Child Abuse & Neglect 26 (2002) 975–976 Spotlight on Practice Editorial. Consistency in children’s accounts of maltreatment David P.H. Jones Park Hospital for Children, Old Road, Headington, Oxford 0X3 7LQ, UK Ghetti, Goodman, Eisen, Qin, and Davis (2002) describe a study of children who were interviewed on two occasions as part of a legal investigation of alleged abuse experience in order to see how consistent the children were between the two occasions. The authors highlight an area of major concern for professionals responding to children’s concerns. Ghetti et al. (2002) study a group of 222 children aged between 3 and 6 years, who, as part of a legal investigation into their alleged experiences of abuse, were interviewed on two occasions. The research utilized the fact that the children were admitted to hospital as part of the legal investigation designed to substantiate whether or not they had been abused. The assessment included a legal investigation which incorporated one interview for forensic purposes and another interview as part of a psychological consultation. These two interviews were used in order to assess the consistency of the allegations that the children made. Further, after a 3-day interval, the children were interviewed about their memory for the physical examination which had formed part of the legal investigation. The researchers used these two occasions to provide a measure of how accurate was the children’s memory. The research report begins with a helpful review of the different components of “consistency.” This should prove useful to practitioners who are faced with high value afforded to the undifferentiated notion of consistency in legal circles, and also those providing evidence on behalf of children in civil and criminal courts. Ghetti et al. (2002) found that older children were generally more consistent than younger ones in their reports of sexual and physical abuse. Furthermore children were more consistent, when they reported allegations of sexual abuse than physical abuse. Girls were generally more consistent than boys. Interestingly, cognitive abilities per se did not predict consistency for either sexual abuse or physical abuse reports. However, consistency within sexual abuse reports was predicted by measures of memory whereas this was not the case for physical abuse reports. The variation in age is not surprising and a finding that has emerged before. The relationships between types of information and consistency were very interesting and probably of great interest to practitioners, we feel. For example, the researchers found that the 0145-2134/02/$ – see front matter © 2002 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. PII:S0145-2134(02)00366-6