I practice primarily in King, Pierce and Snohomish county in Washington State. These counties have a similar policy when a report of child sexual abuse (‘CSA’) is made; it is routed to a professional interviewer for a ‘CFI’ (Child Forensic Interview).
A very common scenario would be as follows: ‘Janie Doe’, an 8-year-old third grader, tells a school counselor that the reason she is sad all the time and can’t do her schoolwork is that “mommy and daddy yell at each other all the time, and daddy moved out. I only see him on weekends.” When asked how she feels living with mom, Janie says “Mom is always mad.”When the school counselor asks Janie how she feels when she sees her dad, she says, “I am so glad to see him. I wish he would not come into my room when I was getting dressed.”
Out of the proverbial “overabundance of caution,” the counselor makes a report to Washington’s Child Protective Services (‘CPS’). A CPS caseworker shows up to Janie’s school the next day. Janie is asked, in the presence of the school counselor, if her Dad “stays” while she dresses. Janie says “no,” but also says, “I don’t like it when he comes in the bathroom while I’m showering.” The CPS caseworker, out of an “overabundance of caution,” stops further questioning, and contacts local law enforcement to come to the school.
Most law enforcement officers dispatched to the school will not question Janie further; they will schedule a CFI with a professional interviewer affiliated with the county prosecutor’s office, and have the case “assigned” to a detective from the law enforcement agency’s Sexual Assault Unit (‘SAU’). They will also contact the parents “to get their side of the story.”
When I have asked the assigned SAU detective why there is a formal CFI for such a vague, quite likely innocent situation, the uniform response is “the child should not be subjected to multiple interviews- it’s too traumatic.” There are many other supportable reasons for a single interview; the more interviews, the more details that may be inconsistent. The more interviews, the more a child may sense she is not giving sought-after information, particularly when the child notices follow-up questions are in a certain subject area. Detectives have candidly told me that a child “subjected to multiple interviews” is more likely to be a mediocre trial witness and more culpable to damaging cross examination by a defense attorney.
This has led experts in child development to recommend that practitioners minimize the number of interviews by adhering to the ‘one interview rule’ (e.g. American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children 2002). In reality, the concept of a “single CFI” is obviated by the fact that, no matter how short or truncated, formal forensic interviews are usually preceded by several conversations between children and those concerned about their wellbeing, such as caregivers, police officers, social workers, and medical examiners.
In a recent article entitled “Urgent Issues and Prospects on Investigative Interviews with Children and Adolescents”, the ‘one interview rule’ was challenged because it is likely the suspected child victim was indeed ‘questioned’ before the CFI:
“Multiple opportunities to recall abuse experience are very likely the norm rather than exception…most details reported by children in a second interview were new rather than repeated and that two interviews elicited close to double the number of details reported in a single interview.”
The citation for the article is included below.
This writer thinks multiple interviews are dangerous for the child, and law enforcement efforts at criminal prosecution. ‘New details’ do not provide any standards for reliability or credibility regarding a disclosure of sexual abuse and are culpable to common concerns of suggestibility. I would be surprised if any law enforcement agencies or prosecutors offices will move away from the ‘one interview’ standard.
Victoria Talwar et al., Urgent Issues and Prospects on Investigative Interviews with Children and Adolescents, . Legal and Criminological Psychology, Feb. 2025, at 61, 68, https://doi.org/10.1111/lcrp.12269