Imprecision About Body Mechanics When Child Witnesses Are Questioned About Sexual Abuse
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In child sexual abuse cases, a central part of the child’s testimony is their description of the abuse episode. However, it is often difficult for children to describe the body mechanics of abuse, and miscommunications are likely to occur. In the present study, we examined questions about the mechanics of abuse in trial transcripts ( N = 63) to identify sources of miscommunication ( N = 130) between attorneys and children (5–12 years old, M age at trial = 9.44, SD = 1.97). We found that both attorneys and children used imprecise language, which led to miscommunication. Specifically, the imprecise use of sexual terminology and the word “touch,” polarity items, broad open-ended questions, anaphora and elliptical questions, and “how” questions led to imprecision in attorneys’ questions. Imprecise attorney questions often elicited underinformative answers from children, including misinterpretations of the grain size (i.e., level of detail) requested. In response to these underinformative answers, attorneys at times asked highly focused and leading questions, which led to further miscommunications. Implications and recommendations for future research on how best to elicit details about the mechanics of abuse from children are discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".