Administration

Communications

Lecturer lends expertise to train law enforcement
Wednesday, November 03, 2010

CANTON, Mo. – Interviewing a child who has been the victim of sexual abuse can be one of the most difficult jobs a police officer or law enforcement official will face. But a Culver-Stockton College faculty member is helping make that job a little easier for officials in Illinois by teaching them new interview techniques and approaches. Judy Abbott, C-SC senior lecturer in criminal justice and law, recently taught at the Finding Words Forensic Training Initiative in Springfield, Ill. This is Abbott’s second year as a faculty member with the Finding Words Initiative.

“As a Prosecutor in Juvenile Court, I worked on many sex cases and saw firsthand the barriers our system places in front of child sex abuse victims. For that reason, I joined a team of professionals from Adams County who became forensic interviewers so we could bring these skills to our jurisdiction,” explains Abbott.

Finding Words is a training initiative offered through the National Child Protection Training Center; it’s aimed at law enforcement officials, workers with the Department of Children and Family Services, socials workers and prosecutors. The goal is to teach officials forensic techniques that can be used when interviewing child sex abuse victims. Using forensic interviewing techniques helps ensure that the child’s statement is admissible in court during trial.

“Children face the biggest barriers in Court, from accessibility to believability,” said Abbott. “The McMartin Pre-School trials in the 1980s sent shock waves through the criminal justice system and highlighted the suggestibility of child victims. Child advocates have countered those concerns by starting the nationwide Finding Words Initiative. We train investigators, DCFS workers and prosecutors to interview child sex abuse victims in a child-friendly atmosphere in a non-suggestive manner so their statements can be admitted in court as reliable evidence. Our forensic interviewers create a calm, neutral, non-suggestive environment in which the child witness can relate the details of the incident to an interviewer trained in collecting those statements,” Abbott adds.

More than 40 people took part in the training session held Oct. 18 though Oct. 22 in Springfield, Ill. The sessions are offered twice a year in Illinois and give participants the opportunity to study and practice interviewing techniques with various Finding Words faculty members and fellow trainees.

“After attending our training, these forensic interviewers work as part of a multi-disciplinary team in order to maximize the admissibility of the child victim’s statements. Our initiative stresses the importance of the “single interview” so that multiple people from multiple agencies are not interviewing the child numerous times. The research in the field has underscored that multiple interviews can lead to implanted and false memories and unreliable statements,” explains Abbott.
Abbott has worked as a juvenile prosecutor and domestic violence prosecutor in Adams County, Ill., since 1995. She is a trained forensic interviewer and has worked extensively on behalf of child sex abuse victims. She is a member of the Illinois State Bar Association, the Adams County Bar Association and the Adams County Domestic Violence Council, as well as several other state and local organizations. Abbott joined the faculty of Culver-Stockton College in 2008.