David La Rooy
Dr David La Rooy is a Chartered Psychologist, Chartered Scientist, and an internationally recognised expert in child forensic interviewing and eyewitness memory. He completed his B.A., M.Sc., and Ph.D. at the University of Otago, followed by a Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the United States. David has served as a Lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London and was awarded a prestigious lectureship by the Scottish Institute for Policing Research. As a consultant and expert witness, he provides evidence-based training to police, lawyers, and judges. His research is dedicated to improving the integrity and accuracy of memory retrieval within the legal system.
TALK TOPIC
Remembering childhood sexual abuse: Scepticism, recovered memories, science, and real-world examples.
Within the legal system, children are routinely questioned about their abuse experiences more than once, with different information about their abuse experiences recovered in different interviews at different times. Over recent decades, the effects of conducting multiple interviews in legal contexts that seemingly ‘recover’ new memories about alleged child abuse has generated considerable controversy among legal commentators and researchers alike. Some emphasise that seemingly ‘recovered memories’ are most probably inaccurate and are most likely the product of suggestive influence, whereas others emphasise the legal and ethical advantages of allowing child victims of abuse more than one opportunity to talk about what really happened to them. In this talk, David will briefly review the controversy and scepticism about memory recovery in children and the underpinning science, before presenting real-world examples that illustrate what happens when children recover new, previously undisclosed information, about their abuse experiences in legal contexts.