...cases repeated child abuse. The professionals' perceptions (all experts in this area) were elicited via individual in-depth semi-structured interviews. While all participants acknowledged the importance of particuladsation, the views of the police officers varied in several important ways to those of the other professionals. Overall, the police officers perceived that highly specific details (such as the location, date and time of the offence) are essential for particularisation to occur, and that maximising the number of separate offences and specific details about each offence increases the chance of successful prosecution. In contrast, the legal professionals perceived that the primacy goal of the police officers should be to elicit a free- narrative account of one or more offences. A high proportion of specific questions was perceived to negatively impact on the child's credibility by contaminating the evidence. The implications of these findings are discussed.

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Sexual and physical abuse of children is a global problem that affects millions of children worldwide (World Health Organization, 1999). While there is no firm indication of the number of children who are actually affected by child abuse, reports of suspected child abuse in Australia alone was 115,471 in 2004 (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 2004). In some of these cases, an act of abuse was allegedly perpetrated on a single occasion. In many cases, however, several different acts of abuse were allegedly perpetrated, or a particular act was perpetrated on multiple occasions over an extended period of time (hereby referred to as repeated abuse). Irrespective of the type of abuse (single or repeated), police and child protection organisations usually interview alleged child abuse victims when these authorities receive a notification of suspected abuse.

Interviewing children about abuse for investigative purposes is a challenging task. However, it is particularly challenging in cases where the abuse was repeated. For an offender to be charged and convicted in relation to child abuse, most jurisdictions require that the individual offence(s) be 'particularised'. Specifically, each separate act of which the suspect is charged must be identified with reasonable precision with reference to time, place or some other unique contextual detail (S v. R, 1989). (1) Recalling an individual occurrence of repeated abuse, however, is not an easy task for witnesses, especially when the separate occurrences of abuse were similar in terms of content or context (Connolly & Lindsay, 2001; Hudson, 1990; Lindsay, Johnson, & Kwon, 1991; Powell & Roberts, 2002; Powell, Roberts, Ceci, & Hembrooke, 1999; Powell & Thomson, 1996, 1997a, 1997b). One key difficulty is the ability to identify and recall details pertaining to one particular occurrence as distinct from another. However, even when a particular occurrence can be unambiguously identified, a person may still have difficulty discriminating the occurrence from other similar experiences (Hudson, 1990; Powell et al., 1999; Powell & Thomson, 1996, 1997a, 1997b). Both of these difficulties are particularly pronounced for children whose knowledge and understanding of time, and ability to monitor the source of details, is not as well developed as that of adults (Friedman, 1991, 1993; Roberts & Blades, 2000). The difficulties children have in discriminating between occurrences of repeated variable events are depicted by a high proportion of internal intrusion errors (i.e., intrusion of details from other occurrences of the event into the target occurrence).

Research examining the effect of repeated experience on child eyewitness memory is still in its infancy. Much of the prior research to date has focused on identifying and understanding the nature of children's difficulties as opposed to testing possible strategies that may reduce these. However, broad recommendations for interviewing have emerged (see Roberts & Powell, 2001 for review). One of the main recommendations is that children (irrespective of their age) should be allowed to report what happened in each occurrence of the repeated event in their own words (i.e., in response to broad open-ended questions) and without interruption (Orbach et al., 2000; Powell, Fisher, & Wright, 2005; Powell & McMeeken, 1998; Roberts & Powell, 2001). Open-ended questions encourage elaborate responses and minimise internal intrusion (and other) errors whereas these errors are heightened when questions narrow the range of response options and focus the child's attention on specific details that may have varied across separate experiences (Powell & Roberts, 2002; Powell & Thomson, 1996).

So how well do investigative interviewers adhere to open-ended questions when interviewing children about repeated abuse? Unfortunately, the prior literature suggests that the under-use of open-ended questions is a major limitation of police officers and child protection workers. A highly specific questioning style is common, particularly the use of closed (e.g., yes/no, option posing) questions (Aldridge & Cameron, 1999; Cederborg, Orbach, Sternberg, & Lamb, 2000; Sternberg, Lamb, Davies, & Westcott, 2001; Sternberg, Lamb, Esplin, & Baradaran, 1999; Warren, Woodall, Hunt, & Perry, 1996; Warren et al., 1999). This finding has been consistent across field interviews (many of which were likely to involve repeated abuse) as wall as mock (simulated) interviews about single and repeated events (Guadagno, 2006; Powell et al., 2005). Many of the specific questions focus on eliciting highly specific contextual and temporal details such as the number of times the event occurred, when and where the occurrences took place, the time and duration of each occurrence, who was present, and where specific items occurred within the series (Guadagno, 2006).

The high rate of specific questions begs the questions: Are officers aware that they use so many highly specific questions? Do they believe that such questions are beneficial for particularising repeated abuse? The aim of this study was to answer these questions by examining the perceptions of police officers and legal professionals (i.e., prosecutors, defence lawyers, judges) with considerable experience in the prosecution of child abuse offences. The reason for including legal professionals in this study is that they provide a framework for understanding the police officers' perceptions. Specifically, they assisted in drawing conclusions about the degree to which the police officers' perceptions and interpretations of the law are particular to the officers' background and the unique context in which they work.

However, this study was not designed to understand how representative or widespread the beliefs or perceptions of the professionals are. Rather, it examined the perceptions of a select group of professionals:...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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