The Interactional Costs of “Neutrality” in Police Interviews with Child Witnesses

ABSTRACT

This paper concerns the interactional dilemma between displaying affiliation and doing being neutral. This dilemma is highly salient in police interviews with child witnesses where interviewing guidelines encourage police officers to take a neutral stance to avoid steering children’s stories. In this article, we use conversation analysis to analyze childrens’ volunteered accounts of their own role during the alleged offense, e.g., how they resisted. Such accounts make relevant affiliative uptakes such as approval, disagreement, or reassurance that may be seen as nonneutral. Hence, these accounts raise interactional dilemmas for police officers: Should they do what is interactionally relevant or follow the guidelines? Our analysis shows how police officers display and deal with this dilemma and that children may add to it by pursuing something more than neutralistic uptakes. The upshot of this analysis is that attempting to be neutral in interaction may cause apparently undesirable interactional difficulties. The data are from the Netherlands.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Some ethnographic work accompanied was done to better understand the setting. This is more elaborately explained in Jol (2020).

² This article is based on an earlier version of the analysis in Jol’s dissertation (Jol, 2020).

³ This phrase is a bit odd in Dutch. A more standard phrase is, e.g., “next to us/our house stands a flat.”

⁴ The Dutch utterance is missing a subject.

⁵ Hij is translated here as “it” because it likely refers to her underwear or pants.

⁶ Diminutives are very common in Dutch. It is uncertain if the diminutive broekje is just one of those cases, if it refers to children’s pants or to shorts. The latter seems more likely given the embodied demonstration. Hence the translation as “shorts.

Additional information

Funding

The research was funded by the Centre for Language Studies (CLS) of the Radboud University Nijmegen.