Transcript
Hello, everyone. My name is Gilbert, and it’s an absolute pleasure to talk to you about the research I’ve been conducting in the last three to four years. I’ve been really interested in understanding the reasons why individuals with FASD may be much more likely to encounter the police compared to those who do not have an FASD. And in order to achieve the aim of my research, I conducted an experiment.
With this experiment, I had a total of fifty-two young people, and I divided them into two groups. The first group was a group who had FASD, while the second group was a group that did not have FASD. And I used these standard instruments known as the Gudjonsson suggestibility scale. With this instrument, I told the two groups a very short story. And at the end of the story, I asked them to tell me back all that they remember from the story I just told them, and then I asked them twenty questions. Now fifteen of these twenty questions actually contain suggestions that never happened in the original story. And these questions are designed in such a way to look like the kind of questions the police would ask you when they encounter you.
Now from my experiment, please take a look at the results that I actually found. Clearly from these results, the individuals who have FASD could only remember five out of the forty items contained in our short story. The individuals of FASD again compared to those in the group without FASD, actually begun to accept suggestions in those fifteen questions that were not part of the original story. I then measure something known as fabrication, which is part of confabulation where I’m able to access the level at which people begin to insert new items into events that happen. And clearly, those with FASD began to fabricate even more compared to those without FASD. And finally, I was able to access what we know as total suggestibility, where I’m able to measure the level at which during police interrogation they would easily say ‘yes’ to crimes, they never committed. Now clearly from all of this result, we can see that the individuals of FASD during police questioning may likely accept the fact that they committed crimes when they never committed.
At the moment, I’m conducting a larger experiment with individuals of FASD in Australia, in New Zealand, in the UK, in the US, and in Canada, to better understand this and contribute to understanding to how the police should work with individuals of FASD. I hope this contributes to knowledge. Thank you for listening.