Facilitating disclosure of child sexual abuse victims in the middle childhood : a seven-phase forensic interview protocol

Abstract

Conducting forensic interviews are challenging and the impact of a poorly conducted interview has a detrimental impact on all persons concerned. This study aimed at developing, implementing and evaluating a seven-phase forensic interview protocol for social workers and allied professionals. Twenty girls in the middle childhood, allegedly been sexually abused, were purposively selected in an experimental and comparison group in order to determine if the proposed seven-phase forensic interview protocol is implementable and which parts of it appears to be probably used in the social work profession in South Africa. The statistical analysis showed that in five of the seven phases a statistically significant difference was found between the experimental and comparison groups. The results propose that the seven-phase forensic interview protocol was successfully implemented, and could probably be considered a new development to the social work profession. However further research with a larger sample of children is needed.