Bridging Guidelines and Practice: Questioning Styles in Judicial Interviews with Child Sexual Abuse Victims in Portugal.

BACKGROUND

Statements for Future Use (SFU) are judicial pre-trial testimony proceedings and a central evidentiary mechanism in child sexual abuse (CSA) cases in Portugal. This procedure aims to prevent children from testifying at trial and to collect their accounts closer in time to the alleged events. Although evidence-based guidelines recommend open-ended, child-centered interviewing practices, little is known about how questioning is conducted in SFU interviews.

OBJECTIVE

This study examined questioning styles and children's responses in SFU interviews to assess alignment with best-practice recommendations.

PARTICIPANTS AND

SETTING

The sample comprised 128 SFU interviews conducted between 2014 and 2024 with CSA victims aged 4 to 19 years.

METHODS

This retrospective observational study coded interviewer utterance types and children's responses in real-world SFU interviews. Descriptive statistics and linear mixed-effects models were conducted.

RESULTS

Option-posing utterances were significantly more frequent than all other utterance types. Focused-recognition prompts were approximately twice as frequent as open or recall-based prompts. Invitations accounted for only 6% of utterances. Because focused-recognition prompts were used so frequently, more than half of the children's reported details were elicited through these prompts. Although rarely used, invitations were the most productive utterance type, eliciting the greatest number of details per utterance.

CONCLUSIONS

Despite international guidelines supporting child-centered, open-ended interviewing, Portuguese judicial interviews rely heavily on recognition-based questioning. Children's responses may therefore be more vulnerable to error and interviewer influence, potentially compromising testimonial reliability. Findings highlight the need to strengthen adherence to evidence-based interviewing protocols and child-sensitive justice practices.