Course Description: Seeking Information Training Series
Advanced Forensic Interviewer Training: Seeking Information Training Series
Pursuit of information is the core to forensic interviewing, exploring allegations and clarifying statements made in the course of the forensic interview. Forensic interviewers need to build knowledge regarding multiple forms of child maltreatment and practice question development to continue developing their skills.
Module Topics:
Seeking Information: Medical Child Abuse Allegations
Description: Medical Child Abuse allegations are complex investigations, based on perpetrator and household dynamics. Navigating these interviews takes skills and knowledge regarding significant barriers that can exist within these case dynamics. Come learn employed strategies to successfully explore these allegations!
Objectives:
1. Learn about the dynamics of medical child abuse.
2. Discuss strategies surrounding an interview involving allegations of medical child abuse.
3. Generate questions relevant to dynamic and detail exploration for potential victims and witnesses of medical child abuse.
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Seeking Information: Child Sex Trafficking Allegations
Description: Child Sex Trafficking allegations have dynamics core to sexual abuse forensic interviews, but consideration should be noted regarding additional dynamic factors as well as the exploration of the business aspects of this abuse type. Navigating these challenges, alongside alleged victim response to formal interventions, makes these interviews complex. Learning to conduct these interviews takes skills and employed strategies to successfully explore these allegations.
Objectives:
1. Learn about the dynamics of child sex trafficking.
2. Discuss strategies surrounding an interview involving allegations of child sex trafficking.
3. Generate questions relevant to dynamic and detail exploration for potential victims and witnesses of child sex trafficking.
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Seeking Information: Evidence in Forensic Interviews
Description: When evidence is found during the course of the investigation, deliberations need to be made regarding the use of evidence in the forensic interview. Questions of ‘how’, ‘when’, and ‘if’ should be considered in cases involving evidence, and the defensible use of such evidence in a forensic interview.
Objectives:
1. Review different types of evidence that may exist.
2. Discuss considerations regarding the use of evidence in the forensic interview.
3. Generate question strategies in scenarios in which evidence will be used in the forensic interview.
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Seeking Information: Recantations
Description: The potential for recantation is a reality for any case regarding allegations of child abuse. What is critical is understanding dynamics that increase the likelihood of recantation, which allows us to identify those factors and understand how to proactively respond to them. How those dynamics are explored is critical in the course of a forensic interview, and strategies of how a forensic interviewer navigates a recantation interview is the focus of this training.
Objectives:
1. Learn the dynamics of cases with a higher likelihood of recantation.
2. Identify indicators that contribute to recantations.
3. Discuss the MDT response to recantations.
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Seeking Information: Grooming
Description: Perpetrators of child sexual abuse utilize grooming to gain access and opportunity to their victims. Victims and families are at risk, and may have risk factors that may increase the possibility of this abuse. Learn more about how this manipulation allows perpetrators to not only initiate the abuse, but facilitate silence. Develop questioning strategies to explore grooming in the forensic interview.
Objectives:
1. Learn how perpetrators utilize grooming to facilitate sexual abuse.
2. Identify risk factors that may put a child or family at risk of grooming.
3. Understand the impact of grooming and trauma on victims and families.
4. Develop questioning options while exploring grooming in forensic interviews.
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Seeking Information: Child Torture
Description: Child torture cases are extreme and often multi-faceted, and can include physical abuse and emotional abuse. The impact of trauma, to include denial and accommodation, are often responses that can be observed in children. Understanding foundational aspects of child torture cases and how to explore these complex cases through question development is core in this module.
Objectives:
1. Learn foundational components that may be present in child torture cases.
2. Review the impact on trauma and how that can alter communication within the forensic interview.
3. Develop questions to explore the complexity and severity in child torture cases.
*each session is approximately 3 hours, but training times may vary*