For nearly a decade, the USC Child Interviewing Lab has helped children of Los Angeles tell their truths. To assist the courts, the Lab has interviewed hundreds of children who shared their stories of alleged abuse — reducing the need for children to testify about traumatic experiences and facilitating an expedient assessment of their cases.
This year, the lab is going mobile, allowing it to broaden its reach and assist more children in sharing their experiences of abuse or witnessing violence in a timely manner.
The lab is directed by USC Gould School of Law Professor Thomas Lyon, who has devoted his career to identifying the most productive means of questioning children about difficult topics.
“We’re at the point that we’ve done a lot of interviews, we have the experience, we’ve published articles on what works and doesn’t work, but there are cases that are falling through the cracks,” Lyon says. “Cases where they can’t wait a week to schedule an interview because they have made an arrest and have to either arraign the individual within three days or let them go. The mobile lab allows us to take this on the road, respond to emergencies and go out to where kids are.”
Lyon started his legal career as an attorney with the Los Angeles County Dependency Court, which oversees removal of children from their parents as a result of abuse or neglect. Recognizing the need to better understand how to communicate with children, he obtained a PhD in developmental psychology, and came to USC Gould in 1995.
He started training attorneys and other professionals how to interview children, and in 2005, he created the Ten Step Investigative Interview, which is now taught state-wide to all new forensic interviewers.
“Everyone knows that they should avoid asking children suggestive questions, but what we’ve learned is that the most open-ended questions not only reduce errors, but increase children’s productivity,” Lyon says. “The technique is to get the child talking first. Before asking any questions about abuse, we practice asking open-ended questions with the child, and teach the child to give narrative responses about their personal experiences, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. This prepares them to provide complete reports about their abuse.”
For the past decade, the USC Child Interviewing Lab has been interviewing children about sexual abuse at the Los Angeles Dependency Courthouse, recording and transcribing the interviews for the courts, then anonymizing the interviews for training and research.
The Lab has now retrofitted a truck with state-of-the-art audio and visual technology. Interviews will be conducted in a sound-proof room. Law enforcement, social services, and district attorneys can observe the interview from an adjacent room inside the truck, or they can watch a live feed at their offices. And the quick response times will reduce the possibility that children will be subjected to pressure to change their story, he says.
Jordan Sargent will be the lead forensic interviewer for the Mobile Child Interviewing Lab. She started working for Lyon conducting research interviews for studies in 2016 while she was a senior at USC. She went on to get a Master of Social Work while working for the lab.
“Because Los Angeles County is so big, child advocacy services can get overwhelmed by the amount of allegations made,” Sargent says. “There are so many kids making these disclosures or witnessing crimes that it’s hard to service them all and get interviews done in a timely manner. Going mobile is going to be a real asset to the community and expand the types of interviews we’re able to do.”
At USC Gould, law students can take Lyon’s child interviewing practicum and learn to interview children using the Ten Step procedure. During the 14-week course, they receive more intensive training than many professional interviewers, Lyon notes. They also participate in the lab’s biweekly webinar reviewing interviewer performance with hundreds of participating practitioners in the U.S. and other countries.
Law students can then take their child-interviewing skills into careers in juvenile dependency and delinquency court, criminal court, family court, immigration law and pro bono work.
Before she entered law school, 2L Gabrielle Silberman was an elementary school teacher and worked as a social worker with Homeboy Industries, a gang rehabilitation and re-entry program for East L.A. youth.
After spending the spring semester in Lyon’s Child Interviewing Practicum, she will put the lessons to use this summer by talking with children in the foster care system while working at Children’s Law Center of California.
“Being in the Child Interviewing Practicum has been a reminder to be intentional with my language,” Silberman says. “My natural questioning style was who, what, when, where, why, how. The practicum teaches you to ask very open-ended questions that I think, whether I’m working with young people or adults, whether I’m doing criminal defense work or working for a nonprofit, will help me avoid influencing the response and make sure that I am an effective advocate.”
We are seeking philanthropic support for this important program. For information on how you can support the Mobile Child Interviewing Lab, please contact Margaret Kean, Assistant Dean for Development at [email protected], (213) 821-6342, or give online at gould.usc.edu/alumni/giving/.
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