Loughborough University
Browse
Antaki et al J of Socioling 2015.pdf (348.68 kB)

Police interviews with vulnerable people alleging sexual assault: probing inconsistency and questioning conduct

Download (348.68 kB)
journal contribution
posted on 2015-06-24, 14:09 authored by Charles Antaki, Emma Richardson, Elizabeth Stokoe, Sara Willott
Reporting 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

Published in

Journal of Sociolinguistics

Citation

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

Publisher

© Wiley

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 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

1467-9841

Language

  • en