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Seeking Accurate Memories

Drawing may be one of the best ways to get accurate accounts of abuse from children, according to University of Otago researchers.

"Childhood sexual abuse has become a leading mental health concern in New Zealand and around the world," says researchers Professors Margaret-Ellen Pipe and Harlene Hayne, who have been doing research into children's eye-witness memory during the past decade. The child is usually the only witness, and his or her account of the event is crucial.

"Our goal is to establish the conditions that enable children to provide the most complete and accurate accounts of their experiences," Pipe says.

Researchers examined the use of dolls, photographs and drawing as interview techniques to improve children's accounts. Hayne says that some techniques, such as drawing during the interview, increased the amount of information that children reported without decreasing their accuracy. Past findings have shown that children are "notoriously poor" at recounting their experiences in standard oral interviews.

"The brevity of children's accounts is especially evident under tests of free recall, in which the child is asked open-ended questions such as what happened?'" Hayne says that a child's reply might be so brief as to make the information clinically and legally useless. New ways had to be found.

"The results of the present programme will contribute information necessary for developing policies and law in this area. Some of the techniques that we have developed have already been adopted by clinicians working with children and have influenced how interviews are conducted in legal contexts."