disclosure of abuse, asking children questions, questions about abuse

Asking children questions about possibly abusive events

Jenni Whitehead sets a 'questions exercise' for the staffroom discussion or staff meeting

As part of my development role I co-train with a police officer, from our local child protection unit, on our investigating child abuse course. This course is run on a multi-agency basis and aims to help professionals to understand their role in investigations. For most professionals their role will be to share their information with the appropriate agencies. However, professionals can only share their information once they know that it is information that needs to be shared. Teachers and other education staff are well placed to receive information from children and where a child is able (and willing) to give a free-flowing account of an abusive event it is necessary to ask questions, other than for clarification. However, as you probably already understand, children and especially very young children may only give the listener little snippets of information making the asking of questions unavoidable.

We have now a dilemma: many local authorities still give the advice that we should avoid asking questions, when at the same time we know children often need the helping adult to steer them through a process of telling, even when they are telling about enjoyable non-abusive events. Some local authorities simply advise against asking leading questions without a great deal of advice about what questions can be asked.
Adults often ask questions of children that include clues as to the context of the answer required. ‘Did this happen at the weekend?’, indicates to the child that the answer required is about timing and days. However, the question specifies a particular timing and may result in a simple yes or no answer. If the answer is no the adult is left with trying to ascertain on which of the other five days the event occurred. The point here is that questions that elicit only a yes or no answer are not particularly helpful.

Closed questions and open questions
Try this exercise in your staff meeting. In pairs, one person thinks of a famous person, the other person has to work out who it is by asking questions. They can only ask closed questions. A closed question being one that will result in a yes or no answer. Make sure each partner has a go. You will find that while most pairs can work it out it is a fairly lengthy task. Some pairs will get the answer fairly quickly if they know each other well and know each other’s interests. (Tony Blair and Elvis come up fairly regularly in this exercise!)
Now ask people to think about doing the same exercise with Year 1 children. It would be easier with children whom you know have a favourite character!

Answers to closed questions do not give us a lot of detail or description.

Now try the exercise again using more open questions. (You are not allowed to ask ‘Who is it?’)

Use questions that start with the words what, when, how and where. Again make sure both partners have a chance to have a go.

You will find that those asking the questions were able to acquire a lot more information from these types of questions than with the closed questions. However, doing this with adults is quite different from doing this with young children.

As teachers will know there is an order of development in children’s acquisition of comprehension of wh-question words and children may adopt strategies to cope with wh-questions that they don’t understand. Linguistic researchers argue that particular wh-questions are understood before others, namely what, where and who are easier to understand than how, why and when.

Common strategies
For instance the young child who does not understand the ‘when’ part of the question, ‘When did this happen?’ may respond as if it is a where question and answer ‘In my bedroom.’ Another strategy comes into play when young children only understand part of the question. For example ‘How and why did you go to the house?’ may result in an answer that only takes account of the ‘how’ part of the question and not the ‘why’ part – ‘In the car.’ Another strategy is to give a stereotypical answer and stick to that for all questions. Example: ‘Where did this happen?’ Answer: ‘School.’ ‘Did it happen anywhere else?’ Answer: ‘Yes’. ‘Where else did it happen?’ Answer: ‘School.’

The ‘I don’t know’ answer is quite common! Children may use this as an avoidance technique, they may not understand the question and they may genuinely not know. Not knowing can become a pattern for managing all questions, where this occurs think about how to rephrase the question, rather than ask ‘Why did dad do this?’ ask ‘What happened?’.

Personally I would always try to avoid the why word when talking to children about difficult events. Why does tend to suggest blame, ‘Why did you do that?’ is often met with, ‘I don’t know miss.’ Whereas ‘what happened?’ suggests that you understand that there must have been a reason for the child behaving in what ever way they behaved.

Completely open questions
Completely open questions allow the child who is ready and able to tell.

Try the exercise again using what have been called TED questions: Tell, Explain, Describe. Again as adults we are able to use this type of question to our best advantage: ‘Tell me about the person.’ ‘Explain what makes them famous?’, ‘Describe the person.’ Think about the differences in asking the same questions of children and discuss how you might use the questions to help the child talk about the event.

‘Tell me what happened’
‘Please explain what you mean when you say…’
‘Can you describe the person?’ or ‘Can you describe the place?’

I would suggest that given that young children’s understanding of questions will be more limited than older children and adults, the most useful of the TED questions is ‘Tell me’: ‘Tell me what happened’, ‘Tell me who was there’, ‘Tell me what they did’, ‘Tell me what happened next.’

There is another reason that the ‘Tell me’ question is more useful to children, it suggests in a very direct way that we want to know, that we are ready to hear. Children who are trying to tell us about abuse may view the ‘helping adult’ as a potential extra burden. ‘If I tell will it upset her?’ ‘Will I cause him pain if I tell him this?’ So anything that we can do to suggest to the child that we are capable of hearing will be useful.

Reflection on practice
As part of the exercise ask staff to reflect on their own direct work with children: do they ever ask questions that children are less likely to understand, do they sometimes use two wh-questions in one question?
Ask staff to continue reflecting on their own practice and set up a follow up session to discuss how they have changed their practice, what worked and what didn’t.

Good luck!

Use the following examples and ask staff to think about the strategies the child is using as a result of not quite understanding the question.

Question – ‘How did he do it?
Answer – ‘Years ago.’
Question – ‘When does it happen?’
Answer – ‘In the bath.’
Question – ‘ Why did mummy smack you?’
Answer – ‘Here’ (points to bottom)
Question – ‘Why do boys wear trunks for swimming?’
Answer – ‘Cos they do and girls wear costumes cos they do.’
Question -’How many times has this happened?’
Answer – ‘Yesterday ago.’
Question – ‘When did it last happen?’
Answer – ‘When I had my jeans on.’
Question – ‘When did it happen and where was your mum?’
Answer – ‘With me'.

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