False Negatives in Sexual Abuse Interviews: Preliminary Investigation of a Relationship to Dissociation

Abstract

ABSTRACT This study followed-up children who initially had presented to a hospital emergency room with purely physical complaints later determined to be a sexually transmitted disease considered to be compelling evidence of sexual abuse. Cases were selected where there was no prior history, suspicion, or disclosure of abuse, and the child failed to disclose any sexual contact in the initial sexual abuse disclosure interview. These interview “false negatives” previously had been found to be related to caretaker biases against considering the possibility that abuse may have occurred. However, it was not clear what role, if any, individual psychological processes may have played in the false negative interviews. The present study re-located and assessed a small number of these children for dissociative and behavioral symptoms. Two non-contemporaneous comparison groups were used: “true-positive” (i.e., disclosing) sexually abused children from the same hospital emergency room and non-abused, non-psychiatric controls from the same hospital. False negative children were found to have significantly higher levels of dissociative symptoms, although they did not differ from true positives and non-abused controls on general behavioral problems. The results would be consistent with an association between false negatives in sexual abuse interviews and dissociation. Because the study was correlational, and dissociation was measured long after the false negative interview, caution is advised in inferring that dissociation may cause false negative interviews.