The Quality of Forensic Child Interviewing in Child Sexual Abuse Cases in Indonesia

Abstract

Most of the foregoing research on child investigative interviewing has focused on interview practices in Western countries, thus potentially limiting the generalizability and application of the findings to improve interview practices in non-Western countries. The current studies are the first to examine police interviewing practices involving alleged child sexual abuse (CSA) victims in Indonesia which has marked cultural differences compared with Western countries. In Study 1, we presented Indonesian police child interviewers (N = 26) with a sexual abuse case vignette concerning a 7-year-old girl. Police interviewers were asked to write down the questions they would pose to the child. We categorized questions into four types: open-prompts, directives, option-posing, and suggestive. In Study 2, we examined Indonesian police files (N = 24) containing child sexual abuse interviews and also scored the type of questions used as per the first study. We compared our data with those obtained in Western countries. The consistent finding in both studies is that Indonesian police interviewers rarely used open-prompts, asked more directive and option-posing questions. Consistent with findings from Western countries, our studies provide indirect evidence that open-prompts may be infrequently used by forensic child interviewers in Indonesia.