Police interviews with criminals and witnesses may be the fodder of popular TV crime shows but forensic interviewing is a highly specialised area which can take years of practice to hone.
Professor Martine Powell, Director of the Centre for Investigative Interviewing based at Griffith University’s Mt Gravatt campus and world-renowned child interviewer, says one of the biggest issues in how interviews are conducted in practice is the lack of consistency with scientific guidance.
“The aim of investigative interviewing is to elicit an accurate and detailed account of an event or situation from a person, but in practice too few interviews are characterised by open-ended prompts,’’ she said.
“When interviewing child witnesses, it often appears that despite the best of intentions, interviewers tend to stray from being relatively passive receivers of children’s information and instead play a major role, albeit inadvertently, in shaping their accounts.
“This is a problem in most jurisdictions. Knowing how to
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