Investigating Child Sex Abuse Allegations: A Guide to Help Legal Professionals Distinguish Valid from Invalid Claims

Abstract

This article is written to help prosecutors as well as defense counsel gain more knowledge of the science relevant to child sex abuse allegations. Increased knowledge reduces professionals' doubts about handling these enormously complex cases, and the greater confidence moves these professionals just a little way toward certainty. The behavioral sciences can assist legal professionals in their efforts to determine the validity of a given child sex abuse (CSA) allegation. To provide some information from those fields, the author reviewed the pertinent literature. Some findings emerged: 1) clinicians' judgments about the veridicality of unconfirmed CSA allegations may well lack a firm scientific basis; 2) no psychological test or method reliably indicates whether a child has been sexually mistreated, or whether someone has committed an act of abuse; 3) children do sometimes falsely accuse; 4) the concepts of “memory repression” and “recovered memory” are not scientifically substantiated; 5) medical evaluations are often inadequate to determine the presence or absence of sex abuse; 6) the most reliable indicator of sexual mistreatment is often not the physical examination, but rather the child's own report; 7) certain features of the child's account suggest that the accusation is valid. It is concluded that conducting such interviews is of paramount importance; suggestions are made to improve these interviews' quality.