Using dolls to help young children detail abuse called into question

By Jim Barlow

Using anatomically correct dolls with young children, especially youngsters
3 years old and under, does not help them describe how they were touched by
an adult, according to a recent psychological study.

The researchers concluded that 2 1/2-year-old children, even after giving
relatively accurate verbal accounts, "were quite unsuccessful when asked
simply to map between their own body and a doll, and neither the 2 1/2- nor
the 3-year-olds were very good at using a doll to demonstrate" where they
had been touched by an adult in a series of games played in a laboratory
setting.

The findings - detailed in a paper to be published in the Journal of
Experimental Child Psychology - could have repercussions for
child-protection professionals, who often use anatomically correct dolls
with the belief that the dolls help children tell how they were sexually
abused.

"I think there are several good reasons for not using anatomically correct
dolls in questioning very young children," said Judy S. DeLoache, a
psychology professor at the UI who worked with graduate student Donald P.
Marzolf in the study.  "The dolls may be helpful with older children, but
even that issue is not really clear."

The researchers say young children have trouble seeing the dolls as symbols
of themselves.  Their ability to think abstractly is not as developed as
many people assume, said DeLoache, who has shown that young children often
fail to detect symbolic relationships that older children and adults think
are obvious.

Children were divided by age - 2 1/2, 3 and 4 years old - into three groups
of 24 to play games with a male experimenter, who touched them as he placed
stickers on their forearms, knees, feet or cheeks, and as they played a
touch-oriented version of Simon Says.  The children then were interviewed
about what had happened to them, using dolls that matched the gender and
race of each child.

Following the sticker game, 4-year-olds correctly placed 92 percent of the
stickers on the dolls to show where they had been touched; the 3-year-olds
were 71 percent accurate; and the 2 1/2-year-olds correctly placed only 41
percent.  Many of the older children checked where stickers had been placed
on their own bodies before placing them on a doll.

For the Simon Says activity, the children were asked questions, some
leading and others misleading, about where they had been touched.  None of
the children spontaneously used the dolls in their responses.  Instead,
they verbally reported or demonstrated on their own bodies where they had
been touched.  When asked to use the dolls to show where they had been
touched, the accuracy of all three age groups dropped dramatically.

Overall, "fewer of the touches that the children had actually experienced
were demonstrated on the doll than were reported verbally or nonverbally on
themselves," the authors wrote.  "The children provided more correct
information in response to the interviewer's direct questions."