COLLABORATIVE PROPOSAL: Legal Questioning of Adolescent Victims

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In contrast to the expansive and highly influential body of research on children's memory and suggestibility, which has led to clear guidelines about how to elicit accurate testimony from child victims of sexual abuse, little is known about how to question adolescent victims, even though they represent a large proportion of victims who have suffered a range of sexual abuse experiences and are questioned by law enforcement and legal authorities. The lack of guidelines is even more striking for sexually trafficked adolescents, who are often identified as criminal suspects and questioned by police, not trained forensic specialists. How to approach and interview adolescent victims, particularly those who have been trafficked, has never been comprehensively examined. Yet professionals, including interviewers and police, must question these adolescents in a way that elicits clear disclosures from the victims about their experiences in order to intervene, ensure their protection, and prosecute those who commit these heinous crimes. This study will systematically evaluate actual interviews by law enforcement and legal professionals with suspected adolescent victims, including those who have been trafficked. It will determine what types of questioning approaches are used, what approaches are more or less effective at eliciting abuse and trafficking details, and how the questions and victims' responses relate to the outcomes of criminal cases against traffickers. The results of the research will inform scientific models of disclosure patterns in highly vulnerable populations of victims. The results will also impact policy and practice by providing crucial insight into effective questioning approaches with adolescent sexual abuse victims, especially those who have been trafficked, thereby laying the foundation for training protocols on these approaches and long-lasting improvements in practice and policy. This research will specifically involve reviewing and coding 340 interview transcripts of adolescent victims, half trafficking victims and half adolescents who have experienced other forms of sexual abuse. For cases that went to trial, transcripts of the victims' testimony, case details and case outcome data will also be collected and coded. Statistical analyses will focus on the types of questions asked and the tone of the questions (for instance, whether the tone is supportive or interrogation-like), as well as characteristics of the victims' responses, such as whether they disclose abuse, the amount of detail they provide, the content of what they report, and their levels of evasiveness. With this extensive coding system, linkages between the question and response categories will be evaluated to determine what kinds of questions are more versus less effective at eliciting specific types of responses from victims and how the questions and responses, directly and interactively, relate to case outcomes.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.