FEBRUARY 18, 2020 Interviewing Victims with Disabilities: Identifying Gaps and Best Practices >> Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining our webinar today. I'm Ashley at the Vera Institute of Justice. I would like to welcome you to today's webinar. We're pleased to bring you this as part of the 2020 people with disabilities webinar series. We have a few items before we begin today. There are two ways to communicate with myself, and Vera colleagues, presenters, and other webinar participants today. First chat pod. You can use this chat pod to introduce yourself and answer any questions the presenter may pose to the audience. In addition to the chat pod, there's an Q & A pod which is used to communicate directly and privately with myself and my Vera colleagues. If you have technical difficulties, please post them in the Q & A pod. If you post about the technical issue in the chat pod, my Vera colleagues may not see your post. 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A link to the reporting, as well as the PowerPoint, transcript, and ending survey will be e-mailed to all participants following the webinar. It will be posted on the web site within one week. A record of attendance will be available for download at the end of the webinar. Our presenter today is December Guzzo. December is the forensic interview coordinator and child forensic interview specialist for the national children's advocacy center. December works closely with the NCAC training center on special projects and served as a practice dumb facilitator for the basic forensic interview training. December has conducted numerous training throughout Alabama and presented at the NCAC international symposium on child abuse. She has worked in the child abuse field for over 17 years. 11 of those as a child abuse investigator and ongoing child protection services worker. Due to a family connection and medically fragile case load, December has expanded her knowledge and skills and communication with children on the autism spectrum specifically. She's developing a tool kit and interviewing techniques on victims of crime who have a disability. She has a bachelors in psychology and minor in sociology and a masters in social work administration from the University of Alabama. Thank you. With that, I'll turn the presentation over to you. >> December: Thank you, Ashley. Thank you, participants for being here today. I'm looking forward to helping you understand some ways that we can fill some gaps and educate you in best practice in interviewing people with disabilities. When Ashley was reading my bio I forgot to add some additional work that I've done with adults who have a disability. It is not extensive. But we'll talk more about how I serve those victims later on in the presentation. Okay. So today our goal is to talk about the barriers to safe and accessible interviews for victims with disabilities. I want to start with this information concerning how people with the disability are at an increased risk for victimization. And as you can see there on the slide three times more likely to experience a violent victimizations and 12 times more likely to experience sexual victimization. We'll talk in the next few slides about why this is a fact and hopefully by the end of the presentation, we can all think of ways in our own agencies and in the jurisdictions that we work to first start handling these cases for a person with a disability as they should be handled and then hopefully start preventing some of the victimization from occurring in the first place. This information, as you can see, came from the National survey in 2013 showing why some people may choose not to report or not even know how to report. When you look at these stats, you can see why. People with disabilities are shown over and over again that they will not be believed or even taught how to report when something has happened to them. I believe these misconceptions in this slide and the next started from a place of wanting to protect and help. Adult services was put into place and we created mandatory reporting laws, guardianships, so these things often do especially with dealing with larger agencies and state and federal partners. These policies and protocols that we put in place go too far. In this sense, control has been taken away from people that are more than capable or making all, if not most of the decisions for themselves. Now the people that have designed to protect those with disabilities, you and I, all of us here today, are part of this environment which is rich for abuse and victimization. So let's talk about power differentials for a minute. There are big concerns. Often times the abuser is someone that's known to the victim, and this is the case for all victims of all ages, especially regarding sexual abuse and neglect. These people are often also in a position of power, as you can see in the slides there. And this causes a barrier for that victim to report. Maybe by withholding food, by withholding care, they can withhold a wheelchair or other ambulatory devices, even a communication device. There are many ways for these perpetrators to abuse their power. And especially if our victims have not been taught how to report or that they will be believed or protected when they do report. We've talked about a few of these barriers when considering the misconceptions and reporting. These are some specific barriers that we've identified that hopefully can be resolved by you all working in this field, victims that have differing abilities. These are also things that I challenge you to keep in your mind when working with someone who may have a guardian, who may be in an institution, or have someone that is assisting them with different types of care or daily living skills. And I'll talk later on about interviewing. And this will address how people might communicate differently than the experts in the field are used to and a lot of times they are used to getting specific kinds of information and it will be our job to help educate them on how we can get this information differently. My experience in regarding barriers to reporting is that people with a disability are actually very capable of telling about what happened to them. And in my experience with autism spectrum disorders, they are actually my favorite population of people to interview, because I think they are amazing tellers of the things that happened to them and their attention to detail is very helpful. We just have to allow the victims, our victims, to communicate in the way that they do. And provide some accommodations to meet some specific needs, and be interviewed in a way that highlights their strength. And this is where all of you here today will have an opportunity to educate your professional partners, the people that you are working with, and hopefully change the narrative around interviewing people with disabilities about their victimizations. So now what I would like for you to do in the chat box is tell me some barriers that you have seen for victims with disabilities and reporting their victimization. Okay. I'm seeing some transportation. Communication is definitely something that we'll address today. And that goes along with people not believing our victims that might communicate differently from us. This is going kind of fast. I'm going to try to catch up with some of this. So I see someone has talked about pressure, maybe from the caregivers in the room. We'll talk about the settings that's most appropriate for interviewing an adolescent or an adult with a disability that's a victim of a crime. Let's see. Lack of interpreters. That's definitely a barrier that we've experienced here at my agency. Okay. All right. Thank you for that. I'm going to move on. Actually this is a good time, I think, for us to have an interpreter change. So we're going to pause just a minute. >> Okay. Now I would like to go over the gap in interviewing over the next few slides and we've identified some specific things in trying to serve victims of abuse who may have some type of a disability. So as we go over the next six slides, I want you to think about how I serve people with disability in your agency and within your jurisdiction. And at the end of the section, we'll have another opportunity for a chat. I would like you to let us know if you have these gaps that I've spoken of or any other gaps in services that might need to be addressed. I feel that this section is important, because these are the things that we need to create more policies for. Or some protocols and have some guidelines in how we address these gaps. And another need that you'll see is for additional providers who have appropriate training this assisting people with disabilities. So the first gap that we've identified is that the protocols that we have are designed for interviewing children with disabilities. And there's quite a reliance on using the Children's Advocacy Centers as the place to interview adults. Often times the people at the Children's Advocacy Centers have additional training to serve people with disabilities. But as you can see this supports the misconceptions that people with a disability are more vulnerable and it also infantilizing them. This is something that took me a long time to understand. I was very stuck on the fact that we at the Children's advocacy Center would be the best to serve the person with a disability. I wanted to serve the cases. I didn't stop to think what the victim might have felt. This is one of the hardest things to realize as a provider. That the person in front of me is an adult. We cannot just swoop in and do what we think is best. Would you do that to an adult who has no perceived disability? Or is thought to be able to make decisions for themselves? So I don't think that we would? We need to be cautious and thoughtful in how we serve all victims. Again because of the previous misconceptions and lack of knowledge with our partners, I think it is even more important for a person with a disability who has been a victim of a crime. So the second gap that we identified is that there's no protocol for the various types of interviews that the victim might experience. They might have a minimal fax interview by a medical personnel or a victim advocate. Then they might have a different type of first responder and communication with them. And then it moves on to an investigator. So kind of like where we started with the children's advocacy centers is that we're trying to solve the problem of a victim, and at the time we were thinking specifically of children but as victim is being interviewed multiple times by various people who may not have the appropriate training. For forensic interviewing, we have strict guidelines and protocols. For adults there's no such constrain in talking about their victimization. At the end of the spectrum, we need more regulation on training and interviewing, specifically with adults with disabilities but I believe all victims of crimes. I believe all victims deserve a better structure in collecting information from them. And we all know in working in the field that trauma plays a big role in how we're able to talk about the traumatic events that happen in our lives. There's a lot more research now showing how our memory works and how trauma can affect the way we can retrieve that. If I could have it any way, I would like all victims in all spans of life to have a trauma-informed interview much like a forensic interview. But for now adults and often adolescents, depends on what you do in your jurisdiction, will have varies types of interviewing by several people. This can cause inconsistencies, further trauma to the victim, and is not helpful in trying to move these cases forward. The third gap that we've identified is the pre-interview stage which we teach for Children's Advocacy Centers and forensic interviews is not designed for adults at all and more specifically for adults with disabilities. As the interviewer, I would gather information from the caregivers. And because a lot of victims currently with a disability who are adults are being served at CACs determines the information we collect. If we are working with an adult, they have the right to give their own information. The information should be collected from them. Not from a caregiver or third party. Which can cause some confidentiality issues. So again another stage protocol needs to be established or at least best practice. Gap number four is something that I have quite a lot of experience with. As I said previously, I'll talk a little bit more about my experience in serving adults. For us here in Huntsville, our CAC is where our partners turn to if they have an adult victim who had some type of differing ability. Even though we do our best to serve them as adults and respect their autonomy, once we finish with that victim, they are moved on to the victim services through a prosecutor. The victim services in the DA -- district attorney's office, I apologize, often do not have additional training and serving a person with a disability nor the connections to resources pertaining to their specific needs. And the DA's office may not be diverse in the victim's strength and to educate the prosecutors and help them understand the victim is a great teller of the events that happened to them. In my experience unless there's a connection with a prosecutor and they happen to have for whatever reason specific training in whatever disability that their client might have, they look to someone that can guide them through whatever the ability or disability is, and if they don't have that information, it can be a barrier to them trying the case. And another point to the gap is that victims need ongoing support to make it through the court process and beyond. These victim services provider need to be protected to support the victims in the way that they need to be served. You'll see that in our next slide as well. Gap number 5 is that there's limited ongoing therapeutic opportunities for adults with disabilities. And if you think about the way that we're currently serving adults who are victims of crimes in general. A lot of times that's in group therapy. And I remember talking with the crisis center, I won't name the jurisdiction. She was talking about that their agency is on the second floor. There's no elevator. Let's consider if a person communicating differently, also if the second floor is a barrier, communication can come in as a barrier. And if the others in that group and likely the facilitator don't communicate in the same way, are they going to learn how the other victim communicates or quite possibility is that victim not going to have access to the group therapy? So this is where we need to think outside of the box and how we can solve some of these gaps. I also know the number of individual therapist is quite low in regards to being trained with serving a person with a disability. And like I previously said, therapeutic intervention often times is a significant factor if a person is able to complete the court process, and then how they will recover after the victimization. And if this is not something that they are able to get assistance on, then this experience just makes them more susceptible to further victimization. So this is where I would like you all to add to the chat box where you might see some gaps in your jurisdiction or your agency. Okay. Entering the building is one that we've seen before. Yes, surely making sure that you have the right type of interpreter for your clients. There seems to be a lot of lack of certified deaf interpreters. Yes, Michelle, rural areas have a lot of their own issues already. So there's further gaps for those services and professional okay. Maybe not allowing someone to use their device in the group therapy. I see there's someone else talking about further training for adults with protective services for their caseworkers. Okay. Thank you, everyone, for your input. I think right now we might need to have a quick break for an interpreter change. Now I want to move on and talk about recommendations for interviewers. This isn't specific, just for forensic interviewers. This relates to all people at some point that might have for whatever reason a chance to interview someone that has experienced a victimization and also has differing abilities. Now I want you to imagine you are a police officer. You are a victim services provider or some other professional that works -- that serves victims. So let's say that you walk into a murder scene or other type of crime that has just happened. Are you going to touch or move the weapon? Are you going to walk through the blood that might be there on the floor or change anything at the scene? It's likely that you would not do that, even when law enforcement comes on the scene in some type of crime, most often they rope it off, and then they call the crime scene professionals. So I want you to stop and think about someone's memory about an active victimization they experienced. And think about that as a piece of evidence. Because it is. Often times in sexual abuse cases, specifically, it is usually the only type of evidence that we have. So the testimony of the person that experienced that victimization is one of the most important pieces of evidence. So we need to be trained and purposeful in how we collect that evidence. Let's talk about best practices now. These are still be established. Like Ashley stated earlier, Vera is currently working on a tool kit and a type of white paper. I wouldn't say protocol in reference to interviewing children with disabilities. So we're still working to establish some specializations in adults. We definitely don't want to default to interviewing someone with something that we've learned as a child interviewer. Currently it varies by jurisdiction and if you have a CAC, a Children's Advocacy Center, or if you use some other type of center to interview victims. Of course we want to consider that our interviewer is going to be trained. And have knowledge -- at least a general knowledge of disabilities, but preferably a specific knowledge of whatever person they are serving. And we always want our interviews, of course, to be trauma-informed in dealing with any victimization. We also want to be able to prefer our clients to whatever necessary services that they need that we may not be able to provide. I want you to rethink how you view disclosure. And in my experience in interviewing all types of victims, disclosure comes out in very different ways. And historically, a lot of our professional partners and the criminal justice system view it as something that's static. It happened one time. That's not the case. Disclosures come out in very different ways. Often times they are not organized. They've occurred in a very traumatic fashion. When they are disclosing about the event that happened to them, it is often the job of the interviewer to help the victim organize what has happened to them in a way that can make sense to our partners. We also need to think about the reluctance and the roadblocks that occur for victims. This is across the board for all victims. Because I think there's a lot more challenges for a person when they have a disability, I think these might play a bigger role, and I think we need to be aware of these and need to help address these when we're serving victims. And I definitely think I play a bigger role and if the victim is going to be able to trust you and disclose to you about what has happened to them. Also I think it affects how they can be and will be supported after the fact. When I talk about family and caregiver dynamics, even with adults, we still seek support and care from our family, loved ones, and the people around us. So that's how even with adults that support system is so important. I previously talked about trauma and how it can affect your memory. I think it plays a bigger role with someone who already might communicate differently from the person that's interviewing them. Now I would like to talk about the interview setting that you have at your agency or within your community if you have a victim with a disability that has experienced some type of victimization. In the chat log, let me know where they might be interviewed. I'm seeing in the courtroom, at the police station, another children's advocacy center, maybe at the base program or in the hospital. I see another person that pointed out a lot of times within their homes possibly an earshot of the user. Emergency department. Police station seems to be quite often a place for interviewing. Shirley, I see you do it at your adult protective agency. That's great. A few other people had multiple occasions. Multiple -- excuse me, multiple environments where you interview. Okay. Next slide. This is what I would suggest for best practice for interview setting for an adult. It needs to be fully accessible. And it definitely needs to be a place that is not specific for children. I know occasionally there was no other option than using the Children's Advocacy Center. I would ask you to really think outside of the box on how to support the victim. I know we have a portable system. Even though we need to use an interviewer from the Children's advocacy Center We can do it at a different location. This would be something that I would suggest that you start talking with your agency and within your jurisdiction now and plan ahead about some other options. The issue a lot of times that we see with using the Children's Advocacy Center is there's a lot of child-like paraphernalia, toys, that could or would infantilize the victim. We want to avoid that. Like somebody else stated doing it in the victim's home where the victimization might have occurred is not an ideal setting. We would like it to be neutral, not-threatening, and friendly. The interview needs to be recorded. Preferably audio and visually, but at the very least, audio. If that's fits with how the person is going to communicate. We also would like that victim to have access to medical services, depending on what the victimization is. If that's not something that you have in your agency, we might suggest thinking of a prefer process ahead of time. So it can be more seamless for the victim. And also have some type of mental health or family help available. I know we are talking about adults, but they occasionally contain to children. There's many times where the Children's Advocacy Center doesn't interview adolescents and it's done by law enforcement. And in that case, even with an adult who has a disability -- who may have a disability, they have family with them. That family is going to be hopefully a source of support for them. When victimizations occur, it is not just the victim that needs support in what's happening. Yes. Someone made a comment that should we ask the client where they feel most comfortable? Yes. Most definitely. Just like we want to give that client autonomy and if they are going to report or not. We want to give them the choice about where they are going to be interviewed and have them be a part of that discussion, if possible. And I wanted to briefly talk about the interview setting for children. You can see there are many similarities as for best practice for adults. This is for serving all adults who have experienced or been a victim of crime. The only difference is the accessibility for the person with disability and also the additional training to ensure that we're meeting that person in the way that they communicate. So the next few slides are going to be about question types and ways to access information from others by asking specific types of questions in an appropriate way. And this is not directed just to a person with a communication issue. It is directed at how to collect information from all victims of crime. But I do think that it makes a big difference as to what information we are targeting in the brain and what your job as the interviewer is in regards to supporting that interviewee and helping them talk about their experience in a succinct way that includes information that the criminal justice system is accustom to having and needs to move the case forward. So recall-based questions are the types of questions that we want to focus on the most. In those questions, tap into a person's narrative information. You can get a little bit more focused with recall-based questions. Meaning I can direct the person that I'm interviewing to something specific they already said. So I want them to tell me more about an incident they listed as happening. So they listed that shall be had hurt them in their bedroom. So I can direct them to tell me more about what happened in their bedroom. The recognition-based question is when I'm giving the interviewee options, and I want them to confirm them. Or it is a yes-or-no type question or the type of question that's going to produce information. As the interviewer, I want my interviewee to tell me all about what they experience. And if I only focus on what I think might have happened or what usually happens in these cases, I'm going to miss out on specific, important information that makes that interviewee more reliable. And most of the research that I'm familiar with is based on interviewing children with disabilities. But in general recall questions as opposed to recognition questions are going to give you more reliable information. There's some information on recognition versus recognizing questions. Recall is going to be in the victim's words. I'm not using my own words for what may have happened to them. They are describing it in their own words. Which again provides more consistency and will show that it is less fluent or contaminated by the interviewer. I don't like the word story. But that's really what it is. Even though it is the truth about what they experienced, it is their story the way they tell it, and the way they want to tell it about what happened to them. So if I'm using more recognition-based prompts, it might push a person to feel like they might need to answer me. It has a more risk of contamination, where they might be saying, yes, or no to questions. Because they really are not sure how to answer. And this victim has just experienced something traumatic and now likely they are in a setting that they are not used to with a stranger. It puts them in a position where it is harder to correct you. And here are just some examples of what a recall question is as compared to what a recognition question is. If you are trained as a forensic interviewer, you are more to remember the recall questions or narrative prompts. I'm putting a very open question out there. I'm asking the interviewee just to tell me about what it is they want to tell me about. But even within that, we are not taught to be witnesses. Children more so, but even as adults, we're not taught to tell about all of the things that law enforcement and the criminal justice system might need. So we do have to get directed at times. But that can be done still in a more open-ended fashion. When you close the questions in, you are really tapping into more of a recognition-type of memory. And that's where, as you see this question, did the fight happen in the bedroom, den, or somewhere else? This is what we call in the forensic interview world as an option posing. We think we're doing that a good job of adding that somewhere else. But really it isn't. And we're going to pause for just a moment for a quick interpreter change. I want to continue with the last recognition question. Did you do it on purpose, or was it an accident? Sometimes our partners want to know what is behind what somebody does. We have to recognize that victims of all ages are not going to be able to give you that purpose. Before we go to the questions chat, I wanted to briefly go over some things to avoid in interviewing specifically a person with a disability where there might be some communication barriers. And being more short in your question types and more concrete, starting with the open-ended prompts and really only going direct when you need to and being patient and pausing and giving time for people to process your question. And give you an answer. It is very, very important. What we definitely want to avoid as interviewer is asking them why things happened. Asking them any types of questions about time frames or the amount of times the victimization might have happened if there were multiple events. There's other ways to get to that information. If you are interviewing a person with some type of intellectual delay that you are not interviewing them as a child or using any type of baby talk. That you are treating them still as an adult. Let's look at the questions that you are using more specifically. Okay. If everyone has a chance to read this chat questions. I want you to tell me types of questions that you've seen be effective if you've ever interviewed a victim with a disability. Karen, I really like what you put there. First that you explained confidentiality, and then you ask them what they might want to share about their experience. That's really important. As the interviewer, you want to make sure the person in front of you knows that they have the right to say I don't want to answer that question, and it is okay. It is okay for them to be honest about how they feel. I like at the idea about reviewing the client's rights. Let them know what makes you feel more comfortable. That's great too, Shannon. >> Mandatory reporting is very important. We didn't feel we had enough time in the webinar to really fully give it all of the attention that it needed. Okay. Thank you, everyone, for your input there. So what we want to get out of this is that we need to create an adult appropriate protocol. We have a long-term goal. And that's to develop a protocol for all adults. As I said previously, we believe that all victims of crime deserve to have an appropriate, trauma informed interview. And starting with the disabilities that we believe is a good start. And then for us here at the National Children's Advocacy Center, our idea was to possibly move into sexual assault victims next. For now if you can address the gaps that we discussed here in the webinar at your agency, we might be able to get to the point where we have the developed protocol to adapt and make more accessible for people with disabilities. That's all I have now. If we have any questions, Ashley might help you with that. >> Hi, December. This is Ashley. We do have some questions. I also want to raise up a few of the comments about mandatory reporting. Kind of give you an explanation of why we didn't include that in the webinar. And the thinking behind that from our perspective was that we talk expensively about mandatory reporting in the context around, the need to have conversations around mandatory reporting and the need to have conversations around what does mandatory reporting look like in your state and identifying that, and whether you are a mandatory reporter or not, but this webinar was really focusing on interviewing. So the assumption for this webinar was that the victim or survival was in a place to report and coming to make that report. Mandatory reporting, if you refer to the slides is very early on. It is a barrier to reporting that we talk about. So we sort of -- we viewed it that way. We really wanted to focus this on interviewing. Some other comments that I wanted to uplift before we get to questions, I really appreciated the conversation happening in the chat pod around the need for language access and the need to really think about that in your agency. I think that's a huge barrier for a lot of victims and survivals with disabilities and deaf survivals, not just thinking about interpreters, but more broadly about communication access. Does your interview staff know how to approach working with a victim or survival who uses a communication board or assistive communication technology. Thinking through some of that. I wanted to uplift that part of the conversation before we moved forward into questions. And please, the chat pod was very helpful. We are saving the chat pod so that we can use it for the tool kit that December mentioned. A little bit about that tool kit, Vera and the National's Children's Advocacy Center and a few of our partners are working together to create a resource around this and provide some information for not only interviewers, but other professionals around how to serve victims with disabilities and deaf victims. So I think that that is going to be a great resource for a lot of you. Be on the look out for that. Hopefully it will be out later this year. December we did have some questions for you. The first question was: one of our participants stated that there's a conversation about how patients or individuals who have been through trauma may not recall the who, what, where, when, why, or how of what happened to them specifically. But you are also taught it is not a good idea to ask close-ended questions. Can you talk a little bit about how -- kind of how to balance that when maybe trauma or disability means someone can't answer the who, what, when, where, why, or how questions? >> Yes, thank you, Ashley. In the interview word, we call that scaffolding. That's where you always try to start with the most open ended. But often times people don't have all of the answers about their experience. What is most important? What weapon did it use? What did the person do to your body and environment? Those are important. We like the interviewers be able to tell us about their experience with that. The when is not as important. And part of this is educating our partners that, you know, law enforcement specifically needs those boxes checked. And some of them are specific in how they charge. But we like to challenge and say, of course, that the interviewer is not the only part of the investigation. If the part of it and there's lots of other information that can be collected outside of the interview. So let's say our victim knew what how they were living in, because it was a delayed type of disclosure. If we knew what house it was, then we could have law enforcement look into the leasing agreement, or mortgage sales or things like that to get to the time frame. That's not something the victim could give. And the why, of course, is like I said, not something that we can ask. If you start your questions. I'm sorry. I'm going to get back to scaffolding. More open ended and they can give you a little bit of information. Aisle going to use the person in front of me's words to use what they did give me. Then I can go a little bit more direct. And get them to try to give me more of the whos and the whats. That's a little bit more in depth than I want to have a discussion in the regular interviewee training. But that's how we do it. >> Thanks, December. This is Ashley again. We also had a question from a participant about the recommendation to record the interview. My understanding is that by law in many jurisdictions, forensic interviews do need to be recorded. Is that correct? >> Yes. A lot of that comes into play? >> Yes. A lot of it is children's advocacy centers, based in interviewing children. A lot of times if the child is over a certain age, the interview can't be played in court. You have the recording, because it might need to be played at court if they can prove some inconsistencies. That's where that comes into play. We've had many conversations here about the Children's Advocacy Center about the development of the adult protocols as well. We believe that visual and audio recording is important. Because it shows the state of the victim. You can see things that you can't hear in regards to maybe what the victim is doing while you are talking to them. They can see the mannerisms and the settings of the interviewer and where the interview takes place. But really takes out some of those unknowns that a jury might be weighing on. And we also know that a lot of times you don't go to court for several years after a crime has been committed. And so that video is a good snapshot of that person at that time. Sometimes when the victimization occurred, or when that victim was ready to tell. >> Right. I think, December, what you are doing is differentiation between criminal justice interviews, and some of our staff might be doing more advocacy services. I don't think they are saying the advocate should be recorded. I don't think she's talking about advocacy interviews that might happen at a rape crisis center, for example. I think we want to make that differentiation. >> Yes. Thank you, Ashley. Definitely. Even with the parallel of children, even -- children are talked to by CPS workers or teachers. No. They are not interviews. We still talk to those people that might interview a child about the best ways to ask the questions. Yes, those don't need to be recorded either. Sorry about that. >> There's also some conversation in the chat pod about needing to make sure that the accuracy of a police report -- to ensure the accuracy of a police report. The idea of amending police reports with additional information, making sure that information is up to date and correct. That's an interesting conversation in the chat pod. Carla said as an advocacy person, they aren't doing the forensic interviews. They might be the first person to hear the survivor's story. How can they communicate they might need to tell their story again? How do they talk to the victim or survival about the fact they might have to talk to someone again about this in a more formal setting it they choose to make a report? >> That's a good question. Often times you are the first person that hears something. You need to let them know, especially if it is a possibility of going to court. They are -- I would not say definitely, but most likely you are going to have to continue that conversation and give the information more specifically to someone else, whether it be law enforcement or their attorney. I think you have a wonderful role in them being able to tell them, they told you, this person believes me and is supporting me. I think they will do a better job in talking to law enforcement or attorney. Now they've had a good experience with you. >> Thank you, necessary. Another thing around the chat pod is around interpreters, making sure you are ensuring confidentiality with American Sign Language interpreters and not relying on family members and using the same interpreter for victim interviews and perpetrator interviews, and maintaining that confidentiality with interpreters. That's a great point. I wanted to uplift that as well, December. Are there any other questions at this point? Anything else that you want to ask December? Angela brought up a great point about revictimization, when it can take a couple of years to go through the criminal justice process, there can be an opportunity for revictimization. How can we think about addressing that and preventing that as much as we can? >> I think -- >> Okay. Sorry. >> That comes in where we are connecting with our community providers and creating a resiliency network is what we call it here at the Children's Advocacy Center. We're reaching out to community partners and breaking that gap between us and them. If a client leaves here, we are going to make sure we get support in wherever it is that we need support. If it is housing or food or mental health needs, whatever it might be. And I think meeting those needs and having other community partners to reach out to help that victim. I think that can be a stopgap in hopefully revictimization. Now if it is in regards to someone that's providing care or lives with them or has a different type of relationship like that, that's going to be a lot more complicated. I would say that's when we want our criminal justice partners to move in a little bit more swiftly and provide safety for that person if that's what that person wants. >> Thank you so much, December. Looks like I'm not seeing any more questions. I'm going to -- one more came up. How can we check in with the client as an advocate without coming off as pushy or making them report a crime? I would say really focusing on safety planning with the survival victim and having conversations about what might make them the most safe. I think talking about the benefits of some circumstances and how to report safely where you are not pressuring them to report, but you are having conversations with them about reporting. That might be a good way to approach the issue. More having conversations about ways in which they can be safe and have -- you know, promote their healing. That may or may not include reporting. Talking about it more as an option, not the option I think is always helpful. December, thank you so much. I'm going to change the screen really quickly. Thank you all so much for participating today and for the lively discussion that happened in the chat pod. We really appreciate your intentional listening to this webinar, and you've taught us some information that we didn't know. We hope that you got something from the webinar that's helpfuller for you. 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