Emotional Language Used by Victims of Alleged Sexual Abuse During Forensic Investigation

Addressing the characteristics of children as witnesses has been a focus of many researchers; however, the emotion derived from children during investigative interviews is an understudied field that is vital for practitioners from various contexts. The current study explores the emotional language that children use during forensic investigations following suspected sexual abuse. The sample comprises 97 investigative interviews with children (N = 97) aged 3–14 years. These interviews were randomly selected from all forensic interviews carried out in Israel in 2011. All of the interviews were conducted in conformity with the National Institute of Child Health and Development Protocol, and the emotional language of the children was coded. The results reveal a limited overall presence of emotional language. Children hardly used positive emotional language and mainly employed negative emotional language. The interview phase and the age of the children greatly affected the use of emotional language, and gender and suspect familiarity had no effect on the children’s emotional language. The findings from the current study enhance existing knowledge on the emotional language of children during forensic investigations and highlight the study’s unique characteristics in the context of abuse, trauma, and forensic investigation. The results of this study demonstrate the need for including probes about emotions in investigative interviews and the addition of emotional language to coding schemes for investigative interviews.