Years of experience using the NICHD Protocol in forensic interviews led forensic interviewers to realize that its careful focus on the cognitive factors that help children be good informants about their experiences sometimes need to be complemented by closer attention to the social and emotional factors that affect how cooperative suspected victims may be in forensic interviews, especially when the suspected offender is a family member or someone on whom they are emotionally or otherwise dependent. This led to the creation of the Revised Protocol. The Revised Protocol includes all of the techniques and strategies that helped make the Standard Protocol successful but places more emphasis on providing social and emotional support to address emotional factors that often impede cooperativeness. The Revised Protocol was finalized by the mid 2010s and has been widely employed since then. Available here are translations into a number of the languages in which it has been successfully employed in the last decade. Experience and research have shown that the Revised Protocol is superior to the Standard Protocol and that interviewers should be trained to use it.

As with the Standard Protocol, it is important to make clear that effective use of the Standard Protocol depends on extensive training, including guidance from peers and other experts. Simply reading the Protocol before using it does not ensure high quality interviewing.

By the mid-1990s, we had learned a great deal about what interviewers should do when conducting investigative interviews with suspected victims of child abuse and we had learned a lot about what interviewers should not do in those interviews. Many experts conducted trainings and gave lectures explaining what interviewers should and should not do. Trainees nodded sagely. The information was clear. They understood. However, when they came to conducting interviews, all that learning seemed to disappear.

It was in this context that the NICHD Protocol was developed. It aimed to provide clear and concrete guidance about what interviewers should aim to do when interviewing suspected victims. Because experience and research had shown that simply knowing conceptually what to do or not do was insufficient, the Protocol provided many examples and concrete suggestions. All of the guidance was based on years of research showing how to make is easiest for children in these situations to understand their roles and those of the interviewer, and the specific questions they were asked; how to feel comfortable in the unfamiliar context, how to retrieve memories of experienced events from memory, how to provide detailed accounts of those experienced events, how to respond to unusually open questions. To help the interviewers avoid distracting the children and contaminating their responses, the Protocol also set up a structure to ensure that they provided the best possible scaffold to assist the children and make sure that, if they did ask more risky questions, they did so as late as possible so any damage was minimized.

text for Revised Suspect Protocol

Please edit here!

The Japanese version was translated by Makiko Naka. Other Japanese documents are available at https://forensic-interviews.jp/doc/?r=276 .

Portuguese and Portuguese (Brazil)

Spanish and Spanish (Argentina)