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Can people with intellectual disabilities resist implications of fault when police question their allegations of sexual assault and rape?

journal contribution
posted on 2015-08-11, 08:23 authored by Charles Antaki, Elizabeth Stokoe, Emma Richardson, Sara Willott
When people alleging sexual assault are interviewed by police, their accounts are tested to see if they would 'stand up in court'. Some tests are in the form of tendentious questions carrying implications (e.g. that the sex was consensual) damaging to the complainant's allegation. In a qualitative analysis of 19 English police interviews with people with a variety of intellectual disabilities, we show how they deal with the pragmatic complexity of such tendentious questions. We give examples in which the complainants detect and resist the questions' damaging implications, but focus on occasions when they do not do so. We discuss the use of tendentious questions in the light of national UK guidelines on the treatment of vulnerable witnesses.

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Department

  • Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies

Published in

Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities

Citation

ANTAKI, C. ... et al, 2015. Can people with intellectual disabilities resist implications of fault when police question their allegations of sexual assault and rape? Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, 53(5), pp.346-357.

Publisher

© American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (AAIDD)

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2015

Notes

This article is closed access.

ISSN

1934-9556

Language

  • en