When Child Sexual Abuse Hits Home for Jurors

Teresa Huizar: [00:00:00] Hi, I am Teresa Huizar, your host of One in Ten. In today’s episode, When Child Sexual Abuse Hits Home for Jurors, I speak with Dr. Maggie Stevenson, Associate Professor of Psychology at Kenyon College. Now, in prior episodes of the show, we’ve covered negative attitudes of jurors in child sexual abuse cases, gender bias of judges, and even other ways in which the court system may be tilted a bit against children who seek justice.

But what about jurors who may be more likely to have empathy for victims and not less? I know it sounds a bit like a unicorn, but it’s not. As you will hear researchers set out to find whether adult survivors were more likely to be empathetic to child victims than jurors who had never experienced child sexual abuse, and more importantly, what implications [00:01:00] this would have on creating jury pools with a broad range of expertise and views.

But this also raises other and more challenging questions. Are adult survivors more likely to view child victims as credible in these cases? Are adult survivors more likely to recommend or support conviction? I know you’ll be as interested as I was in the answer to those questions. Please take a listen.

Hi Maggie. Welcome to One in Ten.

Maggie Stevenson: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Teresa Huizar: I should say welcome back because this is not your first time with us, but we appreciate you coming back and I thought this study that you’re coming back to talk about was so interesting. We did a research to practice brief on it ahead of this and so I wanna just kind of start at the beginning.

Which is, I’m wondering how you wound up involved for jurors who might have lived experience, they were sexually abused as kids. What the impact of that is on their actual [00:02:00] jury service. So how did you become involved in that study? How did you become interested in this topic?

Maggie Stevenson: Yeah, yeah. So I have long had a special interest in understanding factors that shape jury decision making broadly, but especially with respect to jury decision making in child sexual abuse cases. In fact, this goes all the way back to my graduate school days at the University of Illinois, Chicago, where I worked with Dr. Bette Bottoms, and that is her area of research, you know, factors that shape juror’s perceptions of child sexual abuse victims, essentially. And so I got started in that as a graduate student first publication with them and we conducted a literature review of that chapter on every single mock jury study that had ever been published, examining factors that mock jurors’ perceptions of child sexual abuse victims.

And so that literature has grown since, you [00:03:00] know, this was a 2007 publication, almost 20 years later of the updated state of that literature. It’s grown that much, and so I guess my interest has been there since my early graduate school days, and this study is one conducted by one of Bette’s former students, Taylor Jones Cieminski and myself.

And it is a meta-analysis where what we’re, what we’re interested in doing is getting, again, our hands on every single study that has examined history of being sexually abused as a child might shape their perceptions of child sexual abuse cases. As you know, that is a common thing that attorneys and judges will want to consider when they are conducting voir dire and involve child sexual abuse.

And so it has really not only, I think, psychologically, theoretically interesting implications, but very practical legal implications as well for the fairness of jury decisions in these kinds of cases.

Teresa Huizar: So you mentioned, you know, and [00:04:00] I thought the paper itself laid out while this study was then looks at issues of the severity of that abuse that a juror, mock juror in this case, might have had.

You laid out kind of the literature around this topic more generally, right? So this was an extension, essentially looking at a particular area or looking to extend research that had already been done, including a 2020 study. so what I’m wondering, for those folks who didn’t have the joy of reading your paper yet, although we will link to it on our podcast website, we hope everybody goes there and actually reads it for themselves.

But for those that don’t or won’t, can you just kind of recap for us what do we know at this point about, setting aside your current study, what did we know going into the study?

Maggie Stevenson: Mm-hmm. So you’re right, this was an extension of an earlier study and there is research out there that shows that abuse experiences, you know, people [00:05:00] who have had abusive experiences that does shape their attitudes toward abuse. Generally, they tend to be a little bit higher in empathy for abuse victims themselves. We also know that for parents, if they’re abused themselves, especially sexually abused, then that can kind of, in some cases yield that sort of hypersensitivity to concern about prospective abuse. And so we know there is research out, there was research out there that is showing this evidence of this length, this association between abuse experiences and attitudes toward abuse and concern about abuse and empathy for abuse victims.

And there’s also sort of that lay assumption that those links between those experiences and those beliefs and attitudes exist. What there really hadn’t been, research showing that link [00:06:00] in a mock jury context. And we thought that was interesting and there’s, I think there’s real good reasons for why there hasn’t been research out there because fortunately most people haven’t experienced child sexual abuse.

I’m not saying it’s not prevalent. It absolutely is. But we’re talking, you know, statistical minority of people. And so what that means is it is hard to get your hands on a sample size that’s large enough to really empirically assess or validate these kinds of questions in a mock jury context, which is why I think a meta- analytic route was really necessary.

It was essentially the only way we could study this. Maybe I’m jumping ahead of your question.

Teresa Huizar: No, no. I think it’s good to talk about why you selected the study design that you did, and it’s helpful to understand why it would’ve been shaped in the way that it was. I think what I’m interested in exploring a little bit with you is, again, it’s one of those interesting things where there is a little intuitive [00:07:00] sense of this and that I think if you said to people. Okay. Do you think that if somebody was sexually abused, however you wanna define severely, and I wanna get into how you define or find a proxy for severity in a minute. But you know, the more severely you are sexually abused, the more likely it is that there will be some impact on judgements you make as a juror, whether that’s a mock juror or any other kind. But I thought it was interesting that you all selected to look at that question of severity. And did that just follow from like it seemed like the next thing to study? Or on just a logical extension of it? Or was there something about that that you were really trying to tease out in terms of its practical implications, whether that’s in voir dire or in any other thing?

Like what was it that made severity the next thing to study?

Maggie Stevenson: Yeah, I mean, I think honestly both, it was a natural next step, you know, in that first study. Again, we had to conduct that meta-analysis in order to get the [00:08:00] sample size you’d need to be able to examine. Is there, or is there not a link between juror’s own history of experiencing child sexual abuse and their tendency to convict in child sexual abuse cases?

We showed that there was, in that meta-analysis, you could only, and we could only do that by collecting every single study out there, and there weren’t that many, but we did get every study that had been published or that existed. Some of these were unpublished where we found that the researchers had measured the perspective, the participants experiences with child sexual abuse, and then they had them render case judgements in a mock child sexual abuse case.

And so every individual, one of those studies is, you know, it might have 200, 300 participants, only 50 of whom are gonna have that experience of child sexual abuse. Well, you can’t, you know that any single [00:09:00] study, it’s not gonna be a large enough sample size. But if you’ve got the meta-analysis, you’ve got multiple, you know, every study out there that’s done that, then we can get the sample size that we need to, to make a meaningful inference about those effects.

And we did find that relationship. But you know, we did have reviewers at the end of that study ask us, well, did you measure the severity of the abuse and did that have an effect? And you’re like, well, okay, we didn’t do this in this particular study. And so you’re right, that was a logical next step. And I do think that not only answering that empirical question is important, but also to your point, I think that there are additional practical legal implications for knowing the answer to that question because you know, there are individual differences in what and what people even perceive themselves in terms of experiencing child sexual abuse and whether or not they identify with it. And, and all of that can manifest during voir dire and might [00:10:00] shape the outcome. So I think severity is another sort of practical element with respect to voir dire as well.

Teresa Huizar: When I was reading the paper, one of the things I was thinking about is just even how challenging it is to define severity. I mean, you all found some proxies for it and looked at like penetration, and I was thinking about, and I thought. You know, these are as good a proxy as anything else you might come up with.

But I was thinking about to your point, that it’s so individualized and we know this as child abuse professionals, that people’s trauma response really varies very significantly. And it doesn’t directly align necessarily to some of these things. And yet, what else would you possibly choose?

And so, you know, I just would say to our listeners, you know, this isn’t a time for argument about what severity means because it’s just one of those challenging things that if you’re trying to examine it, you have to find something that’s a proxy for these things in order to even do the study. But at the [00:11:00] same time, you know, in the paper yourself, you guys acknowledge that there’s just, the survivor perception is different among survivors in ways that may or may not align directly to these points.

Maggie Stevenson: A hundred percent. You know, there are inevitably gonna be limitations in any kind of quantitative study. I think especially quantitative studies, you know, we’re measuring severity with a series of proxies. I mean, I think to the extent that there are individual differences in whether or not that definition of severity that we’re using fits an individual’s actual experience of severity, there’s always gonna be that gap.

Construct validity, gap and that kind of gap, we wanna minimize it. And to the extent that it exists, it will undermine the likelihood that we will find effects. But we did find effects. In other words, this might, you know, you could consider this a conservative test of the relationship between severity of abuse [00:12:00] experiences and these attitudes because I think, you know, had we been able to do something more nuanced, more individualistic, it would ostensibly even be stronger.

Teresa Huizar: When you went into the study, were you expecting to have any surprises or was this one of these things where you were sort of doing it to, to really just build the body of research on this, but you really pretty much expected to find what you found?

Maggie Stevenson: We did expect this, we hypothesized it. But you know, the thing with psychological research, I think so much of what I have experienced in my own endeavors in the research process is, you know, after the fact, the study comes out, the way it comes out and you’re like, oh, I knew that all along.

It easily could have failed. Easily could have not worked out that way. And so often that is what happens, you know? Or so often what we find, I think is counterintuitive, but it really could have been the case that severity did not, you know, severity of [00:13:00] abusive experiences, didn’t predict attitudes. It could have just been the, a dichotomy.

Did you have have that experience or not? That predicted it. But we did find severity manifested as a predictor. I won’t say I’m surprised, but I’m always happy when it works out the way that you expect it to work out. That is nice.

Teresa Huizar: So one of the things that the paper pointed out, which I thought was interesting, again, might not be radically surprising, but it’s an interesting thing to think about it as a driver.

The largest part of the effect seemed to have to do with empathy for the child. You know what was happening is, which let me just back up here for a minute, and say, for all of our listeners who are involved in these cases all the time, you know the frustrations of having a case in which the opposite of happens, right?

It feels like the jury pool, for whatever reason, does not have any empathy for the child, and the outcome then falls apart in a way that winds up leaving the child, the [00:14:00] MDT, the victim advocate, all traumatized by the whole experience, right? So, it’s an interesting thing to see here that when there are survivors, adult survivors who are a part of a mock jury pool or a jury pool, that their empathy, the sort of identification really with the victim, which forms this empathy, then means that, you know, they are more likely to make judgements kind of in the child’s favor in that sense. And again, it’s not that that’s surprising. But it raised the question in my mind, which your study will not answer, so just know, I’m just musing here. But it raises this question of, you know, to your point, not everyone is a survivor, and empathy is an important thing, especially in these trials where often the only evidence is the child’s statement, and there may be a little bit of corroborating evidence someplace else, but often it really does come down to the child’s statement.

And if there isn’t the ability on the part [00:15:00] of jurors to empathize in any way with this child, you know, it all too often yields outcomes that do not tend to justice for kids. And so we know from your study that it influenced jurors who were adult survivors. I’m curious about how the lack of that experience, which was not a part of the study, how it has the opposite effect.

Maggie Stevenson: Yeah, I mean, that’s a good question. You’re right because in this study we were just looking at people who had experienced abuse and not a control group of participants who had not. Now in our earlier meta-analysis, we were comparing an abuse group to the non-abuse group, and I hope I’m keeping those two straight.

I feel like I’m flipping back and forth between those two studies, but I think you make a good point. You know, I think often when we’re looking at the voir dire process, we are concerned in child sexual abuse cases or legal actors. And by that I mean, you know, attorneys are concerned about the possibility that people who have had similar experiences who have [00:16:00] experienced child sexual abuse are disproportionately biased or prejudiced, and that’s grounds for excluding that perspective juror, because the jury instructions are gonna tell them you have to render decisions that are rooted and merited, you know, only on the basis of that probative evaluation of case evidence and not prejudicial.

But I think we need to think carefully and kind of interrogate that question of what it means to be biased. And to what extent do our life experiences necessarily reflect bias? And you raise a different point, an important point, which is that a lack of experiencing of child sexual abuse might be a sign of, you might be a little bit less aware of the realities of child sexual abuse.

You might be, if you’ve never experienced it, more likely to endorse inaccurate myths about child sexual abuse. And maybe that’s a form of prejudice. Maybe that’s a form of [00:17:00] bias. We don’t consider that grounds for exclusion in child sexual abuse cases, but you could sort of flip that on its head and sort of interrogate why that is.

Is that fair? And I think our argument we’re really careful to sort of advance is that. We don’t necessarily believe that people who have had these experiences of child sexual abuse are necessarily inherently biased in child sexual abuse cases. They have unique worldviews, maybe. And we want jurors, we want a jury to have a diverse set of perspectives.

That’s very important for jury fairness and so we would argue that it shouldn’t necessarily be automatic grounds for exclusion. Is it something that’s important to consider? Does it have the potential to shape attitudes toward these kinds of cases? Empathy, yes, but to your point, it could also sort of equivalently be that [00:18:00] the case that you know, not having these experiences, not being as in tuned with those realities, you know, child sexual abuse, very real reality, can also have an impact on inaccurate beliefs and prejudices as well, maybe disproportionately prone to believe children are lying in these kinds of cases.

Teresa Huizar: We’ve had a different researcher whose name escapes me at the moment, but on the podcast to talk about a study that really looked at that with male jurors and the endorsement essentially of myths or the lack of belief or the belief that kids make these things up, essentially, that victims make it up more.

And it’s just an interesting thing to tease out both sides of that. But back to your study for a minute. When you looked at the issue of severity, you found that yes, increased severity yielded more essentially victim empathy. But what I did find interesting is it wasn’t necessarily additive.

It wasn’t true in the study [00:19:00] that for anyone who’s an adult survivor, there was an effect on juror judgment across the board. But when you looked at severity alone and tease that out, the more severe, yes, the more empathy for the child, but not necessarily the more belief that the child is more credible or more likely to assign guilt, which I thought was both interesting and to your point on this issue of bias, I think that the way that survivors have been generally treated in the courtroom often is to the extent that people believe, not just that they’ll have more empathy for the victim, but the more severity in what they’ve experienced will make them much more likely to believe the child, much more likely to assign guilt and therefore to somehow shift criminal justice outcomes in a way that you wouldn’t otherwise expect. And this is why in voir dire, there’s this sort of going down a [00:20:00] rabbit hole of questions. And when a survivor says that they’ve had that experience, that’s not the end of the questions. Right. That’s not the end of the question.

That is, are you a survivor? Oh, interesting. Instead of it’s to ask about those experiences in some detail. And you, the paper points out, I think a few things that are some practical implications that I want to talk about, which first of all. How triggering that can be or how upsetting that can be for survivors to have to experience that in the first place.

But the second thing is, if it’s not likely to really create bias in the system, right, or bias in their judgments. Then are we subjecting them to a bunch of unnecessary questions that are upsetting, but does it really affect whether or not they should be seated on the jury. And so I’m just kind of curious about how you think about that, about, you know, what has been the reaction of [00:21:00] folks in the criminal justice system when you’ve had an opportunity to talk about your paper and its findings and its implications.

You know, are you seeing things that are really concerning that you’re hoping that the paper will shift? I mean, I’ve just asked you like four questions, so I’m gonna pause here for breath. And let you just kind of tell me about what you see as the practical applications of all of this.

Maggie Stevenson: I do think, you know, one thing that has been understudied in the field generally is juror trauma. You know, juror, we ask a lot of our jurors, you know, they have to experience maybe in some cases really gruesome evidence of, you know, kind of horrific kind of crime and child sexual abuse cases. I would put those in that category of, you know, the kinds of cases that can be really upsetting for people.

To put it mildly in many cases. And so this, I think, can also be compounded at the voir dire phase. You know, we’re, we’re asking jurors to say out loud in [00:22:00] front of, often in front of other prospective jurors, you know, whether or not they have had these kinds of experiences. So that’s disclosing a lot of sensitive information.

A, are people even willing to do that? I mean, I know it is perjury if they don’t, but you know, we do kind of wonder too are, are they being fully honest, but I think we do need to worry a little bit about, or a lot about what that can do to jurors. And I don’t know if we have really paid as much attention to that as we ought to have.

Empirically, I think we should be studying it more. And this is just one way to kind of scratch the surface of that. And, and I would argue that one of the implications of this research is to show that yes, it does seem to be the case, that severity of your abuse experience, your sexual abuse experience as a child shapes empathy, but to the extent that it doesn’t predict guilt is a sign that I would say maybe [00:23:00] we could use as evidence to sort of encourage the courts to back off on that really invasive line of questioning during voir dire. I don’t to the extent to which that’s the implication, which I think it is, and that’s sort of one thing.

I think it’s another thing to get attorneys to be willing to do that. You know, we have an adversarial court system and you know their job is to win that case, right? To advocate to the best of their ability. And so I hope that the science would be convincing that it would change hearts and minds and practice.

I don’t know if I’m as optimistic to as to believe it’s immediately gonna have that kind of effect, because it is such an adversarial system and I do empathize with that, but I would hope that it might have a mitigating effect and that it might help jurors have a more positive experience.

Teresa Huizar: You know, as you were talking, I was thinking there have to be jurors who the first time they disclosed child sexual abuse was [00:24:00] during voir dire.

You know? Because they did know the penalty could be perjury for not, and so they may very well have done that, and I think it speaks to the fact that there’s still work to be done in terms of trauma informed court systems and all of that, because what support then occurred? And follow up for that?

None. I can tell you already, like none universally. And the same thing you’re saying that jurors in general are in child sexual abuse cases, trafficking cases and abusive images cases, they’re exposed to horrific evidence that will take up space in their heads forever. And I think thinking about what kind of support they need, I’m not aware of any court systems that provide any follow up care related to that.

And you know, professionals have access to professional resources to help us try to cope with the degree to which we’re exposed to those things. And there’s, the last however many years, been so many efforts around secondary traumatic stress exposure for prosecutors, [00:25:00] for law enforcement, for Children’s Advocacy Center staff, for others who would be exposed to that kind of material.

But I’m hoping a listener is aware of some court system out there who’s doing something for jurors who have been exposed to that, but I’m not personally aware of anything like that. Which I think just means that’s another aspect of our system that maybe just needs to catch up to where we are. With research overall, what do you see as the next logical extensions for this research? You know, you’ve talked about some of the practical implications, your hope that prosecutors and defense attorneys and judges pay heed even to this. But where do you think it takes you next?

Maggie Stevenson: That is a really good question.

You know, I remain interested in sort of factors that shape outcomes in child sexual abuse cases and there’s still so much that we don’t know. And one study I just did where we did manipulate, for instance, a victim’s own [00:26:00] history of not history of mental illness, but mental illness following an incident of alleged child sexual abuse.

And we’re finding that jurors do perceive the crime as more plausible. They’re more likely to actually convict if the victim is portrayed as having a mental illness diagnosis specifically. That’s interesting of PTSD, TSD specifically, and I think it’s because people schematically, associate PTSD with victimization. And yet we know that there is not a one size fits all model of what child sexual abuse can do, and many victims do not have diagnoses and so, most and or you know, maybe more than would have a specific PTSD diagnosis. And so I say that because I think that that is one study where I think the implications are really interesting in terms of like a defense strategy, a prosecutor’s strategy, and trying these kinds of cases.

And B, what are our [00:27:00] stereotypes about what child sexual abuse looks like? And I’m mentioning that study because I think it sort of relates to these meta-analyses. I sort of wonder, you know, I think, and it is an empirical question, to what extent is it the case that people who have experienced child sexual abuse are less likely to need to believe that child sexual abuse victims are gonna act in this specific stereotypical way?

And I don’t say, I don’t think I’m seeing that particularly clearly, but I guess I’m saying I think that people who have had these experiences might be less likely to endorse these myths or to have, you know, to really hold tight to stereotypes about what they believe child sexual abuse to look like.

And so I would be really interested in examining, are people who have had these experiences maybe a little bit more accurate? You know, are they a little bit less susceptible to manipulations that would lean into [00:28:00] like the most stereotypical kind of case possible? So I think there are interesting ways to suss it out.

I need to think more about it. But that is kind of where–

Teresa Huizar: No, that’s helpful. And actually, you know, the study that you’re just mentioning, which I’m going to just say I have not read, but I think one of the things that’s really interesting about that, as you’re describing it, just a couple of things.

First of all, as you’re saying, survivors have a variable experience and some kids will, and we hope they don’t develop PTSD, right? If we do early intervention early enough and we’re successful at it, then hopefully they won’t develop PTSD and show signs of it by the time that they’re at trial.

I think the other issue is that even if they did develop it, if they got good evidence-based intervention, then by the time of trial, which is often a year or two later. Would they still have that as a diagnosis? Hopefully not. Hopefully it’s fully [00:29:00] resolved. And then there’s a clinician shortage, so there are so many victims that will never get the mental health care they need, period. So they will not have a mental health diagnosis irrespective of what trauma symptoms they have. And so this is kind of the problem with the general public not fully understanding child sexual abuse because they become the juror pool, right.

And they drag in with them all of the myths, all of the biases, all of the whatever it is. And in some cases that may tend towards certain favorable outcomes from some small number of victims. But on the other hand, you say to yourself, but if they believe a lot of myths, then those myths might help this 10% or this 20%, but what does it do for the other 80 that they’re still applying these myths toward?

And that wind up with terrible outcomes court wise, because people were endorsing those myths.

Maggie Stevenson: Yeah. No, because they don’t fit their stereotype of what this looks like, [00:30:00] and that is just inconsistent with what the research shows. There is not a one manifestation of what this can look, and so I agree with you.

I think there’s a lot more we can and should be doing to suss out what’s going on there, for sure.

Teresa Huizar: Well, since you’ve been studying this for 20 years, I feel pretty confident that you’re gonna keep right on down the path looking at these critical questions. And I’m deeply appreciative of it because we are always interested in talking to researchers even when there isn’t an immediate practical implication because it’s still expanding our world of knowledge around child sexual abuse.

But when there are very practical implications as you’re talking about here, where we see these things play out in criminal court every day, all the more so it’s wonderful to talk to somebody who’s doing research that has an obvious practical implication to it. So I’m just wondering, is there anything else I should have asked you and didn’t, or anything else that you wanted to make sure that we talked about today?

Maggie Stevenson: I don’t really have [00:31:00] anything else I’d add to it. This was such a lovely conversation. Your questions are so insightful and it was really lovely being able to chat with you about this.

Teresa Huizar: Well, thanks for coming back a second time and after you, you know, undoubtedly publish your next very interesting paper, you know, you have an open invitation anytime to come back and talk about it because we’ll always be interested in it. So thank you very much Maggie and do come back anytime.

Maggie Stevenson: I really appreciate it. Thank you.

Teresa Huizar: Thanks for listening to One in Ten. If you like this episode, please share it with a friend or colleague. And for more information about this episode or any of our other ones, please visit our podcast website www.oneintenpodcast.org.