Developing a Functional Code System to Analyze Forensic Interviews with Suspected Victims of Child Sexual Abuse

This study describes the efforts of Brazilian and American researchers to create a functional coding system to analyze interviews with children alleged to have been sexually abused in order to support the work of forensic interviewers in Brazil. Relying on a mixed-method approach, researchers conducted the study in two stages. Initially, the proposed coding system was built on concepts focused on the relationship between forensic interviewer and child utterances to discern the factors affecting information sharing on the part of suspected child victims of sexual abuse. Researchers then used that coding system to analyze a sample of child interviews from a Brazilian civil court of protection to capture the depth of the children's disclosure of relevant information. The findings indicate that forensic interviewers frequently used recognition memory prompts rather than probing children's free recall memory. Free recall memory probes were positively correlated with disclosure of new information while recognition memory probes positively correlated with uninformative utterances. The effects of age, number of interview sessions, and group differences were also examined between disclosing and non-disclosing children. Implications of the coding system, including how the verbal interactions with interviewers may influence the child's motivation to disclose sexual abuse, are discussed.