NCJ Number
105046
Journal
Police Chief Volume: 54 Issue: 4 Dated: (April 1987) Pages: 24-46
Date Published
1987
Length
17 pages
Annotation
Six articles examine the criminal justice system response to child sexual abuse victims, serious juvenile offenders, and suicidal adolescents.
Abstract
The first three articles discuss the difficulties inherent in interviewing child sexual assault victims and the potential for increasing the trauma associated with the incident and suggest information-eliciting techniques. Emphasis is placed on the use of comprehensible, nonthreatening vocabulary and the importance of dealing with the child's fears and offering sympathy and support. Specific techniques that can be used include anatomically correct dolls, art materials, scripts, puzzles, magic tricks, and an interview guide. An innovation, proving successful with particularly uncommunicative child victims, is a remote-controlled robot who interviews the child. A fourth article discusses neurolinguistic programming (the matching of vocabulary to the auditory, visual, or kinesthetic perceptual preference of the listener) as a technique for facilitating communication and illustrates its use with a child sexual abuse victim. The next article discusses signs and symptoms indicative of someone considering suicide and the important role that the school resource officer can play in identifying suicidal adolescents and intervening. Finally an interagency approach, involving law enforcement, social service, court, and corrections professionals, is proposed as a means to ensure that chronic, serious juvenile offenders do not fall through the cracks of the system.