In Porto, around 70 ‘statements for future use’ (DMF, in the Portuguese acronym) have been gathered using the new method for child victims in sexual abuse cases, which consists of using a forensic psychologist to interview the minors instead of a criminal judge.
This pilot project was launched two years ago and, as newspaper Diário de Notícias (DN) reports, “Looks set to radically change the way DMF statements are gathered.”
DMF interviews are conducted outside the courtroom to protect the child from having to testify, and can be used as evidence later on during the trial.
“Instead of a judge, a forensic psychologist interviews the child in a room with unidirectional glass, where the investigating judge, prosecutor and lawyers are present, without the victim seeing them”, DN explains.
However, the innovative move has not gone down well among some judicial circles.
Cristina Esteves, a criminal instruction judge at Cascais Court and president of the Justice and Democracy civic movement, argued “it is illegal to replace judges with psychologists in collecting ‘statements for future use’.
“The Code of Criminal Procedure is very clear and says that it is an examining magistrate who should conduct the interview”, she criticises.
During her career, Ms. Esteves has conducted hundreds of interviews with child abuse victims, and believes “it is necessary to focus on the training of judges to do these interviews, to replace magistrates with psychologists does not seem legal or viable. At the end of such hearings, what matters is whether those acts were criminal or not; if the defendant has committed them or not, and only a judge can determine that.”
Carlos Eduardo Peixoto, forensic psychologist at the Porto Institute of Legal Medicine, was responsible for implementing the new method, which came about following recently-published research into DMF statements, carried out by Mr. Peixoto and several other researchers.
The study analysed 137 interviews with children aged three to 17 between 2009 and 2014, and concluded that most of the questions are classed as ‘forced-choice’ and ‘targeted’, which the researchers concluded could “contaminate” most of the children’s details to the judges and affect their credibility.
Carlos Peixoto guarantees that using the new method, “based on open questions and restricting suggestive questions, it is possible to obtain information from children with a high degree of detail.”
Faced with possible hostility that the technique could receive from the judicial class, the forensic psychologist points out that it has had “the collaboration of several judges in the Porto district.”
And, he stressed, all hearings were conducted under the supervision of an investigating judge.
“During a first interval in the interview, the technician goes to the observation room where the judge, the Public Prosecutor and the lawyers are, and receives questions posed by these professionals; the session ends only when the judge says he is satisfied”, he explained.
Within the ranks of Portugal’s Attorney General’s Office the new method is viewed with a degree of scepticism.
António Ventinhas, president of the Public Prosecutor’s Magistrates Union, said he believes it would be “positive if specific training for prosecutors in the technique of interviewing children” was given, but already has “doubts about the greater effectiveness of interviews being conducted by psychologists, and also if there will be enough technicians to do so.”
Fernando Silva, a Family and Minors barrister, recalls that this technique is already implemented in Brazil “in an exemplary way”, because it guarantees “greater credibility of the testimony of the child.”