling the bladder to capacity with contrast
fluid. Also, the child is asked to urinate on the examining
table—a potentially embarrassing activity, especially
for young children who have been toilet-trained recently.
Despite the high levels of anxiety experienced by
most of the children who undergo this examination, how-
ever, some have questioned the relevance of the VCUG to
situations involving sexual abuse because it is a socially
sanctioned procedure. However, this criticism may be ir-
relevant to situations in which an abusive adult provides
the young victim a misleading framework characterizing
their interactions as conventional, such as describing the
abuse as a secret game or a special relationship. Further,
to the extent that children lack an understanding of the
diagnostic value of the VCUG, some may conceive of
this procedure as a betrayal by trusted caregivers rather
than a medically necessary examination.
Memories for Trauma Are Subject to Forgetting.
Like ordinary memories, memories for trauma become
less accessible as the delay interval increases. Usually,
with the passage of time, peripheral or inconsequential
details are lost most readily and the gist or central de-
tails persist (Goodman, Hirschman, Hepps, & Rudy,
1991; Peters, 1997; Peterson & Bell, 1996). To illus-
trate, Peterson and Whalen (2001) showed that although
children maintained generally accurate memory over a
5-year period for an accident (e.g., lacerations, bone
fractures, burns, and dog bites) and medical attention in
a hospital emergency room, some aspects of the experi-
ence, particularly the details of the treatment, were lost
during the delay. Moreover, the general components of
the injury were retained better than smaller details.
Memories for Trauma Are Susceptible to Con-
structive Distortions from External Events. Trauma
memories, like memories for more mundane events, are
vulnerable to constructive distortions or confusions from
other, similar experiences. That is, existing memories of
trauma can be altered during the course of the interval
between the experience and the report of it, when infor-
mation from intervening experiences becomes incorpo-
rated into the original memory. For example, Principe,
Ornstein, Baker-Ward, and Gordon (2000) provided evi-
dence that television programs can produce later fabrica-
tions of medical procedures that were nonexperienced but
seen on television.
Howe et al. (1995) have shown that, as the delay be-
tween a trauma and later interviews increases, children
become increasingly likely to erroneously incorporate
information from intervening, like traumatic events into
their accounts of the original occurrence. For example,
one child who was asked to recall the details of an emer-
gency room treatment for an eye injury that had taken
place 6 months prior mistakenly reported that the doctor
had fixed his tooth and put medicine in his mouth—ac-
tivities consistent with another hospital room visit that
had occurred in the preceding month. Of particular im-
portance, although nonexperienced details imported
from intervening experiences generally do not hinder
the accuracy of children’s reports, an interviewer who is
not privy to the details of the original event likely would
not be able to differentiate the children’s reports in
terms of actually experienced events versus intervening
events—an important point given that forensic inter-
viewers rarely know exactly what happened.
Memories for Trauma Are Vulnerable to Con-
structive Distortions from Internal Factors. Mem-
ories for distressful events may change over time as the
result of internal thoughts, such as expectations, feel-
ings, preferences, and goals. To illustrate, Pynoos,
Steinberg, and Aronson (1997) reported that some chil-
dren who witnessed brutal domestic violence erro-
neously recalled intervening to help the abused parent.
Likewise, consider an investigation by Ornstein and his
colleagues (1998) in which 4- and 6-year-old children’s
memory was assessed for a mock physical examination
that included some highly expected medical features
(e.g., measuring weight) while omitting others, and in-
corporated several atypical, unexpected features (e.g.,
collecting a sputum sample). After a 12-week delay, but
not during an immediate interview, the children exhib-
ited a relatively high frequency of spontaneous intru-
sions of typical, but not atypical, medical features that
had not been included in their checkups. In fact, 42% of
the 4-year-olds and 72% of the 6-year-olds made at least
one such intrusion at the 12-week assessment, whereas
essentially none of the children reported in their sponta-
neous recall any of the atypical procedures that had not
taken place during their examinations.
Taken together, empirical studies demonstrate con-
vincingly that memories for traumatic experiences act
like memories in general. Children’s trauma memories
are not repressed or hidden from consciousness; rather,
the core of the event tends to be well remembered over
time. Although trauma memories are enduring, they are
not indelibly preserved in storage in their original form.
 Autobiographical Memory, Developmental Dif ferences, and Mechanisms of Suggestibility
Rather, their details tend to fade from memory with
time. Nor are traumas immune to constructive distor-
tions; intervening events and internal ruminations can
alter memory. Thus, it seems that traumatic memories
are not of a unique nature, nor do they require special
principles to explain their operation.
There is one qualification to these general conclu-
sions, and this involves the long-term memories of very
young, often nonverbal children who are later asked to
recount an event. In other words, can children or adults
accurately recall events that occurred during the first 2
years of life? This is a very complicated issue about
which much has been written, but it can be summarized
with a few major points.
First, it is clear that throughout infancy, nonverbal
memories for certain types of sequenced events develop
such that some infants as young as 13 months at the time
of original exposure to a simple event are able to nonver-
bally reenact three-step sequences following delays as
long as 12 months (Bauer, Wenner, Dropik, & Wewerka,
2000). Although these investigations provide ample evi-
dence that infants are capable of retaining information
about the past, exactly what aspects of their experiences
they can remember is unclear. In the infancy work, re-
tention is inferred on the basis of changes in behavior,
such as kicking more vigorously or reproducing a set of
actions. Behavioral responses, however, are not equiva-
lent to demonstrations of autobiographical memory. Au-
tobiographical memory involves a process in which
stored information is made consciously available and re-
membered as an actual experience, that is, occurring at
a particular time, in a particular place, and under partic-
ular circumstances.
Nonetheless, these findings of infant retention may
be relevant to discussions of children’s testimony if
early memories first expressible only through behavior
later become verbally expressible once children have ac-
quired the ability to talk about past experiences. A num-
ber of investigations, however, have provided compelling
evidence that children cannot gain verbal access to
memories stored without the benefit of language. In a
study of children’s recall of traumatic injuries that oc-
curred between 13 and 34 months of age, Peterson and
Rideout (1998) found that 2-year-olds who were unable
to provide a narrative account of the injury immediately
after it took place produced fragmentary and moder-
ately inaccurate accounts of this event during subse-
quent interviews. Similarly, when 3-year-old children
were asked to recall a novel event that they had experi-
805
enced 1 year earlier, they used only words that were part
of their vocabulary when the event was experienced
(Simcock & Hayne, 2002). These provocative findings
suggest that children cannot translate memories into lan-
guage if the words were not available when the memo-
ries were formed. This work indicates, then, that it is
difficult, if not impossible, for children or adults to pro-
vide verbal testimony about events that occurred before
the onset of productive language.
Are Traumatic Events More or Less Memorable
Than Everyday Events?
Although it is clear that traumatic memories are subject
to the same mechanisms as normal memories, the ques-
tion remains whether traumatic events are more or less
memorable than more mundane events. It is somewhat
difficult to answer this question because few studies
have directly compared memory for traumatic experi-
ences with memory for nontraumatic experiences within
the same children. Nonetheless, what evidence exists
suggests that traumatic events often have certain fea-
tures that make them more or less memorable than most
experiences. As such, it is important to understand when
and how distress might translate into more or less de-
tailed, accurate, or enduring memories. Factors such as
the distinctiveness of an experience, children’s under-
standing of the experience, and their level of distress
during the experience can affect the processes involved
in encoding, storage, and recall, and consequently affect
the memorability of traumatic occurrences.
The Distinctiveness of the Experience. One fac-
tor that might affect the memorability of trauma con-
cerns the distinctiveness or uniqueness of the event
against the background of the particular child’s past ex-
periences (Howe, 1998). Studies of event memory
demonstrate that unique events, whether negative or
positive in tone, tend to be better remembered than fa-
miliar or routine events (Fivush & Schwarzmueller,
1998; Hudson, Fivush, & Kuebli, 1992). For example, by
3 years of age, children are able to retain generally accu-
rate and detailed memories over extended delays for
novel events such as airplane rides and visits to Disney
World and special museums (see Fivush, 1993, for a re-
view). However, children have great difficulty recalling
single episodes of familiar or repeated events, such as
what happened one time that they went to McDonald’s
or what happened on a specific day at preschool (Fivush,
1984; Hudson & Nelson, 1983; Myles-Worsley, Cromer,
806 The Child and the Law
& Dodd, 1986). These patterns indicate that single dis-
tinctive experiences are more memorable than single
episodes of familiar events.
Extending this logic to traumatic events, trauma may
be better remembered than other events to the extent
that it deviates from the typical experiences of children,
rather than merely as a function of the distress that it
brings about (Howe, 1998). A fire at a preschool that
prompts an emergency response by the fire department
might be recalled better than last Monday’s snack or
trip to the park, not necessarily because of the distress
evoked by the situation, but because it stands out from
the usual. Like the fire, a visit by the SPCA or a trip to
the planetarium might be well remembered because such
events are inconsistent with children’s expectations of
what usually happens at school.
In support of this account is work by Ornstein (1995)
examining memory for the VCUG that shows that chil-
dren’s reports of this distressful medical procedure are
more complete and more accurate than their accounts of
a routine pediatric checkup. One explanation for this
finding is that the VCUG is better remembered because
it is a single distinctive experience made up of unfamil-
iar activities, such as a catheterization, a fluoroscopic
filming, and urinating on the examining table. In con-
trast, the well-child checkup is a repeated, familiar
event made up of recognizable actions, many of which
are often part of young children’s pretend play.
Further supporting the notion that the uniqueness of
trauma enhances memorability is work by Stein (1996),
who found that children’s accounts of emotional expe-
riences, both positive and negative, tend to focus on
those aspects that are novel or different from what is
expected. Stein argues that it is the violation of the typ-
ical, not direction of the emotion evoked by the event,
that facilitates memory, as distinctive events can elicit
positive as well as negative emotions. Consistent with
this contention is an investigation by Fivush, Hazzard,
Sales, Sarfati, and Brown (2003) that revealed that
children living in violent, inner-city neighborhoods re-
called positive events in more descriptive detail than
negative events. Fivush and her colleagues attribute the
heightened recall of positive events to a violation of ex-
pectation; for children living in conditions of chronic
violence, positive experiences may be distinctive and
therefore more completely remembered than negative
events. In contrast, a single traumatic event may not
stand in stark contrast to their daily lives and would not
be expected to persist in memory.
As noted by Howe (1998), this argument is in line
with studies showing that as the novelty of stressful sit-
uations dissipates, so does their memorability. Consider,
for example, individuals in emergency response teams
who acclimate to experiences that may seem upsetting
to most. This example illustrates that previously distinc-
tive experiences may lose their uniqueness, and hence
their memorability, with additional experience. In the
next section, we review evidence that directly examines
the effects of repeated experience on memorability.
Effects of Repeated Experience on Event Memo-
rability. Despite the lack of evidence supporting
Terr’s (1994) distinction between Type I and Type II
trauma, the experimental literature on children’s mem-
ory makes it clear that memories of repeated experi-
ences are quite different from memories of single
events. However, the reasons for these differences are
not the ones proposed by Terr.
Repeated experience with an event can have both
beneficial and baleful effects on children’s memory, de-
pending on the nature of the event details being recalled.
After multiple occurrences of an event, details that gen-
erally are experienced the same way during each occur-
rence are strengthened in memory. Consequently, with
repeated experience, children’s reports become increas-
ingly general or script-like, focusing on what usually
happens (Pezdek & Roe, 1995; Powell & Thomson,
1996). However, with regard to children’s recall of de-
tails that vary across occurrences (e.g., remembering
what clothing was worn by a person the last time the
event was experienced, when the items of clothing dif-
fered each time), repeated experience has detrimental
effects on children’s ability to remember a particular
occurrence. Specifically, the number of correct details
reported about a particular episode of a repeated event is
lower than when recalling a one-time event, as details of
specific occurrences are omitted or confused among
episodes (Hudson, 1990). Although children’s general
reports of repeated events are largely accurate, in the
sense that they describe the gist of what usually hap-
pens, they lack detail and may not be veridical with any
one instance of the event.
The problems associated with children’s recall of the
variable details of an occurrence of a repeated event are
accentuated under certain conditions. The more fre-
quently events are experienced, the longer the time
delay between the event and the interview; the greater
the similarity between the events, the more difficult it is
 Autobiographical Memory, Developmental Dif ferences, and Mechanisms of Suggestibility
for children to keep track of which details were included
in a particular occurrence (Lindsay, Johnson, & Kwon,
1991). Further, the accuracy of children’s recall of an
occurrence of a repeated event is shaped by the manner
in which memory is tested. When children are asked to
freely report what happened in an occurrence of a re-
peated event, they provide few specific features that dis-
criminate one occurrence from others in the series. In
contrast, when questions are asked that focus the child
on specific aspects of the event that were likely to have
varied, confusion between the occurrences is more evi-
dent (Powell & Thomson, 1997).
Unlike Terr’s (1994) speculation that multiple expe-
riences lead to poorer memory, it simply may be that the
details of individual episodes are not recalled as well
when they have happened on numerous occasions than
when they have happened only once. But, as discussed
earlier, although the details of repeated events fade as
the memory becomes increasingly general and abstract,
the gist tends to be well maintained and largely accurate.
The only study to examine children’s memory for re-
peated trauma was done by Howard et al. (1997). Chil-
dren who were in remission from cancer were asked to
recall the details of chemotherapy treatment that had
lasted for an average of 21 months and had ended over
2.5 years earlier. The children’s reports of their treat-
ment were quite extensive and highly accurate. Further,
no parent agreed with the statement “My child cannot
recall the treatment because he/she has actively blocked
it out.” Thus, Terr’s (1994) contention that repeated, or
Type II, trauma is unavailable to conscious recall is not
supported by empirical evidence.
Existing knowledge. A central determinant of
what is selected for attention and placed in memory is
existing knowledge. Knowledge influences how children
monitor the world, interpret events, and encode incom-
ing information (Bjorklund, 1985; Chi & Ceci, 1987;
Ornstein & Naus, 1985). One implication of the litera-
ture is that in situations where a child does not under-
stand what is happening, he or she will have little basis
for later remembering what was experienced. For exam-
ple, when child abuse victims are young enough to have
almost no sexual knowledge, they likely will have trou-
ble interpreting and remembering what took place. Al-
though children as young as 2 or 3 years will understand
that “something is wrong” if they experience the physi-
cal pain associated with anal or vaginal penetration,
when they experience milder forms of abuse, such as
807
genital touching, they may not be aware of the inappro-
priateness of genital fondling versus everyday hygiene
and, as a result, construct a very different memory for
the encounter than do older children who have learned
the impropriety of this behavior.
This argument is most relevant to young sexual abuse
victims because most abuse with this age group does not
involve vaginal or anal penetration. It most often in-
cludes exhibitionism, fondling, photography, and oral
fellatio. To the extent that children do not interpret these
activities as sexual or inappropriate, they may not be
perceived as any more distressful than ordinary forms
of affection, cleaning, or diapering, and would not be ex-
pected to be any more memorable. The important point
here is that what is considered traumatic by adult stan-
dards might not be construed as such by a young child.
Stress. A number of investigators have proposed
that individual differences in children’s behavioral reac-
tions to stress can impact their encoding and retention
of a traumatic experience (Howe, 2000; Ornstein, Man-
ning, & Pelphrey, 1999). If one child responds to anxiety
by closing her eyes and covering her ears, she is prevent-
ing encoding of visual and auditory stimuli associated
with the event. However, if another child deals with his
feelings of fear by asking questions about what is being
experienced, he may likely generate a well-organized
and enduring memory for the event.
Despite the intuitive appeal of this prediction, mea-
sures of stress have faired poorly in how well they predict
children’s memory for a traumatic event. Some authors
argue that stress experienced as an event is taking place
strengthens children’s abilities to focus and thus facili-
tates the encoding of information (Fivush, 1998; Good-
man, Hirschman, et al., 1991; Shrimpton, Oates, &
Hayes, 1998), whereas others have found that elevated
levels of stress impede memory (Howard et al., 1997;
Merritt et al., 1994; Peters, 1997). Still others have
shown mixed or no significant effects of stress on mem-
ory (Bruck, Ceci, Francoeur, & Barr, 1995; Goodman &
Quas, 1997; Howe et al., 1995; Peterson & Bell, 1996).
To some extent, these discrepancies may be due to the
various indices of stress that have been used. Measures
used range from self or parental behavioral ratings of
stress (ratings of stress as adduced by a parent or objec-
tive observer) to physiological ( heart rate, blood pres-
sure) and neuroendocrine indicators (salivary cortisol).
Not only are few of these measures associated with one
another, but few of these measures show a consistent
808 The Child and the Law
relationship with recall. For example, in an investigation
of children’s memory for a VCUG, Merritt and her col-
leagues (1994) observed a negative association between
stress and memory with behavioral ratings of stress but
not with salivary cortisol.
As discussed by Ornstein and his colleagues (1999),
an adequate understanding of the effects of stress on
memory may involve using moment-by-moment indica-
tors of arousal as an event is occurring rather than sum-
mary measures ( be they behavioral, physiological, or
neuroendocrine) that essentially result in an estimate of
the average level of anxiety experienced during the event.
This is important because the amount of stress experi-
enced may vary considerably as the event unfolds, with
some moments accompanied by high levels of arousal and
other moments experienced with nonchalance.
On the basis of this brief review, it is apparent that
special mechanisms are not needed to account for mem-
ory for traumatic experiences. Whether the event is a
single occurrence or repeated on multiple occasions,
traumatic experiences are remembered as least as well as
if not better than more mundane experiences. Traumatic
memories, however, like ordinary memories, can be falli-
ble, incomplete, and malleable. What a child remembers
about a traumatic event is based on constructive
processes that result from the complex interactions of a
wide range of cognitive and social variables that affect
the encoding of the original event, the storage of informa-
tion memory, and the retrieval of material from storage.
Developmental Differences in Suggestibility
and Autobiographical Recall
In the review of the literature that was pertinent to the
Lillie-Reed case, we focused on studies of preschoolers
( because this was the age group under consideration)
without discussing developmental differences. Al-
though the research findings demonstrate that pre-
school children are especially susceptible to the
deleterious influence of suggestive interviewing tech-
niques (Ceci & Bruck, 1993; Ceci & Friedman, 2000),
their greater vulnerability is a matter of degree only;
even much older children and adults will succumb to
suggestions and pressures (Bruck & Ceci, 2004). For
example, Finnila et al. (2003) staged an event (a version
of the Paco visit we described earlier) for 4- to 5-year-
olds and 7- to 8-year-olds. One week later, half the chil-
dren were given a low-pressure interview that contained
some misleading questions with abuse themes (e.g., “He
took your clothes off, didn’t he?”). The other children
received a high-pressure interview; they were told that
their friends had answered the leading questions affir-
matively, they were praised for assenting to the mis-
leading questions, and when they did not assent, the
question was repeated. In both conditions, there were
no significant age differences in the percentage of mis-
leading questions answered affirmatively, although a
significant number (68%) were assented to in the high-
pressure condition (see also Bruck et al., in press;
Zaragoza et al., 2001). It has also been found that under
some conditions, older children are more suggestible
than younger children (e.g., Finnila et al., 2003;
Zaragoza et al., 2001).
Many of the suggestive techniques used in the child
studies also produce tainted reports or false memories in
adults (e.g., see Loftus, 2003). An illuminating piece of
evidence for this assertion is the work of Kassin and
Kiechel (1996). They have shown that college students
will often erroneously claim they broke a computer after
being told that they did by an experimenter. Moreover,
they will internalize this belief, tell others they acciden-
tally broke the computer, and sign a statement to this
effect, agreeing to donate 8 hours of service to the ex-
perimenter in reparation for the alleged breakage.
Thus, although suggestibility is highest among pre-
school children, this type of memory distortion occurs
at all ages.
In terms of autobiographical recall, preschoolers are
also least able to provide details of actually experienced
events (e.g., Baker-Ward, Gordon, Ornstein, Larus, &
Clubb, 1993; Cassel et al., 1996; Ceci & Bruck, 1995;
Lamb et al., 2003; Quas et al., 1999). When asked open-
ended questions, preschool-age children can recall rele-
vant and accurate information, but they often are less
responsive and provide fewer spontaneous memory re-
ports than older children and adults (Bahrick et al.,
1998; Goodman, Hirschman, et al., 1991; McCauley &
Fisher, 1995; Ornstein et al., 1992; Peterson, 1999; Say-
witz, 1987).
Mechanisms Underlying
Children’s Suggestibility
The search for mechanisms underlying children’s sug-
gestibility is an enterprise that attempts to integrate de-
velopmental differences in basic cognitive skills and
social behaviors with developmental differences in sug-
gestibility. The general strategy is to link the reduction
 Autobiographical Memory, Developmental Dif ferences, and Mechanisms of Suggestibility
in suggestibility with the development of social and cog-
nitive skills. Methodologically, hypotheses that emerge
from this exercise are tested in correlational studies
whereby the levels of children’s suggestibility are corre-
lated with their performance on a range of tasks that as-
sess the predicted mechanisms (see Bruck & Melnyk,
2004, for a review).
Some of the attempts to pinpoint the mechanisms un-
derlying children’s suggestibility examine the relative
importance of social versus cognitive factors that under-
lie suggestibility effects. On the one hand, it is argued
that the child (or adult) adopts suggestions in order to
defer to or comply with the agenda of the questioner. In
other words, for social reasons, the children repeat sug-
gestions that they know to be inaccurate. At the other
extreme, there is the view that suggestibility effects re-
flect cognitive weaknesses. For example, the child may
incorporate a suggestion because he or she forgets the
original event or is confused as to whether he or she saw
the original event or the suggestion. Of course, both fac-
tors may underlie suggestibility effects; for example,
social factors may first influence assents to misinforma-
tion or misleading questions, but with time, the assents
may lead to cognitive impairments involving memory
changes (see Ceci & Bruck, 1995). Or, because of chil-
dren’s less developed cognitive skills, they may be more
willing to defer to the perceived agenda of their adult in-
terviewer. In the following paragraphs, we attempt to
provide a bird’s-eye view of the various hypotheses that
have been put forward to account for age-related reduc-
tions in children’s suggestibility. As will become evi-
dent, some of the proposed cognitive mechanisms also
account for age-related changes in children’s autobio-
graphical memory.
The focus on children’s memory is of central inter-
est because it is commonly found that children with
poor memory of an event are more suggestible about
that event (e.g., Marche, 1999; Marche & Howe, 1995;
Pezdek & Roe, 1995). This has led to the following ob-
servations and proposals. As children grow older, their
memories become more efficient because of the acqui-
sition of strategies, knowledge, and self-insights about
their memory (so-called metamemory). Preschool-age
children have limited skill at using encoding, storage,
and retrieval strategies (Brainerd, 1985; Brainerd &
Ornstein, 1991; Loftus & Davies, 1984). They often
fail to encode new events efficiently due to their selec-
tive focus on salient or central features (Bower &
Sivers, 1998), their lack of knowledge about the events
809
(Ricci & Beal, 1998), and their tendency to rely more
on verbatim than gist memory (Brainerd & Reyna,
1990; Foley & Johnson, 1985). Young children have
weaker memory traces and show steeper forgetting
curves (Baker-Ward et al., 1993; Brainerd, Reyna,
Howe, & Kingman, 1990). They are also inferior to
school-age children in terms of the strength of stored
representations, because use of storage strategies, such
as rehearsal and organization of stimuli, is uncommon
among preschool children. They exhibit production
deficits when it comes to retrieval strategies (e.g., use
of category information) needed to search and facili-
tate their memories (Cox, Ornstein, Naus, Maxfield, &
Zimler, 1989; Schneider & Bjorklund, 1998). All of
these deficits conspire to render them dependent on ex-
ternal cues, such as an interviewer’s prompts or ques-
tions, to retrieve information stored in long-term
memory (Priestley, Roberts, & Pipe, 1999).
Young children’s limited knowledge constrains their
ability to incorporate and organize new information
(Chi & Ceci, 1987; Johnson & Foley, 1984; Lindberg,
1980; Ornstein, 1990; Schneider & Bjorklund, 1998).
Because of a lack of knowledge, they do not introspect
into the inner workings of their memories to monitor
when they need to engage in more mental work to con-
solidate a memory. Because young children fail to en-
gage in strategies and insights, their memories are
sometimes weaker and more susceptible to alteration by
insinuations and false suggestions.
In addition, preschoolers lack skill at distinguishing
between two or more sources of input into their memo-
ries (Gopnik & Graf, 1988; Wimmer, Hogerfe, &
Perner, 1988), thus confusing things they heard with
things they saw, and vice versa (Johnson & Foley, 1984;
Lindsay et al., 1991). They also are more likely than
older groups to exhibit a confusion between reality and
fantasy that can lead at times to the belief that some-
thing was directly experienced when, in reality, it was
merely dreamed about or imagined (Foley & Johnson,
1985; Foley, Santini, & Sopasakis, 1989; Lindsay &
Johnson, 1987). This is called “source confusion,” and
young children are more likely to exhibit it, such as
when they misattribute an interviewer’s suggestions to
actual experiences (Ackil & Zaragoza, 1995).
Another limitation of preschoolers that may be related
to suggestibility concerns so-called scripted knowledge.
Scripts are temporally organized expectations regarding
typical and habitual routines of an event (Ceci & Bruck,
1993). It has been reported that young children are more
810 The Child and the Law
susceptible than older children to the negative effect of
scripted knowledge (Farrar & Goodman, 1992; Hudson,
1990; Hudson & Nelson, 1986; Powell & Thomson,
1996). For example, young children might report erro-
neously that a certain event occurred as it usually hap-
pens in their script, even though the event was not
witnessed at that instance. In other words, young children
have trouble recalling novel details of a single event that
are inconsistent with their generalized script of the event
(Farrar & Goodman, 1992). This tendency to overly rely
on the scripted knowledge might lead them to be more
vulnerable to overgeneralizing their scripts.
For the cognitively unarmed child, an interrogation
by experts is no contest: Children can be made to say
things that are incriminating, even if they are false. In
the summer of 1999, the city of Chicago witnessed a
grisly murder and sexual assault of an 11-year-old girl
named Ryan Harris. In the aftermath of discovering
Ryan’s body, two boys, ages 7 and 8, confessed to mur-
dering her. The boys made their confessions without
counsel present during a lengthy interrogation. Later, a
27-year-old ex-convict’s semen was found on the dead
girl’s body, and he now stands indicted for her murder.
Why would those two boys falsely admit to things they
didn’t do? One possible answer lies in their eagerness to
please adult authority figures by complying with the
boys’ beliefs about what the police wanted them to say.
Children might respond with a very compliant attitude
during an interrogation, especially if they are highly
praised and given attention that is rare in their everyday
life. The boys in the Chicago case sat around a table with
two uniformed officers; they held hands around the
table and pledged to be on the “same team.” The offi-
cers bought the boys food and explained that they could
go home as soon as they helped the rest of the team clear
up Ryan Harris’s murder. After several hours of interro-
gation without the presence of an attorney or family
member, each boy ended up admitting to a series of be-
haviors that they almost certainly could not have en-
acted, including raping the dead girl.
Without foreseeing the ramifications of their state-
ments, children learn that noncompliance is met with
negative reaction by adults, and so they avoid challeng-
ing adults’ suggestions in their daily experiences and in
the courtroom situations as well (Saywitz & Moan-
Hardie, 1994). Children’s eagerness to please adults is
easily exploitable by interrogators as well as defendants
seeking their help.
The socioemotional pressure to comply in forensic in-
terviews may result from children’s limited perspective-
taking skill (Flavell, 1992). They lack the knowledge of
the interviewer’s motivation, the purpose of questioning,
and the forensic relevance of their responses. They some-
times acquiesce to suggestive questions to avoid humilia-
tion, assuming that their lack of knowledge may be
viewed unfavorably.
Despite this long list of possible mechanisms, there
are very few data to support any of these hypotheses
(see Bruck & Melnyk, 2004). One of the implications of
this is that at present, we cannot accurately predict the
types of children who might be most suggestible.
FUTURE DIRECTIONS
Since the end of the 1980s, developmental psychology
has made enormous progress in providing a scientific
basis for the studies in children in the law. In this chap-
ter, we have shown the extent of this progress in under-
standing aspects of children’s testimony before they
come into the courtroom and once they are there. Al-
though there may be new areas of interest in the coming
decade, spurred by current basic research or by current
societal problems, the existing research calls for impor-
tant modifications and changes in the current system.
First, the most significant implication of the research
on adults’ memories of interviews with children is that
interviewers should be mandated to electronically pre-
serve all (and especially the very first) of their inter-
views with children. If courts are interested in historical
accuracy, there is simply no substitute for a tape that
can be played to verify the accuracy of the interviewer’s
recall and the details of the discussion that took place
between the interviewer and child. Although there may
be times when it is not feasible to electronically record
interviews (specifically, when parents question their
children at home or in the car), it is nevertheless impor-
tant for jurors and judges to know how to interpret
hearsay testimony and to consider the potential for dif-
ferent types of errors, even though the testimony may be
compelling and be offered in good faith.
Despite the dramatically consistent scientific find-
ings that interviewers have poor recall of both the con-
tent and the structure of their interviews with children,
only a handful of states mandate electronic recordings.

Agencies or jurisdictions defend the absence of this pro-
cedure on a number of grounds, including the claim that
videotaping would provide the defense with evidence to
be used against the child victim, or that agencies do not
have the facilities to carry out these procedures, or that
the child had already been interviewed prior to the first
investigative interview. These are not viable reasons.
First, if there is evidence of suggestive interviewing,
then this exculpatory evidence must be turned over to
the defense. If the interviews are well carried out, how-
ever, electronic copies will be useful to the prosecution.
In this electronic age, the cost and ease of obtaining
videotaped or audiotaped statements from children is
negligible. It should be part of every professional’s
training to know how to obtain the best quality records
possible. Finally, although it is true that children are
sometimes (suggestively) interviewed by parents or
other caretakers prior to their first investigative inter-
view, this does not preclude the necessity of videotaping
the first official and subsequent sessions. For example,
in Lillie-Reed, before the first investigative interview, all
parents had reported that their children had disclosed
abuse (and their reports also revealed suggestive inter-
viewing techniques); however, careful inspection of the
first videotaped interviews with the children by the po-
lice showed that the children did not disclose what the
parents had reported. With suggestions from the police,
the children eventually did disclose. Without the video-
tape, the nature of the children’s police disclosures
would have been lost. What would have remained was
the parents’ reports of disclosures and the police reports
of disclosures.
When a crime has been committed and evidence is
being collected from the crime scene (the weapon, blood
samples), the investigators are not permitted to simply
inspect these pieces of evidence, make notes about their
appearance, and then throw the evidence away. This
would not be allowed into a court of law because the in-
vestigators’ reports would be unreliable. For the very
same reasons, children’s reports of victimization should
be handled in the same careful way required for physical
evidence at crime scenes. The only means to achieve this
goal is through electronic recording.
Second, there is a clear need for further work on the
development of empirically validated interview sched-
ules for interviewing children. The developmental re-
search has proved the basic foundation for the general
structure and constraints of such protocols. Michael
Future Directions 811
Lamb and his colleagues from National Institute of Child
Health and Development have taken the lead in this field.
They have developed one such protocol (for details of the
protocol, see Orbach et al., 2000; Sternberg, Lamb, Or-
bach, Esplin, & Mitchell, 2001) that emphasizes the use
of open-ended questions to obtain detailed reports from
children; specific and leading questions should be used
only when necessary and only at the end of the interview.
This interview schedule was specifically developed for
children suspected of being sexually abused; however,
with a few modifications, it is also applicable for inter-
viewing children about a variety of topics.
Although this team of researchers has made enormous
contributions to the field, there need to be further studies
that examine modifications to protocols (e.g., having dif-
ferent protocols for different age groups). In addition, it is
important that these protocols be tested in the laboratory
as well as in the field (i.e., interviewing children sus-
pected of abuse). The latter methodology provides infor-
mation about feasibility, whether it is possible to train
interviewers to follow the protocol, whether children can
follow the instructions, as well as the amount and quality
of information that children provide. However, these stud-
ies do not provide information on the reliability or the ac-
curacy of children’s reports. This is because interviewers
simply do not know the details about the event that the
children are reporting. To address issues of accuracy and
reliability, the accuracy of children’s reports must be ver-
ified; this can be achieved through laboratory studies in
which children are asked to recall events about which the
researcher has full knowledge.
Third, even though there is some progress in the con-
struction of standardized interviewing protocols, this
must be accompanied by the development of programs to
teach interviewers how to use these protocols. This is not
an easy task; training is intensive, often lasting days and
sometimes weeks. In part, this is because interviewers in
training must give up previous automatic strategies,
many of which they may not be aware of using. Anecdo-
tal reports suggest that even after intensive training, in-
terviewers will not faithfully follow the protocols unless
there are intermittent reeducation sessions. The cost and
time required to retrain a large workforce in this area
will be great. However, as a start, one would hope that
all professional training programs (undergraduate, grad-
uate, and certificate) would redesign their curriculum to
ensure that their graduates will be properly trained to
interview children.
812 The Child and the Law
REFERENCES
Ackil, J. K., & Zaragoza, M. S. (1995). Developmental differences in
eyewitness suggestibility and memory for source. Journal of Ex-
perimental Child Psychology, 60, 57–83.
Ackil, J. K., & Zaragoza, M. (1998). The memorial consequences of
forced confabulation: Age differences in susceptibility to false
memories. Developmental Psychology, 34, 1358–1372.
Amato, P. R. (2000). The consequences of divorce for adults and chil-
dren. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 62, 1269–1287.
Bahrick, L., Parker, J. F., Fivush, R., & Levitt, M. (1998). The effects
of stress on young children’s memory for a natural disaster. Jour-
nal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 4, 308–331.
Baker-Ward, L., Gordon, B. N., Ornstein, P. A., Larus, D. M., &
Clubb, P. A. (1993). Young children’s long-term retention of a pe-
diatric examination. Child Development, 64, 1519–1533.
Barker, R., Jones, J., Saradjian, J., & Wardell, R. (1998). Abuse in the
early years. (Report of the independent complaints review team on
Shieldfield Day Nursery and related matters). Newcaste upon
Tyne, England.
Bauer, P. J., Wenner, J. A., Dropik, P. L., & Wewerka, S. S. (2000).
Parameters of remembering and forgetting in the transition from
infancy to early childhood. Monographs of the Society for Re-
search in Child Development, 65(4, Serial No. 263).
Bauserman, R. (2002). Child adjustment in joint-custody versus sole-
custody arrangements: A meta-analytic review. Journal of Family
Psychology, 16, 91–102.
Bjorklund, D. F. (1985). The role of conceptual knowledge in the de-
velopment of organization in children’s memory. In C. J. Brainerd
& M. Pressley (Eds.), Basic processes in memory development
(pp. 103–142). New York: Springer-Verlag.
Bower, G. H., & Sivers, H. (1998). Cognitive impact of traumatic
events. Development and Psychopathology, 10, 625–653.
Brainerd, C. J. (1985). Three-state models of memory development:
A review of advances in statistical methodology. Journal of Ex-
perimental Child Psychology, 40, 375–394.
Brainerd, C. J., & Ornstein, P. A. (1991). Children’s memory for wit-
nessed events: The developmental backdrop. In J. Doris (Ed.), The
suggestibility of children’s recollections (pp. 10–20). Washington,
DC: American Psychological Association.
Brainerd, C. J., & Reyna, V. F. (1990). Gist is the grist: Fuzzy trace
theory and the new intuitionism. Developmental Review, 10, 3–47.
Brainerd, C. J., Reyna, V. F., Howe, M. L., & Kingman, J. (1990). The
development of forgetting and reminiscence. Monographs of the
Society for Research in Child Development (No. 55).
Bruck, M., & Ceci, S. J. (2004). Forensic developmental psychology:
Unveiling four common misconceptions. Current Directions in
Psychological Science, 13(6), 229–232.
Bruck, M., Ceci, S. J., & Francoeur, E. (1999). The accuracy of
mothers’ memories of conversations with their preschool chil-
dren. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 5, 1–18.
Bruck, M., Ceci, S. J., & Francoeur, E. (2000). A comparison of 3-
and 4-year-old children’s use of anatomically detailed dolls to re-
port genital touching in a medical examination. Journal of Experi-
mental Psychology: Applied, 6, 74–83.
Bruck, M., Ceci, S. J., Francoeur, E., & Barr, R. (1995). “I hardly
cried when I got my shot!”: Inf luencing children’s reports about a
visit to their pediatrician. Child Development, 66, 193–208.
Bruck, M., Ceci, S. J., Francoeur, E., & Renick, A. (1995). Anatomi-
cally detailed dolls do not facilitate preschoolers’ reports of a pe-
diatric examination involving genital touch. Journal of
Experimental Psychology: Applied, 1, 95–109.
Bruck, M., Ceci, S. J., & Hembrooke, H. (1997). Children’s false re-
ports of pleasant and unpleasant events. In D. Read & D. S. Lind-
say (Eds.), Recollections of trauma: Scientific research and
clinical practice (pp. 199–219). New York: Plenum Press.
Bruck, M., Ceci, S. J., & Hembrooke, H. (2002). Nature of true and
false narratives. Developmental Review, 22, 520–554.
Bruck, M., Ceci, S. J., Melnyk, L., & Finkelberg, D. (1999, April).
The ef fect of interviewer bias on the accuracy of children’s reports
and interviewer’s reports. Paper presented at the biennial meeting
of the Society for Child Development, Albuquerque, NM.
Bruck, M., London, K. Landos, R., Goodman, J. (in press). Autobio-
graphical memory and suggestibility in children with autistic
spectrum disorder. Developmental Psychopathology.
Bruck, M., & Melnyk, L. (2004). Individual differences in children’s
suggestibility: A review and synthesis. Applied Cognitive Psychol-
ogy, 18, 947–996.
Bruck, M., Melnyk, L., & Ceci, S. J. (2000). Draw it again Sam: The ef-
fect of drawing on children’s suggestibility and source monitoring
ability. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 77, 169–196.
California v. Raymond Buckey et al., Los Angeles County Sup. Ct.
A750900 (1990).
Cassel, W., Roebers, C., & Bjorklund, D. (1996). Developmental
patterns of eyewitness responses to repeated and increasingly
suggestive questions. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology,
61, 116–133.
Ceci, S. J., & Bruck, M. (1993). The suggestibility of children’s rec-
ollections: An historical review and synthesis. Psychological Bul-
letin, 113, 403–439.
Ceci, S. J., & Bruck, M. (1995). Jeopardy in the courtroom: A scien-
tific analysis of children’s testimony. Washington, DC: APA Books.
Ceci, S. J., & Friedman, R. D. (2000). The suggestibility of children:
Scientific research and legal implications. Cornell Law Review,
86, 34–108.
Ceci, S. J., Huffman, M. L., Smith, E., & Loftus, E. F. (1994). Re-
peatedly thinking about a non-event. Consciousness and Cogni-
tion, 2, 388–407.
Ceci, S. J., Loftus, E. F., Leichtman, M., & Bruck, M. (1994). The
possible role of source misattributions in the creation of false be-
liefs among preschoolers. International Journal of Clinical and
Experimental Hypnosis, 42, 304–320.
Chen, E., Zeltzer, L. K., Craske, M. G., & Katz, E. R. (2000). Chil-
dren’s memories for painful cancer treatment procedures: Impli-
cations for distress. Child Development, 71, 933–947.
Chi, M. T. H., & Ceci, S. J. (1987). Content knowledge: Its represen-
tation and restructuring in memory development [Special issue].
In H. W. Reese & L. Lipsett (Eds.), Advances in Child Develop-
ment and Behavior, 20, 91–146.
Child Maltreatment 2002. (2004). Reports from the States to the Na-
tional Child Abuse and Neglect Data Systems—National statis-
tics on child abuse and neglect.
Commonwealth v. Amirault, 424 Mass. 618 (1997) 3, 52n., 91, 92, 98.
Cox, B. C., Ornstein, P. A., Naus, M. J., Maxfield, D., & Zimler, J.
(1989). Children’s concurrent use of rehearsal and organizational
strategies. Developmental Psychology, 25, 619–627.

Dalenberg, C. J., Hyland, K. Z., & Cuevas, C. A. (2002). Sources for
fantastic elements in allegations of abuse by adults and children.
In M. L. Eisen (Ed.), Memory and suggestibility in the forensic in-
terview (pp. 185–204). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Davies, G. M., & Westcott, H. (1999). The child witness and the
memorandum of good practice: A research review. London: The
Home Office.
DeLoache, J. S., & Smith, C. M. (1999). Early symbolic representa-
tion. In I. Siegal (Ed.), Theoretical perspectives in the concept of
representation (pp. 61–86). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Emery, R. E., Laumann-Billings, L., Waldron, M. C., Sbarra, D. A., &
Dillon, P. (2001). Child custody mediation and litigation: Custody,
contact, and coparenting 12 years after initial dispute resolution.
Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 69, 323–332.
Everson, M. (1997). Understanding bizarre, improbable, and fantas-
tic elements in children’s accounts of abuse. Child Maltreatment,
2, 134–149.
Farrar, M. J., & Goodman, G. S. (1992). Developmental changes in
event memory. Child Development, 63, 173–187.
Finkelhor, D., Hotaling, G., Lewis, I. A., & Smith C. (1990). Sexual
abuse in a national survey of adult men and women: Prevalence,
characteristics and risk factors. Child Abuse and Neglect, 14, 19–28.
Finnila, K., Mahlberga, N., Santtilaa, P., Sandnabbaa, K., & Niemib,
P. (2003). Validity of a test of children’s suggestibility for pre-
dicting responses to two interview situations differing in their
degree of suggestiveness. Journal of Experimental Child Psychol-
ogy, 85, 32–49.
Fivush, R. (1984). Learning about school: The development of kinder-
gartners’ school scripts. Child Development, 55, 1697–1709.
Fivush, R. (1993). Developmental perspectives on autobiographical
recall. In G. S. Goodman & B. Bottoms (Eds.), Child victims and
child witnesses: Understanding and improving testimony
(pp. 1–24). New York: Guilford Press.
Fivush, R. (1998). Children’s recollections of traumatic and nontrau-
matic events. Development and Psychopathology, 10, 699–716.
Fivush, R., Hazzard, A., Sales, J. M., Sarfati, D., & Brown, T. (2003).
Creating coherence out of chaos? Children’s narratives of emo-
tionally positive and negative events. Applied Cognitive Psychol-
ogy, 17, 1–19.
Fivush, R., & Schwarzmueller, A. (1998). Children remember child-
hood: Implications for childhood amnesia. Applied Cognitive Psy-
chology, 12, 455–473.
Flavell, J. H. (1992). Perspectives on perspective taking. In H. Beilin
& P. Pufall (Eds.), Piaget’s theory: Prospects and possibilities
(pp. 107–139). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Foley, M. A., & Johnson, M. K. (1985). Confusions between memo-
ries for performed and imagined actions: A developmental com-
parison. Child Development, 56, 1145–1155.
Foley, M. A., Santini, C., & Sopasakis, M. (1989). Discriminating be-
tween memories: Evidence for children’s spontaneous elabora-
tions. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 48, 146–169.
Freud, S. (1953). Fragment of an analysis of a case of hysteria. In J.
Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psy-
chological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 7, pp. 3–122). London:
Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1896)
Garven, S., Wood, J. M., & Malpass, R. S. (2000). Allegations of
wrongdoing: The effects of reinforcement on children’s mundane
and fantastic claims. Journal of Applied Psychology, 85, 38–49.
References 813
Garven, S., Wood, J. M., Shaw, J. S., & Malpass, R. (1998). More
than suggestion: Consequences of the interviewing techniques
from the McMartin Preschool case. Journal of Applied Psychol-
ogy, 83, 347–359.
Gindes, M. (1998). The psychological effects of relocation for chil-
dren of divorce. Journal of the American Academy of Matrimonial
Lawyers, 15(1), 119–148.
Golombok, S., Perry, B., Burston, A., Golding, J., Murray, C.,
Mooney-Somers, J., et al. (2003). Children with lesbian parents: A
community study. Developmental Psychology, 39, 20–33.
Goodman, G., Batterman-Faunce, J., Schaaf, J., & Kenney, R. (2002).
Nearly 4 years after an event: Children’s eye witness memory and
adult’s perceptions of children’s accuracy. Child Abuse and Ne-
glect, 26, 849–884.
Goodman, G. S., Bottoms, B. L., Schwartz-Kenney, B., & Rudy, L.
(1991). Children’s testimony about a stressful event: Improving
children’s reports. Journal of Narrative and Life History, 1, 69–99.
Goodman, G. S., Emery, R., & Haugaard, J. J. (1998). Develop-
mental psychology and law: Divorce, child maltreatment, foster
care, and adoption. In W. Damon (Editor-in-Chief ) & I. E.
Sigel & A. Renninger (Vol. Eds.), Handbook of child psychol-
ogy: Vol. 4. Child psychology in practice (5th ed., pp. 775–874).
New York: Wiley.
Goodman, G. S., Hirschman, J. E., Hepps, D., & Rudy, L. (1991).
Children’s memory for stressful events. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly,
37, 109–157.
Goodman, G. S., & Quas, J. A. (1997). Trauma and memory: Individ-
ual differences in children’s recounting of a stressful experience.
In N. Stein, P. A. Ornstein, C. J. B. Tversky, & C. J. Brainerd
(Eds.), Memory for everyday and emotional events (pp. 267–294).
Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Goodman, G. S., Rudy, L., Bottoms, B., & Aman, C. (1990). Chil-
dren’s concerns and memory: Issues of ecological validity in the
study of children’s eyewitness testimony. In R. Fivush & J. Hud-
son (Eds.), Knowing and remembering in young children
(pp. 249–284). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Gopnik, A., & Graf, P. (1988). Knowing how you know: Young chil-
dren’s ability to identify and remember the sources of their be-
liefs. Child Development, 59, 1366–1371.
Grisso, T., & Schwartz, R. (Eds.). (2000). Youth on trial: A develop-
mental perspective on juvenile justice. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Grisso, T., Steinberg, L., Woolard, J., Cauffman, E., Scott, E., Gra-
ham, S., et al. (2003). Juveniles’ competence to stand trial: A
comparison of adolescents’ and adults’ capacities as trial defen-
dants. Law and Human Behavior, 27, 333–363.
Haugaard, J., & Hazan, C. (2002). Foster parenting. In M. H. Born-
stein (Ed.), Handbook of parenting: Vol. 1. Children and parenting
(2nd ed., pp. 313–327). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Howard, A. N., Osborne, H. L., & Baker-Ward, L. (1997, April).
Childhood cancer survivors’ memory for their treatment after long
delays. Paper presented at the meetings of the Society for Re-
search in Child Development, Washington, DC.
Howe, M. L. (1998). Individual differences in factors that modulate
storage and retrieval of traumatic memories. Development and
Psychopathology, 10, 681–698.
Howe, M. L. (2000). The fate of early memories: Developmental sci-
ence and the retention of childhood experiences. Washington, DC:
American Psychological Association.
814 The Child and the Law
Howe, M. L., Courage, M. L., & Peterson, C. (1995). Intrusions in
preschoolers’ recall of traumatic childhood events. Psychonomic
Bulletin and Review, 2, 130–134.
Hudson, J. (1990). Constructive processes in children’s event memo-
ries. Developmental Psychology, 26, 180–187.
Hudson, J., & Nelson, K. (1986). Repeated encounters of a similar
kind: Effects of familiarity on children’s autobiographic memory.
Cognitive Development, 1, 253–271.
Hudson, J. A., Fivush, R., & Kuebli, J. (1992). Scripts and episodes:
The development of event memory. Applied Cognitive Psychology,
6, 483–505.
Hudson, J. A., & Nelson, K. (1983). Effects of script structure on
children’s story recall. Developmental Psychology, 19, 625–635.
Hughes, M., & Grieve, R. (1980). On asking children bizarre ques-
tions. First Language, 1, 149–160.
Janet, P. (1889). L’Automatisme psychologique. Paris: Alcan.
Johnson, M. K., & Foley, M. A. (1984). Differentiating fact from fan-
tasy: The reliability of children’s memory. Journal of Social Is-
sues, 40, 33–50.
Kassin, S. M., & Kiechel, K. L. (1996). The social psychology of
false confessions: Compliance, internalization, and confabula-
tion. Psychological Science, 7, 125–128.
Kelly, J. B., & Lamb, M. E. (2003). Developmental issues in reloca-
tion cases involving young children: When, whether, and how?
Journal of Family Psychology, 17, 193–205.
Kendall-Tackett, K. A., Williams, L. M., & Finkelhor, D. (1993). Im-
pact of sexual abuse on children: A review and synthesis of recent
empirical studies. Psychological Bulletin, 113(1), 164–180.
Koss, M. P., Figueredo, A. J., Bell, I., Tharan, M., & Tromp, S.
(1996). Traumatic memory characteristics: A cross-validated me-
diational model of response to rape among employed women.
Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 105, 421–432.
Lamb, M., Orbach, Y., Sternberg, K., Hershkowitz, I., & Horowitz, D.
(2000). Accuracy of investigators’ verbatim notes of their foren-
sic interviews with alleged child abuse victims. Law and Human
Behavior, 24, 699–708.
Lamb, M. E., Sternberg, K. J., Orbach, Y., Esplin, P. W., Stewart, H., &
Mitchell, S. (2003). Age differences in young children’s responses
to open-ended invitations in the course of forensic interviews.
Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 71(5), 926–934.
Leichtman, M. D., & Ceci, S. J. (1995). The effects of stereotypes
and suggestions on preschoolers’ reports. Developmental Psychol-
ogy, 31(4), 568–578.
Lepore, S. J., & Sesco, B. (1994). Distorting children’s reports and
interpretations of events through suggestion. Applied Psychology,
79(1), 108–120.
Lillie and Reed v. Newcastle City Council & Ors EWHC 1600
(QB) (2002).
Lindberg, M. A. (1980). Is knowledge base development a necessary
and sufficient condition for memory development? Journal of Ex-
perimental Child Psychology, 30, 401–410.
Lindsay, S., & Johnson, M. K. (1987). Reality monitoring and sug-
gestibility. In S. J. Ceci, M. P. Toglia, & D. F. Ross (Eds.), Children’s
eyewitness memory (pp. 92–121). New York: Springer Verlag.
Lindsay, S., Johnson, M. K., & Kwon, P. (1991). Developmental
changes in memory source monitoring. Journal of Experimental
Child Psychology, 52, 297–318.
Loftus, E. F. (2003). Make believe memories. American Psychologist,
58(11), 867–873.
Loftus, E. F., & Davies, G. (1984). Distortions in the memory of chil-
dren. Journal of Social Issues, 40, 51–67.
London, K., Bruck, M., Ceci, S. J., & Shuman, D. (2005). Children’s
disclosure of sexual abuse: What does the research tell us about
the ways that children tell? Psychology, Public Policy, and the
Law, 11, 194–226.
London, K., & Nunez, N. (2002). Examining the efficacy of truth-lie
discussions in predicting and increasing the veracity of children’s
reports. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 83, 131–147.
Lyon, T. D. (1999). The new wave in children’s suggestibility re-
search: Critique. Cornell Law Review, 86, 1–84.
Marche, T. (1999). Memory strength affects reporting of misinfor-
mation. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 73, 45–71.
Marche, T. A., & Howe, M. L. (1995). Preschoolers report misinfor-
mation despite accurate memory. Developmental Psychology,
31(4), 554–567.
McCauley, M. R., & Fisher, R. P. (1995). Facilitating children’s eye-
witness recall with the revised Cognitive Interview. Journal of
Applied Psychology, 80, 510–516.
McCauley, M. R., & Parker, J. F. (2001). When will a child be be-
lieved? The impact of the victim’s age and jurors’ gender on chil-
dren’s credibility and verdict in a sexual-abuse case. Child Abuse
and Neglect, 25, 523–539.
Melnyk, L., & Bruck, M. (2004). Timing moderates the effects of re-
peated suggestive interviewing on children’s eyewitness memory.
Applied Cognitive Psychology, 18, 613–631.
Merritt, K. A., Ornstein, P. A., & Spicker, B. (1994). Children’s
memory for a salient medical procedure: Implications for testi-
mony. Pediatrics, 94, 17–23.
Meyers, J. E. (1995). Expert testimony regarding child sexual abuse.
Child Abuse and Neglect, 17, 175–185.
Myles-Worsley, M., Cromer, C. C., & Dodd, D. H. (1986). Children’s
preschool script reconstruction: Reliance on general knowledge as
memory fades. Developmental Psychology, 22, 22–30.
Nathan, D., & Snedeker, M. (1995). Satan’s silence: Ritual abuse
and the making of a modern American witch hunt. New York:
Basic Books.
National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect. (1998). Child Maltreat-
ment 1996: Reports From the States for the National Child Abuse
and Neglect Data System. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of
Health and Human Services.
New Jersey v. Michaels, 625 A.2d 579 af f ’d 642 A.2d 1372 (1994).
Nightingale, N. N. (1993). Juror reactions to child victim wit-
nesses: Factors affecting trial outcome. Law and Human Behav-
ior, 17, 679–694.
North Carolina v. Robert Fulton Kelly Jr., 456 S. E.2d 861 (1995).
Orbach, Y., Hershkowitz, I., Lamb, M., Sternberg, K., Esplin, P., &
Horowitz, D. (2000). Assessing the value of structured protocols
for forensic interviews of alleged child abuse victims. Child Abuse
and Neglect, 24, 733–752.
Ornstein, P., Gordon, B. N., & Larus, D. (1992). Children’s memory
for a personally experienced event: Implications for testimony.
Applied Cognitive Psychology, 6, 49–60.
Ornstein, P. A. (1990). Knowledge and strategies: A discussion. In W.
Schneider & F. Weinert (Eds.), Interactions among aptitudes,
strategies, and knowledge in cognitive performance (pp. 147–156).
New York: Springer-Verlag.
Ornstein, P. A. (1995). Children’s long-term retention of salient per-
sonal experiences. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 8, 581–606.

Ornstein, P. A., Manning, E. L., & Pelphrey, K. A. (1999). Chil-
dren’s memory for pain. Developmental and Behavioral Pedi-
atrics, 20, 262–277.
Ornstein, P. A., Merritt, K. A., Baker-Ward, L., Furtado, E., Gor-
don, B. N., & Principe, G. (1998). Children’s knowledge, expec-
tation, and long-term retention. Applied Cognitive Psychology,
12, 387–405.
Ornstein, P. A., & Naus, M. J. (1985). Effects of the knowledge base
on children’s memory strategies. In H. W. Reese (Ed.), Advances
in child development and behavior (Vol. 19, pp. 113–148). Or-
lando, FL: Academic Press.
Ornstein, P. A., Naus, M. J., Maxfield, D., & Zimler, J. (1989). Chil-
dren’s concurrent use of rehearsal and organizations strategies.
Developmental Psychology, 25, 619–627.
Patterson, C. J. (1997). Children of lesbian and gay parents. In T. Ol-
lendick & R. Prinz (Eds.), Advances in clinical child psychology
(Vol. 19, pp. 235–282). New York: Plenum Press.
People v. Scott Kniffen, Brenda Kniffen, Alvin McCuan and Deborah
McCuan, Kern County (Calif.) Sup. Ct. 24208 (1996).
Peters, D. P. (1997). Stress, arousal, and children’s eyewitness mem-
ory. In N. L. Stein, P. A. Ornstein, B. Tversky, & C. Brainerd
(Eds.), Memory for everyday and emotional events (pp. 351–370).
Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Peterson, C. (1999). Children’s memory for medical emergencies: 2
years later. Developmental Psychology, 35, 1493–1506.
Peterson, C., & Bell, M. (1996). Children’s memory for traumatic in-
jury. Child Development, 67, 3045–3070.
Peterson, C., & Grant, M. (2001). Forced-choice: Are forensic inter-
viewers asking the right questions? Canadian Journal of Behav-
ioural Science, 33(2), 118–127.
Peterson, C., Moores, L., & White, G. (2001). Recounting the same
events again and again: Children’s consistency across multiple in-
terviews. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 15(4), 353–371.
Peterson, C., & Rideout, R. (1998). Memory for medical emergen-
cies experienced by 1- and 2-year-olds. Developmental Psychol-
ogy, 34, 1059–1072.
Peterson, C., & Whalen, N. (2001). Five years later: Children’s memory
for medical emergencies. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 15, 7–24.
Pezdek, K., & Roe, C. (1995). The effect of memory trace
strength on suggestibility. Journal of Experimental Child
Psychology, 60, 116–128.
Pipe, M. E., Gee, S., Wilson, J. G., & Egerton, J. M. (1999). Chil-
dren’s recall 1 or 2 years after an event. Developmental Psychol-
ogy, 35, 781–789.
Pipe, M. E., Goodman, G. S., Quas, J., Bidrose, S., Ablin, D., & Craw,
S. (1997). Remembering early experiences during childhood: Are
traumatic events special. In J. D. Read & D. S. Lindsay (Eds.),
Recollections of trauma: Scientific evidence and clinical practice
(pp. 417–423). New York: Plenum Press.
Poole, D., & White, L. (1991). Effects of question repetition on the
eyewitness testimony of children and adults. Developmental Psy-
chology, 27(6), 975–986.
Poole, D. A., & Lindsay, D. S. (1995). Interviewing preschoolers: Ef-
fects of nonsuggestive techniques, parental coaching and leading
questions on reports of nonexperienced events. Journal of Experi-
mental Child Psychology, 60, 129–154.
Poole, D. A., & Lindsay, D. S. (2001). Children’s eyewitness reports
after exposure to misinformation from parents. Journal of Experi-
mental Psychology: Applied, 7, 27–50.
References 815
Powell, M., & Thomson, D. (1997). Contrasting memory for
temporal-source and memory for content in children’s dis-
crimination of repeated events. Applied Cognitive Psychology,
11, 339–360.
Powell, M. B., & Thomson, D. M. (1996). Children’s recall of an oc-
currence of a repeated event: Effects of age, retention interval,
and question type. Child Development, 67, 1988–2004.
Priestley, G., Roberts, S., & Pipe, M. E. (1999). Returning to the
scene: Reminders and context reinstatement enhance children’s
recall. Developmental Psychology, 35, 1006–1041.
Principe, G. F., & Ceci, S. J. (2002). “I saw it with my own ears”:
The effects of peer conversations on preschoolers’ reports of non-
experienced events. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology,
83(1), 1–25.
Principe, G. F., Kanaya, T., Ceci, S. J., & Singh, M. (in press). Be-
lieving is seeing: How rumors can engender false memories in
preschoolers. Psychological Science.
Principe, G. F., Ornstein, P. A., Baker-Ward, L., & Gordon, B. N.
(2000). The effects of intervening experiences on children’s
memory for a physical examination. Applied Cognitive Psychol-
ogy, 14, 59–80.
Pynoos, R. S., Steinberg, A. M., & Aronson, L. (1997). Traumatic ex-
periences: The early organization of memory in school-age chil-
dren and adolescents. In P. S. Applebaum, L. A. Uyehara, & M. R.
Elin (Eds.), Trauma and memory: Clinical and legal controversies
(pp. 272–289). New York: Oxford University Press.
Quas, J. A., Bottoms, B. L., Haegerich, T. M., & Nysse-Carris, K. L.
(2002). Effects of victim, defendant, and juror gender on deci-
sions in child sexual assault cases. Journal of Applied Social Psy-
chology, 24, 702–732.
Quas, J. A., Goodman, G. S., Bidrose, S., Pipe, M. E., Craw, S., &
Ablin, D. S. (1999). Emotion and memory: Children’s long-term
remembering, forgetting, and suggestibility. Journal of Experi-
mental Child Psychology, 72, 235–270.
Rayner, K., & Pollatsek, A. (1989). The psychology of reading. Upper
Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Ricci, C., & Beal, C. (1998). Effect of questioning techniques and in-
terview setting on young children’s eyewitness memory. Expert
Evidence, 6, 127–144.
Salekin, R. T. (2002). Juvenile transfer to adult court: How can devel-
opmental and child psychology inform policy decision making. In
B. L. Bottoms, M. B. Kovera, & B. D. McAuliff (Eds.), Children,
social science, and the law (pp. 203–232). New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Salmon, K. (2001). Remembering and reporting by children: The in-
f luence of cues and props. Clinical Psychology Review, 21(2),
267–300.
Salmon, K., & Pipe, M. E. (2000). Recalling an event one year later:
The impact of props, drawing and a prior interview. Applied Cog-
nitive Psychology, 14, 99–120.
Saywitz, K. J. (1987). Children’s testimony: Age-related patterns of
memory errors. In S. J. Ceci, M. P. Toglia, & D. F. Ross (Eds.), Chil-
dren’s eyewitness memory (pp. 36–52). New York: Springer Verlag.
Saywitz, K. J., & Moan-Hardie, S. (1994). Reducing the potential for
distortion of childhood memories. Consciousness and Cognition,
3, 408–425.
Schneider, W., & Bjorklund, D. F. (1998). Memory. In W. Damon
(Editor-in-Chief ) & D. Kuhn & R. S. Siegler (Vol. Eds.), Hand-
book of child psychology: Vol. 2. Cognition, perception, and lan-
guage (pp. 467–521). New York: Wiley.
816 The Child and the Law
Scullin, M., Kanaya, T., & Ceci, S. J. (2002). Measurement of indi-
vidual differences in children’s suggestibility across situations.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 8, 233–241.
Shaw, J. A., Applegate, B., & Schorr, C. (1996). Twenty-one-month
follow-up of school-age children exposed to Hurricane Andrew.
Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychi-
atry, 35, 359–364.
Shrimpton, S., Oates, K., & Hayes, S. (1998). Children’s memory of
events: Effects of stress, age, time delay and location of inter-
view. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 12, 133–143.
Simcock, G., & Hayne, H. (2002). Children fail to translate their pre-
verbal memories into language. Psychological Science, 13, 225–231.
Smith, D. W., Letourneau, E. J., Saunders, B. E., Kilpatrick, D. G.,
Resnick, H. S., & Best, C. L. (2000). Delay in disclosure of child-
hood rape: Results from a national survey. Child Abuse and Ne-
glect, 24(2), 273–287.
Snowden v. Singletary, 135 F.3d 732 (11th Cir. 1998).
State v. Fijnje, 84-19728 (11th Cir. 1995).
State of Washington v. Carol, M. D., & Mark, A. D., 983 P.2d 1165
(Wash. Ct. App. 1999).
State of Washington v. Manuel Hidalgo Rodriguez, 17600-2-III (Wa.
Ct. App. 1999).
Stein, N. L. (1996). Children’s memory for emotional events: Impli-
cations for testimony. In K. Pezdek & W. P. Banks (Eds.), The re-
covered/false memory debate (pp. 169–194). San Diego, CA:
Academic Press.
Steinberg, L., & Cauffman, E. (1996). Maturity of judgment in ado-
lescence: Psychosocial factors in adolescent decision-making.
Law and Human Behavior, 20(3), 249–272.
Steinberg, L., & Scott, E. (2003). Less guilty by reason of adoles-
cence: Developmental immaturity, diminished responsibility, and
the juvenile death penalty. American Psychologist, 58, 1009–1018.
Sternberg, K. J., Lamb, M. E., Orbach, Y., Esplin, P., & Mitchell, S.
(2001). Use of a structured investigative protocol enhances young
children’s responses to free-recall prompts in the course of foren-
sic interviews. Journal of Applied Psychology, 86, 997–1005.
Steward, M. S., & Steward, D. S. (with Farquahar, L., Myers, J. E. B.,
Reinart, M., Welker, J., Joye, N., Driskll, J., & Morgan, J.). (1996).
Interviewing young children about body touch and handling.
Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development,
61(4/5, Serial No. 248).
Stuber, M. L., Nader, K., Yasuda, P., Pynoos, R. S., & Cohen, S.
(1991). Stress response after pediatric bone marrow transplanta-
tion: Preliminary results of a prospective longitudinal study.
Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychi-
atry, 30, 952–957.
Summit, R. C. (1983). The child sexual abuse accommodation syn-
drome. Child Abuse and Neglect, 7, 177–193.
Talwar, V., Kang, L., Bala, N., & Lindsay, R. C. L. (2004). Children’s
lie-telling to conceal a parent’s transgression: Legal implications.
Law and Human Behavior, 28, 411–435.
Terr, L. (1988). What happens to early memories of trauma? A study
of 20 children under age 5 at the time of documented traumatic
events. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent
Psychiatry, 27, 96–104.
Terr, L. (1991). Childhood traumas: An outline and overview. Ameri-
can Journal of Psychiatry, 148, 10–20.
Terr, L. (1994). Unchained memories: True stories of traumatic mem-
ories, lost and found. New York: Basic Books.
Thompson, W. C., Clarke-Stewart, K. A., & Lepore, S. (1997). What
did the janitor do? Suggestive interviewing and the accuracy of
children’s accounts. Law and Human Behavior, 21(4), 405–426.
van der Kolk, B. A., & Fisler, R. E. (1995). Dissociation and the frag-
mentary nature of traumatic memories: Overview and exploratory
study. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 8, 505–525.
Verville, E. (1968). Behavior problems of children. Philadelphia: Saunders.
Warren, A. R., & Swartwood, J. N. (1992). Developmental issues in
f lashbulb memory research: Children recall the Challenger event.
In E. Winograd & U. Neisser (Eds.), Af fect and accuracy in recall:
Studies of “f lashbulb” memories (pp. 95–120). Cambridge, MA:
Cambridge University Press.
Warren, A. R., & Woodall, C. E. (1999). The reliability of hearsay
testimony: How well do interviewers recall their interviews with
children? Psychology, Public Policy and Law, 5, 355–371.
Warren, A. R., Woodall, C. E., Hunt, J. S., & Perry, N. W. (1996). “It
sounds good in theory, but . . .”: Do investigative interviewers
follow guidelines based on memory research? Child Maltreat-
ment, 1, 231–245.
Waterman, A. H., Blades, M., & Spencer, C. (2000). Do children try
to answer nonsensical questions? British Journal of Developmental
Psychology, 18(2), 211–225.
Wimmer, H., Hogerfe, G. J., & Perner, J. (1988). Children’s under-
standing of informational access as a source of knowledge. Child
Development, 59, 386–396.
Zaragoza, M., Payment, K., Kichler, J., Stines, L., & Drivdahl, S.
(2001, April). Forced confabulation and false memory in child wit-
nesses. Paper presented at the 2001 biennial meeting of the Soci-
ety for Research in Child Development, Minneapolis, MN.