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Bridging guidelines and practice: Questioning styles in judicial interviews with child sexual abuse victims in Portugal
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Orientador(es)
Resumo(s)
central evidentiary mechanism in child sexual abuse (CSA) cases in Portugal. This procedure aims
to prevent children from testifying at trial and to collect their accounts closer in time to the
alleged events. Although evidence-based guidelines recommend open-ended, child-centered
interviewing practices, little is known about how questioning is conducted in SFU interviews.
Objective: This study examined questioning styles and children's responses in SFU interviews to
assess alignment with best-practice recommendations.
Participants and setting: The sample comprised 128 SFU interviews conducted between 2014 and
2024 with CSA victims aged 4 to 19 years.
Methods: This retrospective observational study coded interviewer utterance types and children's
responses in real-world SFU interviews. Descriptive statistics and linear mixed-effects models
were conducted.
Results: Option-posing utterances were significantly more frequent than all other utterance types.
Focused-recognition prompts were approximately twice as frequent as open or recall-based
prompts. Invitations accounted for only 6% of utterances. Because focused-recognition prompts
were used so frequently, more than half of the children's reported details were elicited through
these prompts. Although rarely used, invitations were the most productive utterance type, eliciting
the greatest number of details per utterance.
Conclusions: Despite international guidelines supporting child-centered, open-ended interviewing,
Portuguese judicial interviews rely heavily on recognition-based questioning. Children's responses
may therefore be more vulnerable to error and interviewer influence, potentially
compromising testimonial reliability. Findings highlight the need to strengthen adherence to
evidence-based interviewing protocols and child-sensitive justice practices.
Descrição
Palavras-chave
Child sexual abuse Criminal justice system Forensic interviews Interviewer utterances Testimony
Contexto Educativo
Citação
Fernandes, D., Gomes, J. P., Almeida, T. S., Matos, M., & Albuquerque, P. B. (2026b). Bridging Guidelines and Practice: Questioning Styles in Judicial Interviews with Child Sexual Abuse Victims in Portugal. Child Abuse & Neglect, 178, 108159. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2026.108159
Editora
Elsevier BV