Misleading the Alleged Offender: Child Witnesses’ Displays of Competence in Police Interviews

Abstract

This chapter investigates Dutch police interviews with children who are a victim or a witness of sexual violence. These interviews have a great import for children. On the one hand, the testimonies allow children to tell their story and the fact that they are interviewed demonstrates faith in their competence to testify. On the other hand, the interview is a potentially difficult situation for children. Children need to provide a detailed account of sexual violence to an unknown police officer. Moreover, the institutional goal of police interviews is not to help the child and some advice that is meant to ensure reliability of the elicited information sometimes work out as being less than supportive. In this chapter we aim to show how children establish being competent, both in the situation of sexual violence and in the interview itself. We focus on occasions when children formulate their own behavior as somehow misleading the alleged offender in order to avoid the offense or to escape from it. Such reports portray the child as having actively resisted the alleged offender in the reported offense situation, while also displaying awareness of potential (interactional) repercussions when such resistance is offered explicitly and directly. Simultaneously, reports of misleading the alleged offender are situated and produced in interaction with the police officer. As such, they construct a version of what happened that emphasizes resistance and hence counters alternative versions of the story, including those that attribute blame based on the social belief that victims should resist their alleged offender (the ultimate resistance myth, e.g., Estrich in Real rape. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1987). Although it is problematic that such a belief exists, it can be seen as a sign of interactional competence that children manage to build their accounts of what happened in ways that pre-empt such damaging versions of the story (MacLeod in Journal of Pragmatics 96: 96–109, 2016).