Assessing Child Sexual Abuse Allegations in a Legal Context

Chapter 9 provides detailed suggestionsfor framing evaluations of child sexual abuse allegationsin forensic contexts. It reviews issues critical to the assessment of alleged child sexual abuse victims and, when possible, offers empirically supported procedures rather than subjective opinions

The Continuum of Children\u27s Sexual Behavior: Discriminative Categories and the Need for Public Policy Change

One of the most important findings from the past several decades of research addressing the effects of child sexual abuse (CSA) is that no single sign or symptom, including aberrant sexualized behavior, characterizes the majority of sexually abused children. The array of symptoms demonstrated by a child will depend on the complex interaction of internal and external factors. This chapter begins with an overview of normative sexual behavior. The second section addresses the attempts to differentiate types of children with sexual behavior problems (SBPs), and the final section addresses societal and legal responses to children\u27s sexual behavior problems

Safety First: A Model for Understanding Domestic Violence in Child Custody and Access Disputes

A substantial percentage of contested child custody cases involve allegations of domestic violence. The impact on the psychological health and physical safety of the child exposed to domestic violence has only recently become a focus of the courts\u27 and child custody evalu-ators\u27 attention. Currently, the majority of state statutes include consideration of domestic violence in “best interests” child custody criteria. However, many of the statues do not provide the child custody evaluator the specific criteria to consider, especially if the domestic violence allegations have not been previously reported to authorities prior to the commencement of separation and divorce proceedings. This article presents the first three steps of the six-step Safety First Model, designed to assist the legal and psychological professions to focus on the priorities on the safety of children exposed to domestic violence

Incorporating the Principles of Scientifically Based Child Interviews into Family Law Cases

In recent years, scientific work has been directed toward the evaluation of suspected sexually abused children. While in many ways this remains a controversial area, sound evidence has emerged regarding how children should be interviewed in order to enhance their ability to report their experience and as to avoid contamination of their memory. In this article, the authors take the position that the science is now sufficiently evolved so that such interviewing techniques can be applied to interviewing children in child custody evaluations

Police-reporting behavior and victim-police interactions as described by women in a domestic violence shelter

Previous research has addressed the motivations of domestic violence victims to contact police and police responses to domestic violence calls. In a study of 498 women who entered a battered women\u27s shelter, a questionnaire was used to elicit types of abuse they experienced, police contact, and police-victim interactions. Approximately 58% of victims called the police in response to physical, emotional, and other forms of domestic abuse; however, less than one fourth of the batterers were arrested. Batterers who physically abused their victims or used other forms of abuse such as sexual abuse or stalking were more frequently arrested compared to those batterers who used emotional abuse. The women arrested for domestic violence felt that they had acted in self-defense. These results suggest that the police response to domestic violence is variable and the majority of batterers, regardless of type of abuse, may not be receiving any legal or therapeutic intervention