Interrogation and false confessions among adolescents in seven European countries. What background and psychological variables best discriminate between false confessors and non-false confessors?

Abstract

The main aim of the study was to investigate the rate of claimed false confession during police questioning and identify variables that best discriminate between false confessors and non-false confessors. The participants were 24 627 high school students in seven countries in Europe. Out of 2726 who had been interrogated by the police as a suspect, 375 (13.8%) claimed to have made false confessions to the police. Logistic regression analyses showed that for both boys and girls, having attended substance abuse therapy, been attacked and bullied, and having committed a burglary, significantly discriminated between the false confessor and non-false confessor. In addition for boys, having been sexually abused by an adult outside the family was the single best predictor. The study shows the importance of history of victimization and substance misuse among adolescents in relation to giving a false confession to police during interrogation.

Keywords:

• interrogation
• false confessions
• sexual abuse
• substance misuse
• bullying

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Actavis and the City of Reyjavik for financial support, to the numerous people in each of the seven countries who assisted with collection of the data, and to the President of Iceland, Olafur Ragnar Grimsson, for his continued support of this study.

Notes

1. This study was proposed at The Advisory Board Meeting of European Cities against Drugs (ECAD) held in Rimini, Italy, on 4 February 2005. The programme, named ‘Youth in Europe – A drug prevention programme’, aimed to implement effective measures to prevent the distribution, selling and use of illegal substances. The research was coordinated and organized by Reykjavik University and focused on known risk and protective factors in prevention as a tool to assist policy makers in Europe. Each participating country appointed a designated researcher worker who was responsible for organizing and collecting the data in their chosen cities.

2. The study is a part of a larger European study of drug prevention, Youth in Europe – A prevention programme. The ‘parent’ study is a cross-national comparative research to identify and analyse comparable data on drug use and related social factors. It consists of a large number of psychological and background variables considered relevant to illicit drug use. For the purpose of the current research into false confessions a number of items were added to the original questionnaire in the ‘parent’ study, which specifically focused on police interrogations and confessions. The items selected from the background variables were those most theoretically relevant to the risk of making a false confession based on our previous research in a large Icelandic study (Gudjonsson et al., 2006, 2007).