“If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it.”
–Abraham Lincoln
The field of forensic interviewing is approaching five decades and is an integral part of a multidisciplinary response to a report of child maltreatment. The concept of a “forensic interview” was necessitated by high-profile child sexual abuse cases from the 1980s. In these cases, children were interviewed by professionals with little or no training in the art and science of eliciting information from children. In some cases, children were interviewed on multiple occasions by several persons. In an attempt to improve the response to these cases, Children’s Advocacy Centers (CAC) began to emerge and spread across the country.
Today, there are over 900 CACs accredited by the National Children’s Alliance (NCA), which is funded by the United States Department of Justice pursuant to the Victims of Child Abuse Act. One of these NCA accreditation standards involves the forensic interviewing of children, including the requisite basic and advanced training for those conducting this work as well as ongoing peer review.
A number of state and national forensic interview training programs have been approved by the NCA as meeting this educational requirement. In 2015, the United States Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) published a document written by representatives of many of the nation’s leading forensic interview training programs that set forth agreed upon best practices in the field of forensic interviewing.
The OJJDP publication noted that although “national training programs are generally based on the same body of research, some differences exist.” However, focusing on the variations among these forensic interview training programs “obscures consistencies within the various forensic interview models.” Moreover, in some cases, “the veracity of the child’s statement” or the work of the forensic interviewer “has been questioned solely on the basis of the model being used.”
The OJJDP best practices guide defined a child forensic interview this way:
A forensic interview of a child is a developmentally sensitive and legally sound method of gathering factual information regarding allegations of abuse or exposure to violence. This interview is conducted by a competently trained, neutral professional utilizing research and practice-informed techniques as part of a larger investigative process.
The growth of the profession of forensic interviewing in the past fifty years, the development of standards governing this work, and the significant research influencing this work are all factors courts must consider when prosecutors seek to utilize a forensic interviewer as an expert witness or when defense attorneys call experts completely outside of this field to critique the work of an interviewer or the credibility of a child’s statements.
This Article explores this issue and offers forensic interviewers—and the attorneys who call them to the witness stand—concrete suggestions for offering expert testimony and in otherwise defending these interviews in court. The Article also offers guidelines for challenging the testimony of those called as experts to critique a forensic interview.