Antaki et al J of Socioling 2015.pdf (348.68 kB)
Download filePolice interviews with vulnerable people alleging sexual assault: probing inconsistency and questioning conduct
journal contribution
posted on 2015-06-24, 14:09 authored by Charles Antaki, Emma Richardson, Elizabeth Stokoe, Sara WillottReporting sexual assault to the authorities is fraught with difficulties, and these
are compounded when the complainant is hindered by an intellectual disability
(ID). In a study of 19 UK police interviews with complainants with ID alleging
sexual assault and rape, we found that most interviewing officers on occasion
pursued lines of questioning which not only probed inconsistencies (which is
mandated by their guidelines), but implicitly questioned complainants' conduct
(which is not). We detail two main conversational practices which imply
disbelief and disapproval of the complainants' accounts and behaviour, and
whose pragmatic entailments may pose problems for complainants with ID.
Such practices probably emerge from interviewers' foreshadowing of the
challenges likely to be made in court by defence counsel. As a policy
recommendation, we suggest providing early explanation for the motivation for
such questioning, and avoiding certain question formats (especially how come
you did X? and why didn't you do Y?).
History
School
- Social Sciences
Department
- Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies
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Journal of SociolinguisticsCitation
ANTAKI, C. ... et al, 2015. Police interviews with vulnerable people alleging sexual assault: probing inconsistency and questioning conduct. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 19 (3), pp.328–350Publisher
© WileyVersion
- 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
2015Notes
This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: ANTAKI, C. ... et al, 2015. Police interviews with vulnerable people alleging sexual assault: probing inconsistency and questioning conduct. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 19 (3), pp.328–350, which has been published in final form at http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/josl.12124. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.ISSN
1467-9841Publisher version
Language
- en