This article discusses best practices on how law enforcement personnel can best communicate with victims as they engage with the system after experiencing an assault.
This article is divided into several sections that address how to best support victim engagement with law enforcement after an assault. The sections discuss how victim engagement can be traumatic, how law enforcement benefits from trauma-informed training, and the use of victim-centered trauma-informed (VCTI) interview techniques in an unconventional program for training police officers to respond to victims of violence. The unconventional program discussed is based on research by Dr. Bradley Campbell, an associate professor at the Department of Criminal Justice and a faculty member in the University of Louisville’s Southern Police Institute. With National Institute of Justice (NIJ) funding, Dr. Campbell trained law enforcement personnel on how to interact with trauma survivors and assessed short-term and long-term impacts of the VCTI training on officers and impacts on survivors that were attended by VCTI-trained officers. The VCTI training for officers utilized actors to portray sexual assault survivors. The article discusses Dr. Campbell’s research study, its methodology and results. Outcomes indicated that VCTI training improved outcomes and had positive effects on officers, their perceptions of victim behaviors, and comfort when interviewing sexual assault victims