Kathleen Coulborn Faller

• Ph.D.
• Professor at University of Michigan

Sexually abused children provide the chief source of information about their victimization. Yet child victims are often reluctant to disclose their abuse. Investigative interviewing strategies strive for forensic balance, that is, to avoid both false negatives (failing to identify true victims of sexual abuse) and false positives (wrongly identifyi...

This article contextualizes new knowledge about forensically interviewing and assessing children when there are concerns about child abuse. The article references the impact of the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act and the circumstance in the 1980s where investigators and clinicians had little guidance about how to interview children about a...

In January, 2016, the Board of Directors of the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children approved a position paper on allegations of child maltreatment and intimate partner violence in divorce/parental relationship dissolution. This commentary describes the range of dynamics that can lead to allegations of interpersonal violence in di...

Recently, child welfare researchers and professionals have turned their attention to strategies for resolving challenging allegations of sexual abuse. An extended assessment, usually 4–6 child interviews by a single interviewer, is one such strategy. Using data from an online survey of 932 child maltreatment professionals about the utility of exten...

Provided in this chapter are estimates of the numbers of true sexual abuse cases in which children deny abuse, the reasons these children do not disclose, predictors of disclosure failure, and strategies that may facilitate disclosure of sexual abuse. The chapter relies upon both research and practice knowledge. The research is comprised of both qu...

When a child does not want to visit or live with a parent after divorce or separation, the public and professionals may assume that the other parent has turned the child against the unwanted parent. This behavior is referred to as parental alienation behavior and the outcome as parental alienation. Although some parents may engage in parental al...

Research is lacking on differing perspectives regarding custody cases involving domestic violence (DV). In a survey of judges, legal aid attorneys, private attorneys, DV program workers, and child custody evaluators (n = 1,187), judges, private attorneys, and evaluators were more likely to believe that mothers make false DV allegations and alienate...

This article describes the evolution of forensic interviewing as a method to determine whether or not a child has been sexually abused, focusing primarily on the United States. It notes that forensic interviewing practices are challenged to successfully identify children who have been sexually abused and successfully exclude children who have not b...

Using data from a survey of perceptions of 932 child welfare professionals about the utility of extended assessments, the researchers constructed a scale to measure respondents' views about sensitivity (ensuring sexually abused children are correctly identified) and specificity (ensuring nonabused children are correctly identified) in child sexual...

Background/Purpose NCWWI traineeship programs worked together to develop a common and comprehensive measure of child welfare competencies in order to track student gains in their programs. Research questions: * What are the characteristics of the Child Welfare Competencies (CWC) scale? * Do multiple raters have similar views of student competenc...

Although child custody evaluations can lead to unsafe outcomes in cases of intimate partner violence (IPV), little is known about factors associated with evaluators’ recommendations. In this study of 465 child custody evaluators, we investigated the association between evaluators’ beliefs, background, and knowledge and their custody and visitation...

This article reports the findings from an online survey of child maltreatment professionals about the appropriateness of extended assessments when maltreatment concerns cannot be resolved in a single interview. Respondents practiced in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and 3 territories, and reported mean years of experience about 15 years....

This is an introductory article to a special issue of the Journal of Childhood Sexual Abuse that responds to challenges to current forensic evaluation practice found in Kuehnle and Connell's edited volume The Evaluation of Child Sexual Abuse Allegations: A Comprehensive Guide to Assessment and Testimony (2009). This article describes the topics tha...

Developmentally inappropriate sexual behavior has long been viewed as a possible indicator of child sexual abuse. In recent years, however, the utility of sexualized behavior in forensic assessments of alleged child sexual abuse has been seriously challenged. This article addresses a number of the concerns that have been raised about the diagnostic...

The purpose of this study was to further our understanding of what child custody evaluators and other professionals believe regarding allegations of domestic abuse made by parents going through a divorce. The study had several major goals: to investigate the extent to which child custody evaluators and other professionals who make court recomme...

This article reviews risk factors associated with child maltreatment in South Korea within the context of the ecological system theory. Although child maltreatment is a serious concern in South Korea, understanding of this phenomenon is limited because most of the empirical studies address individual characteristics and few consider broader ecologi...

This study employs multi-site data from extended assessments of 137 children suspected of sexual abuse to examine what interview techniques evaluators use and what techniques yield information related to sexual abuse. Frequently used techniques were general assessment activities; touching education; nonleading, abuse-focused questions; and preventi...

The increasing diversity of the populations encountered and served by child welfare workers challenges cultural competence models. Current concerns focus on the unintentional over-emphasis on shared group characteristics, undervaluing unique differences of individuals served, and privileging worker expertise about the client's culture, thereby exac...

This article provides new findings from a national study involving 18 forensic interview sites of 137 children who were randomly assigned to a four or eight session extended evaluation. Cases assigned to the eight session protocol were significantly more likely to be classified "credible disclosure" of sexual abuse (56.6%) than cases assigned to th...

This article describes the state of knowledge about extended assessments/forensic evaluations in situations of possible sexual abuse. It provides a critical review of the modest body of relevant research, describes two models for extended assessments, and presents descriptive survey findings of 62 professionals conducting extended assessments, most...

This study describes results related to worker turnover from a longitudinal study of public and private agency child welfare workers in one state. Findings from 460 new workers were examined for reasons respondents took their jobs and chose child welfare work, their commitment to their agencies and to child welfare for two and five years, and the r...

This study examines perceptions of 425 public and private agency child welfare workers from one state in terms of their level of comfort with the court work components of their jobs, at baseline, which is after their initial training but before beginning their child welfare work, and again after six months on the job. Bivariate and multivariate ana...

Method: Child welfare professionals completing training to work in foster care were asked about reasons for taking their child welfare position, commitment to their agencies, and commitment to child welfare. Analyses compared responses from new public agency foster care workers (N = 100), public agency workers making lateral transfers to foster car...

A total of 69 departed public child welfare workers responded to a telephone interview asking why they left their positions and what might have made them stay. Their open-ended responses were then coded into domains and subcategories and also converted into quantitative data for descriptive analysis. The model developed describes the effect of chil...

Interviewing children who may have been sexually abused is a daunting task fraught with far-reaching consequences for the children, families, institutions, and professionals involved. With no room for error, forensic and clinical interviewers must navigate the complex and often contradictory evidence that informs their decision making. This book cr...

St. Mary County is a small rural midwestern enclave with a unique approach to handling accusations of child sexual abuse. Hoping to spare children the trauma of lengthy court appearances and probing interrogations, St. Mary's professionals strive to obtain confessions from accused sex offenders rather than ask the victim to bear the burden of proof...

We review the uses of realistic job previews (RJPs) for recruitment, selection, and retention of child welfare employees. We describe the history of development of RJPs in child welfare, summarize the contents of 10 RJPs, and report on interviews with human resources personnel and other key informants about how RJPs were developed and how they are...

An exploratory study was conducted to examine the effectiveness of a multidisciplinary assessment and follow-up consultation on first-time substantiated child protective services cases with at least one child 7 or younger. Fifty children from families receiving the multidisciplinary assessment were matched on race, family structure, child gender, c...

This article reports findings from a study of attitudes of 259 African American and White child welfare workers. They were asked about their views of the role of race in child welfare decisions and about the appropriateness of placement of children with gay and lesbian and single foster/adoptive parents. African American child welfare workers were...

This article, which grew out of a series of 11 focus groups with child welfare workers and supervisors, explores how legal ethics may increase the stress child welfare workers experience in carrying out their duties and may contribute to high rates of turnover. A number of workers experienced their interaction with lawyers and the legal system as e...

Now published by the AAP, this revised and updated 3rd edition offers a practical, objective, evidence-based guide to the medical diagnosis, and management of child abuse. Now published by the AAP! The previous two editions of Child Abuse: Medical Diagnosis & Management were recognized as one of the leading sources of information on diagnosing and...

The use of standardized tests and measures can supplement information obtained from interviewing the child. This chapter provides information about instruments for both children and adolescents. It covers instruments developed specifically to gather data on possible indicators of sexual abuse and trauma, and to measure the impact of sexual abuse. D...

Professionals who interview children for possible sexual abuse tend to be white and middle class. At the same time, children and families who require assessment for sexual abuse are increasingly from diverse backgrounds. Professionals need to develop special skills to interview cross-culturally. This chapter describes the need for interviewers to t...

Pre-school children pose a special challenge in sexual abuse assessment, because of their limited communication skills and increased suggestibility, when compared to older children. This chapter provides guidelines for both very young children, ages eighteen months to three years, and older preschoolers. It describes the unique developmental consid...

Non-disclosing children continue to challenge interviewers of sexual abuse cases, but there has been less progress in developing techniques for assisting them than disclosing children, in part because constructing appropriate research paradigms is so difficult. This chapter covers research from several domains that yields an estimate of the extent...

This chapter guides through the literature on conclusions about abuse and potential errors in forming conclusions. The chapter advises that multiple hypotheses should be considered and just focusing on information confirmatory of sexual abuse should be avoided. It provides a framework for considering the degree of certainty about sexual abuse and d...

Current policy is to advise professionals interviewing for sexual abuse that they should take a neutral stance, that is, with no vested interest in findings or not findings evidence of sexual abuse. This chapter discusses the etiology of the admonition for interviewer neutrality and its utility. It also discusses the research which demonstrates tha...

Child welfare resources typically dictate the number of interviews children receive before a decision is made about the likelihood of sexual abuse, this is usually one interview. This chapter considers relevant research, which suggests that the number of interviews should vary depending upon where the child is in the disclosure process, whether the...

The documentation debate revolves around whether or not to video record child assessment interviews. In the 1980s, a videotape of the child's interview promised to be a solution to the documentation dilemma and a substitute for child testimony in court. Videos haven't been entirely satisfactory in meeting either goal. This chapter covers various fo...

Dealing with children with special needs because of developmental and/or physical disabilities also requires special interview skills. This chapter discusses research on children with disabilities, which includes their increased risk for abuse and greater dependency on potential abusers. Preinterview data-gathering and adapting the interview struct...

The phases or stages of the child interview have been the focus of numerous guidelines, some informative research, and a great deal of opinion. Employing an interview structure that is evidence-based, comports with best practice, and yet accommodates the needs of the individual child is a challenge. This chapter conceptualizes interview structures...

Interviewing children about possible sexual abuse occurs in both forensic (legal) and clinical (therapeutic) domains. This chapter describes the differentiation between forensic and clinical work, but also notes the variability of practice is each domain and the overlapping nature of forensic and clinical work.

Once the professional has conducted interviews with the child and gathered other data, how then does he/she decide about the likelihood of sexual abuse? This chapter begins by reviewing the literature on decision-making protocols and notes commonalities and differences. This review is followed by a framework and a process for decision-making. This...

A hotly debated aspect of the child interview relates to the questions employed by the interviewer. The core of the debate is whether a particular type of question elicits accurate information from the child or not. The types of questions discussed are invitational, open, closed, open-ended, closeended, leading, multiple choice, direct, specific, m...

Professionals must decide which people, who may inform the likelihood of sexual abuse, to see, and in what configurations when assessing for sexual abuse. Professionals must also be able to provide a rationale for the model of assessment they employed. This chapter conceptualizes current practice into four, overlapping models for conducting assessm...

Both professionals and the public are attentive to and, in some instances, preoccupied with the possibility that sexual abuse allegation might be false. This chapter first differentiates between a false and an unsubstantiated report. It addresses the obstacle of knowing with certainty that an allegation of sexual abuse is false, pointing out that t...

A contested issue in interviewing children about sexual abuse is the use of media, props, tools, or aids, as means of communication about abuse. The controversy over media originated with the use of anatomical dolls, that is, dolls with private parts. This chapter discusses the research and practice on anatomical dolls, anatomical drawings, and fre...

Because child welfare cases in the world of professional practice require interdisciplinary collaboration, it would seem to follow that graduate students, who will become child welfare professionals, should be trained together, both in the classroom and in clinical settings. However, the implementation of interdisciplinary training is far from stra...

To determine significant predictors of severity of sentencing of sex offenders of minors in a jurisdiction which obtains many confessions. Data were abstracted from 323 criminal court case records of sexually abused minors over 11 years in a county which places a high priority on sexual abuse prosecution. The sample used in this analysis consisted...

Comments on an article by Nico Trocmé and Nicholas Bala (see record 2005-15814-002). The findings from the authors' research are fascinating. They confirm the difficulty posed by allegations of maltreatment when there is a custody dispute with their finding that custody dispute cases were significantly less likely to be substantiated. Of particula...

This article examines anatomical dolls in interviews of children who may have been sexually abused from three perspectives. The article summarizes research findings on anatomical dolls, discusses advantages and disadvantages of using them, and describes endorsed doll uses. Although additional, ecologically-valid research is needed on anatomical dol...

Recent research documents the comorbidity of child maltreatment and domestic violence as well as the detrimental impact of exposure to domestic violence on children. Domestic violence and child interviewing also share the distinction of being contested social issues. This article argues that methods employed in interviewing children about child mal...

Understanding and Assessing Child Sexual Maltreatment, Second Edition updates its comprehensive coverage of child sexual abuse definitions and indicators, interview and questioning techniques, and diagnosis guidelines to include an insightful response to the building social backlash against the so-called "child abuse industry." Distinguished schola...

This article examines the number and types of questions employed in clinical and computer-assisted interviews with children referred for sexual abuse evaluation. This research was part of a larger study to assess the efficacy of a computer-assisted protocol in the evaluation of child sexual abuse allegations. Interviews of 47 girls and 29 boys, age...

This chapter focuses on the prevalence, incidence, and effects of child sexual abuse and various professional interventions related to it, such as child protection investigation and mental-health assessment, treatment, and prevention. Various research findings on the subject indicate that victims are fairly evenly distributed across the age span of...

This study examines correlates of offender confession in criminal sexual conduct cases involving children. The cases consist of all closed court files (N=318), spanning the last 10 years from a single jurisdiction. This jurisdiction has a community-wide protocol for handling child sexual abuse cases, a high rate of charging (69%), a high rate of co...

This is an exploratory study that describes the process and outcomes of a Midwestern US community's approach to case management of child sexual abuse. Data were abstracted from 323 criminal court files. Specific information gathered included child and suspect demographic data, law enforcement and CPS involvement, child disclosure patterns and caret...

Seventy-six children (5 to 10 years old), who were referred because of concerns about sexual abuse, were interviewed as part of a larger study testing the efficacy of a computerassisted interview in sexual abuse evaluations. Data from initial interviews were coded according to the presence of disclosure and the details revealed about sexual abuse....

This article derives from an Open Forum on Leading Questions sponsored by the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children. It represents the thoughts of participants in the Open Forum, and the article attempts to integrate analogue research that relates to questioning children about past events into questioning practice with children who...

This introductory article places the issue of child maltreatment in the United States in a historical and political context. It demonstrates how the structure of child protection intervention has resulted in the evolution of knowledge and controversies, selecting those areas of knowledge and controversy that are particularly relevant to the other a...

This article addresses the problem of divorce situations in which there are also allegations of abuse. Its goal is to provide guidance for professionals evaluating these cases. It describes the challenges peculiar to cases where divorce and abuse allegations coexist, relevant research findings, and potential sources of bias. The article suggests a...

Introduction: In assessing for child trauma caused by abuse and other insults, a central source of information is the child. Information may derive from the child's verbal and behavioral communications, the child's functioning, and the child's physical condition. The focus of these guidelines is on eliciting verbal communication from the child. For...

Peer Reviewed http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/67930/2/10.1177_1077559598003004002.pdf

This article describes the parental alienation syndrome, its proposed characteristics and dynamics, and the methods used to document its presence. Research related to various tenets of the parental alienation syndrome is then reviewed. Finally, the syndrome's utility for mental health professionals and courts in explaining allegations of sexual abu...

The study's objective was to examine the relationship of polygraph findings to other indices of likelihood of sexual abuse and to case decisions by prosecutors, child protection workers, and professional evaluators. This is an exploratory study of 42 cases with sexual abuse allegations and polygraph results. Case record data were abstracted and cod...

Peer Reviewed http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/66846/2/10.1177_1077559596001003001.pdf

This study examines a clinical sample of 215 cases of allegations of sexual abuse in families also involved in divorce. Cases are categorized into situations in which: (1) disclosure of sexual abuse is followed by divorce (N = 31), (2) divorce is followed by disclosure of pre-existing sexual abuse (N = 54), (3) divorce is followed by sexual abuse (...

This article provides a historical perspective on the practice of interviewing children in cases of alleged sexual abuse and current controversies about these interviews. The following controversies and related writing and research are discussed: (a) the ability of the interviewer to conduct a competent interview, (b) the competence of the child to...

Increased professional concern regarding the evaluation of suspected child sexual abuse has focused the attention of clinicians and researchers on the statements and behaviors of children during investigative interviews. The early philosophy of "believe the children" has given way to a search for consensus among professionals who perform these eval...

Challenges 3 assertions in the National Institute of Child Health and Development Consensus Statement (M. E. Lamb; see record 1995-33433-001) on child sexual abuse and describes some of the children left out in its investigation. The assertions that complete and reliable information can be elicited from children who are skillfully interviewed and...

The research described is a study of a clinical sample of 72 women who allegedly sexually abused 332 children. The Sample is examined from a variety of perspectives, including whether the abuse was intrafamilial (n = 33), extrafamilial (n = 18), or both (n = 21); and whether the abuse involved multiple intrafamilial offenders (n = 33), a solo intra...

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS,ix WORKING IN THE FIELD OF CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE,1 The Professional as a Person,1 Universal Emotional Reactions,1 The Impact of Gender,2 The Impact of Socioeconomicand Professional Status,3 The Impact of Personal Experiences,4 Sexual Victimization,4 Being a Parent,4 Sexuality,5 Coping With Personal Issues,5 Dealing With Personal Feelin...

Peer Reviewed http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/29602/1/0000691.pdf

Peer Reviewed http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68571/2/10.1177_088626091006004012.pdf

Questions the practice of using parent-child interviews to determine whether children have been sexually abused by the parent. Research on the incidence of false allegations of sexual abuse by children are reviewed, and practical and ethical reasons for not using such interviews are elaborated. Three cases (involving a 10-yr-old girl, a 4-yr-old gi...

Based on a clinical sample of 136 cases, four classes of child sexual abuse cases in divorce are proposed: divorce precipitated by discovery of sexual abuse; long-standing sexual victimization revealed after marital breakup; sexual abuse precipitated by marital dissolution; and false allegations made during or after divorce. Implications for clinic...