ABSTRACT
The situation in Italy regarding how to conduct the interview of a witness is not completely clear and, above all, the conduct and training are not nationally regulated. For this reason there are different practices (almost one for each court) that make it difficult to summarize practice as a whole. As such, while some coverage is given to interviews with adult witnesses, the main focus of this chapter will be on the interviews with children as witnesses for various reasons. The first reason is the role of the child as a witness: children have to be regarded as a particular type of witness who needs more attention and specific regulations because of their vulnerability to suggestion, misinterpretation, etc. In Italy the awareness that children have to be regarded as a special type of witness is quite strong. This is evident by the large number of guidelines and rules concerning how to conduct child witness interviews. In contrast, focusing upon adult witnesses might result in a non-exhaustive and oversimplified view of the fragmentary situation concerning the conduct of such witness interviews in Italy. This focus on child witnesses does not mean that we will completely ignore interviews of adult witnesses, but that we will give more space to the interview with child witnesses because it allows us to present the Italian situation in a clearer way for the reader.
