Vulnerable Witnesses and Problems of Portrayal

Abstract

Through an analysis of a videotaped police interview with a child witness in an alleged rape case, we use conceptual frames and narrative analysis to illustrate how perceptions of co-conspirator and guilt are naively cultivated by (1) the child's relative inability to appropriately structure narrative responses to the police officer's questions and (2) the police officer's lack of attention to the cultural associations embedded in questions asked that draw on the rape myth. These observations illustrate that the videotaped police interview should not serve as both (1) police-produced information for the Crown prosecutors and (2) the witness's evidence-in-chief to be shown in court. Our analysis suggests that a great deal of damage can be done in an interview with a vulnerable witness due to the absence, criticized in earlier work, of lawyer direction, and that a child's testimony is weakened by the jury watching this video as the witness's evidence-in-chief.