Paper long abstract:

If a child is related to a criminal case, he/she might be interviewed as a witness in court. Different actors relate to this interview in various ways, at different times and places. It may even shape the outcome of a court case. Interviewing child witnesses and documenting these interviews, however, are processes that seem to be standardized only at the first sight. A closer look reveals the epistemic claims and some creativity involved documenting interviews with child witnesses.

In order to present these epistemic claims, this paper investigates the process of documenting the interview, particularly the transformation of spoken into written words. The paper presents how the documented interview serves organizational requirements, that it addresses a selected audience and is written in a specific form. In the documentation of the interview certain elements of the child's reality were singularized, generalized and mobilized. When the orally conducted interview becomes a written document, a lot of this transformative work is no longer visible. Then, the newly enacted document renders statements of the interview as facts.

Documenting child witnesses not only enacts knowledge about the specific court case. Instead, in the process of blackboxing the process of documenting, various claims are attached to the document, among them an objectivity of the statements and care for children.

This paper draws from interviews conducted with judges, attorneys and a psychologist, which provide a Statement Validity Assessment report after a child was interviewed.