[Music] i'm kim madden i'm a child forensic interview specialist and forensic interviewer at the children's advocacy center in huntsville alabama and as we think about the ages or the age range of children that come to children's advocacy centers all over the united states and the world it's typically two maybe three on up to 18. and so forensic interviewers do have to be prepared to adapt to a variety of ages and developmental abilities so right now we're going to be looking at the latency age children so a lot of people want to know what what age is that so typically we think about latency starting at age six after kindergarten and then really the age of latency is more dependent upon uh physical development so what that means is when children reach puberty we think of them as moving into adolescence so there can be an age range at the end so most children do reach puberty between by 11 11 12 so so that's kind of the the bookends for latency which is a big a big and there's a lot of developmental changes that occur from that time so when they're um just leaving the preschool all the way up to becoming teenagers in the forensic interview what we want to think about for lindsay there's like a number of characteristics to think about uh so um the first one i think is that they tend to be concrete in their thinking uh so a lot of people want to think what what does concrete thinking mean uh and so if you think about the um it's they have difficulty with abstract concepts i'm going to give you a couple of examples uh the first one's kind of humorous and funny so uh a latency aged child um meets a grandma for after not seeing grandma for a year and grandma says oh you've grown a foot and the concrete thinker will look down because um that child is literally interpreting it so so that's an example of some struggle that a concrete thinking latency age child may have with abstraction so in the forensic interview when we see children who may be challenged with some of the abstract uh questions an interviewer may ask um for me this is where i run into that difficulty when i was wanting to ask about clothing placement and so i would ask a question well how were your clothes and again concrete thinking children interpreted that very literally and i would get the answer all my clothes were fine they were really nice clothes so fortunately had the research of tom lyon a few years ago uh did a couple of research studies looking at intermediate clothing placement and he gave us the wonderful recommendation of asking children where were your clothes that's a good illustration that's a much more direct concrete question that can cue a child to think about um and remember where were their clothes when something happened another example in the interview and this is actually a video that we'll use in training the interviewer was trying to ask a little girl about her posture when something was happening and this little girl was sick so very uh early latency and she said well how was your wealthy and the little girl got how was your body that how was your body part when it came to her she said well my body was laying down and then the interviewer um asked about the perpetrator's body how was his body and she goes i don't know and interestingly she went on to really cue the interviewer into her concrete thinking interview word first was wait a minute how do you not know and she said i don't know i'm not in his body so it's a good good illustration of where we run into those things uh in an interview in an example of when children are thinking concretely so we want to do as interviewers is just be very mindful of our language avoid any abstract uh questions and um this is where of course that instruction to tell me if you don't understand my question comes in because we want kids to be able to let us know that but of course the best thing to do is to prevent any misunderstanding by being mindful of your questions to begin with also when we think of children being concrete the one of the biggest recommendations is why we say practice those interview instructions because just to say uh tell me if you don't understand a question or let me know if i get something wrong or i don't want you to guess that actually can be abstract for a child but giving them that concrete hands-on opportunity to practice that is is again why we recommend that in the interview now interesting there was um a study by michael lamb looking at instructions and interviews and um one of the the things that that research talks about in ways that we can make practice even maybe more of a childhood process by using things that the child gives us an early engagement to uh create our practice scenarios so for example if the child tells you about i have a dog and um and you ask about the dog some more but coming back to the uh to the to the rules uh you could say uh tell me the name of your canine and and that would be oh i don't understand let me ask in a different way um what's your dog's name or uh if the child um says something i think this is an easy one for interviewers to personalize to the child the correct me um so the child says that they go to such and such a school and i'm in such and such a grade then you you go ahead and you mess that up uh so correct me is easy um but i think there's also ways that we could even personalize the you know the don't know so the child says oh my favorite color is is blue and i really like to ride my bike so you could repeat that you said your favorite colors blue tell me my favorite color so i thought that was just a really uh interesting observation and a way to make instructions more child-led but again the point that i was making is because children in that age group are concrete we want to give them that opportunity to practice and perhaps for younger latency aged children um they may benefit from more than one opportunity to practice certainly we recommend if they don't get it the first time we let them have another chance but but maybe even giving them multiple opportunities to practice uh and to think about that possibility of personalizing it to the child if you're a parent or you have nieces or nephews in that age group they tend to really like to be socialized with the adults in their life so what does that mean they'll go to a restaurant with mom and dad they'll go shopping they'll sit at a ball game and they won't cringe to think of who might see them having dinner with their parents on a saturday night so that's a good example of loyalty and you know there's changes that come about with adolescence so it means several things for the interview first of all interviewers really and i think we want to do this all the time but particularly with children in this age group we want to understand what that relationship means to that child in terms of the suspected perpetrator and even the support people in the child's life you want to think about what do these relationships mean to this child and how might a disclosure impact that relationship what effect might a disclosure have because typically the closer that relationship is the more um probably emotional difficulty trepidation children will have to be talking with a forensic interviewer so always try to understand that before you go into an interview as much as you are able to um statistically we know that children are abused sexually physically by people in their in their circle in their orbit people that they know so loyalty issues are going to arise frequently so some things to be aware for the interview uh if and this this actually happened to me uh one time i was set to interview a child who had been abused by an older sibling who was also a caretaker to the child so i think any time you have these inter-familial abuse scenarios those are struggling particularly if you think of it's a parent of two children and that parent caregiver is essentially in the middle and a very difficult position to be in uh but so in this case the um the child and the parent came into the waiting room uh and the advocate came to me and she said they are up there crying they're really struggling unfortunately our advocate had been able to talk with that parent and that the parent was very supportive of the interview wanted both of her children to get some help and was supporting was ready to accept what the child was able to say in the interview um so we made the decision um and again this is based upon what we know about loyalty to uh have that parent right before the child was taken back to the interview to tell the child it's okay it's okay to talk to her meaning me and i just want you to tell the truth so just that little bit of encouragement that boost of of that i will be okay can really be helpful as far as sort of maybe counterbalancing some of those loyalty pools a child may be feeling and again the children are going to be more loyal to the caregiver than they are to me is the interviewer so that coming from the parent has some significance in that particular case i think it helped and i think that the child would have struggled otherwise if if they had not received that assurance from the parent that it was okay and i also think that it's it's legally defensible because that parent is not telling the child what to say just tell the truth and it's okay to talk so it's another place other things with loyalty i think that they can really help to understand uh dynamics of a delayed disclosure why didn't the child tell they may have been struggling with loyalty they didn't want to get anybody in trouble certainly it helps to explain dynamics of recantation because children get pulled back and and in a sense maybe they want to undo what they thought was done by their disclosure because they see somebody that they feel very loyal to and love uh having some you know significant consequences so so there's a lot of ways there another recommendation for loyalty concerns is i think it can be helpful after a disclosure and as you're moving towards the end um you know to ask a child how they felt about a person um it lets the child it gives a child an opportunity to express some complexities but it also can go a long way to maybe again illuminating some of those dynamics so imagine this if a child says makes a disclosure about grandma and the interviewer says well how do you feel about grandma well they really i really love her and and i i don't i just didn't like what she was doing but i love her goes a long way again i think helping people understand that child's experiences and i think as your team is thinking about things to put in place for the child um that's it that's a key um a key dynamic for a therapist to be aware of to help the child through that and any guilty feelings that they may be having as a result and the other part of the entering back into the recantation so if this this child's going to be high risk for recantation because they do feel some remorse what do we need to put in place for that family what kind of supports does this parent or caregiver need to be able to continue providing that child assurance that they did the right thing by coming forward so executive functioning is a sense of a set of mental processes a really common analogy for executive functioning uh that is widely out there is it's like air traffic control so uh in executive function is one of those um mental processes this skill uh it is kind of in short supply as a preschooler as you would expect that's why preschoolers can't drive a car or even really successfully take care of the cat or the dog um not because they don't want to but because it kind of lacks some some basic skills for those kind of responsibilities but we see and and i want to stress is under ideal conditions for brain development his executive functioning does depend on healthy opportunities for brain development that there's a pretty steep trajectory when children leave a preschool of of the development of executive functioning throughout latency and at about age 10 it kind of it peaks and that's the executive functioning level that that we have so so there's a big development opportunity during latency so what what it said in addition to being like air traffic controller executive functioning uh really has three essential elements uh the first one is it requires a working memory so uh children have to remember so if it's being told to do something they have to remember what they were told to do so i'll take the email to feeding the dog go feed the dog and then do your homework okay i've got to feed the dog first so work in memory memory um so and it has to have um some some mental flexibility so the the sense that you have to kind of keep the different types of thoughts in order this is where the air traffic controller is really great because there's multiple planes in there you kind of have to have flexibility to think about all of these orbiting parts and which one has to be a priority and the third thing that is generally essential is this self-control so you kind of have to focus on what you have to do what your priority is and not get distracted by something over there so um for interviews if you can just imagine the way we question children um we're asking them to go back and think about things that have happened to them so it taps into memory uh and the questions that work real well in forensic interviews those narrative encouraging questions start at the beginning think about all the things that happened and tell me about them in order being able to kind of think about that organize that in your mind and then verbalize it and keep track of what you've said and where you need to go and that that is a um it's a good test of executive functioning so when kids have that latency kids have that they do well with that question that's not going to be a challenge but it's why for example that a three-year-old would be probably very challenged think about everything that happened and tell it to me in order so that's a good illustration of that i also want to say though that again executive functioning does depend on opportunities for brain development so good nutrition adequate parenting all of these things that hopefully aren't in children's lives but things that we know are sadly absent for children who've experienced abuse and neglect so we may see deficiencies and that children may struggle with that because they don't have executive functioning also children who've got attention deficit disorder children on the autism spectrum they may have challenges with executive functioning that will persist uh so i think for the interview when we think about the emotional life of children we do want to be attuned during the interview how is that child reacting emotionally where do they seem to be because there are a lot of emotions and some of these will tie back into the loyalty that i was just talking about they feel guilty uh they feel angry so again i think forensic interviewers always want to be aware of that element so some common emotions uh uh maybe guilty angry they may be ashamed about what they view is their acquiesce acquiescing to a sexual abuse experience of course that's not true but they may feel that way uh they may um just be challenged to name parts of their body uh so as interviewers we wanna in addition to be attentive to how this child seems to be doing emotionally we to look for if they're up if they uh need need to distance themselves somewhat from some of the more emotional material so for example do they need to write something down instead of saying that out loud do they need to draw a picture to illustrate something as opposed to verbalizing it so those are some things to think about um and again with with emotions um i i love the question for forensic interviews you know how do you feel about being here how do you feel about talking to me it's just an attempt to try to gain some insight to where that child may be [Music] [Music] [Music] you