Why They Don’t Tell: Understanding Reluctance in Trafficked Youth

Teresa Huizar: Hi, I’m Teresa Huizar, your host of One in Ten. In today’s episode “Why They Don’t Tell: Understanding Reluctance in Trafficked Youth,” I speak with researcher Scarlet Cho, a doctoral student at the University of California, Irvine. Now at one time or another, I’m sure we’ve all seen a movie or TV show on teens who’ve been trafficked and exploited. And likely just like me, you’ve sat in front of the television set talking to the screen saying things like, no, that would never happen that way, or that’s not what it’s like at all. And one of the ways that non-professionals get it wrong, is around disclosure in movies. Witnesses can’t wait to come forward. They’re eager to tell police what happened, and they virtually rushed to court.

But is that what happens in real life? We know it’s not. In real life for so many reasons, teens are reluctant to disclose sexual exploitation in real life. Many are nervous around police and uncommunicative in interviews and scared of court.  What then is all this reluctance about and how do we help youth tell their stories in ways that will help them feel and become safe? As you’ll hear researchers set out to find out what’s at the core of that reluctance in youth who’ve been commercially sexually exploited, and what they found has implications for helping all the teens we serve. I know you’re going to be as interested in this conversation as I was.

Please take a listen.

 

Hi Scarlet. Welcome to One in Ten.

 

Scarlet Cho: Thank you for having me.

 

TH: So how did you come to this work? Really examining, you know, youth who had been commercially exploited and their reluctance when they’re talking with police officers and the court?

 

SC: Yeah, so how I got to this really specific niche area of the field was I had actually been working with Dr. Thomas Lyon in his lab for a few years, and he is really at the forefront of investigating ways to get the most comprehensive information from children in forensic interviewing settings with as little harm to them as possible.

And so I had read a ton of these forensic interviews at the time, and I, along with a couple of my colleagues, Hayden Henderson and Agnieszka M Nogalska, were all really interested in the forensic interview transcripts with adolescents specifically because they seem to look really different than our child witnesses.

We still use the same approach in forensic interviewing, like the 10-step protocol from Dr. Lyon, and it seemed like we needed to, as a field, figure out a way to tailor our interviews to adolescents specifically.  So our first approach was, okay, what is exactly different in these adolescent interviews?

Like they feel very different. They feel a little more resistant to respond in different ways than children. And so that’s when we kind of arrived at the conclusion that we wanted to measure reluctance in these interviews. And develop a scheme for capturing that. And this wasn’t really done in the forensic interviewing literature as much before.

There were a couple studies getting at this, but there wasn’t like a comprehensive way to measure reluctance. So we pulled from different areas such as like police interrogation work, political communication, so how politicians equivocate in their responses and when they’re being questioned about their policies and as well as linguistics research.

So how people may equivocate or, you know, basically just answer questions without really answering them.  So we pulled from all these different literatures to come up with this comprehensive coding scheme to detect reluctance, and our hope was that by detecting reluctance, future studies can use that to find ways to mitigate reluctance in forensic interviews.

So using evidence-based practices that can kind of eliminate this reluctance from forensic interviews, which are really important in aiding in prosecution and gaining as much information as possible to help in the legal process.

 

TH: I’m imagining some of our listeners that are parents of teenagers are saying, teenagers the world over are notorious being reluctant to answer questions about anything. Where were you last night? Where’d you go with your friends? What’d you do school today? So talk a little bit though about the unique aspects of reluctance that attend to adolescents who’ve been commercially sexually exploited.

 

SC: Oh, absolutely. So beyond our specific look into the trial transcripts and interviewing transcripts with these adolescents, just the broader context of what would make them more reluctant to give any information about their abuse is that a lot of commercially sexually exploited adolescents come from a context of a lack of support. So a lot of them have experienced abuse at home before, have ran away from home, don’t have much of a support system there. They have really complicated relationships with their exploiters as well.

So often their exploiters are a very sole source of survival, basic needs. They might have complicated relationships with them. Think that they’re in a, you know, consensual relationship with them and they have a community that they’re a part of in the exploitation network where they do not wanna be regarded as snitches.

They don’t want to give information on their peers as well. And they also have really complicated relationships with the police, so they have really negative perceptions based on possible prior altercations with the police where they really have this dual relationship as they’re seen as suspects in a way, but also victims because of their age and police treat them in that way as well.

So kind of navigating their lack of procedural justice attitudes, like not perceived fairness and the whole legal process. Mistrust of adults in general.  Above and beyond the challenges of adolescents in general when they’re questioned. So having more sophisticated ways of evading questions and just being more mistrustful of adults in general.

There’s a whole host of factors that lead this population to be particularly reluctant.

 

TH: I was thinking as you were talking that most adults, even if they haven’t done a thing wrong and they’re there just as a witness to a crime or something like that, find it anxiety provoking to talk to police. You know, even if they’ve been trained to think of them as helpers always, and those kinds of things.

It’s just an anxiety producing environment I think.  I think the same could be said for court. I mean, we’re gonna get into your study in a second, but that’s another domain you looked at and I was thinking about, you know, forensic interviewers when they testify, are often anxious about that process. Even though they’re not reluctant in the way that we mean that word, they’re actually very forthcoming.

Still, there’s this feeling of nervousness or sort of this intimidating factor that sort of comes into play sometimes, especially if you’re unfamiliar with that. Talk a little bit though about the special considerations here. You started talking about it with police where the relationship can be complicated.

On the one hand, there may have been a time when police came to their aid or they’re talking about trying to protect them from some harm. On the other hand, they may have had other quite negative experiences with police and you know, if you are sort of adding the court into that equation, you know, that also can be somewhat fraught.

And so what did you find in looking at the literature itself about reluctance? Dealing with either of those two populations?

 

SC: Yeah. Beyond our previous studies on reluctance in commercially sexually exploited youth in police interviews, there is virtually no research on that in the court or in other police interviews.

So there’s been a couple in the forensic interviewing literature where they’re getting interviewed at CACs, but generally those were done in other countries, which have different protocols than we use here. We have a lot of variability even within the US and that, so in essence, there’s basically nothing out there on reluctance and commercially sexually exploited adolescence.

 

TH: Well you breaking ground. It is a good thought breaking work. Okay, so then that’s a good point to then start talking about your study itself. So I’m curious about what were your hypotheses going into this? What were you hoping to find out more about as a part of this?

 

SC: Yes. So originally we had developed a more, I guess a less developed version of this coding scheme in a previous study that looked mainly at the police interviewing transcripts, but we did include the court transcripts in there as well, but we weren’t really tuned into thinking about how reluctance might be different in court than in police interviews because the court is a way more constrained environment where there’s a very formal question, answer format. Attorneys have to ask questions in certain ways, and the judge is really there to make sure that everyone follows this format. So our hypotheses were that. Police interviews would elicit more reluctance in these youth than in court.

But we also wanted to look at differences between defense attorneys and prosecutors in eliciting reluctance. So we thought that defense attorneys might elicit just as much reluctance as police officers in the trial transcripts. We also believed that one limitation of our previous study is that we looked at differences in police interview transcript reluctance, and court testimony, reluctance without controlling for who actually made it to court.

Our hypothesis here was that some people were initially interviewed by the police and didn’t later testify, and those people might be the most reluctant or more reluctant than the ones that did agree to testify and made it past the prelim testimony and actually face the defendant in court. So we hypothesize that those would be a little more reluctant than those who made it to testimony.

There were a couple other, I guess, hypotheses with types of questions asked. So we basically put questions into different bins of like, are they WH questions? So like the what, when, how, where those are more like open-ended responses.  Versus tag questions that are more like, yes, no questions, but they basically put forth a narrative like you were there Saturday night, right?

Or like you were in the car with them. Correct? So those are tag questions.  And also statements, which are obviously less used in court, but we hypothesized that the tag questions specifically in court would elicit a lot more reluctance than other types of questions

 

TH: Because they sound a little accusatory for one thing, you know? You were in the car when X, y, Z happened. Correct?  You could see how that might cut someone’s back up a little bit. Okay, so we’ve talked about your hypotheses. Now I want you to unpack your findings for us a little bit, and also as you’re talking about this, just anything that surprised you in your own findings.

 

SC: Yeah, absolutely. So consistent with a lot of our hypotheses, we found that the police interviews elicited a lot more reluctance than in court.  When we looked at the differences between questioners specifically, so police officers versus prosecution versus defense attorneys, there was a little bit more nuance.

So we saw that when you control for the types of questions asked, that defense attorneys elicited just as much reluctance as police officers and compared to prosecution, both of those defense attorneys and police officers elicited the most reluctance. That was a really interesting finding, and we also found that different types of reluctance that we identified where the police interviews witnesses were more likely to be just totally unresponsive, overtly express their reluctance to responding, kind of shifting control of the interview, or challenging the status of the police officers in court. They were more likely to go the route of altering the narrative.

So kind of combating those tagged questions by correcting the interviewer being pseudo responsive. So responding in a way that is like, okay, they answered the question, but it’s not really getting at the information asked, as well as resisting the formality of the courtroom by using inappropriate diction, which is more like persisting and using like, yep.

Nope, in court. When the judge or the attorney is consistently saying, please respond, yes or no, or changing slight wording that would change the connotation of the narrative put forth by the attorneys. So I think that’s the most interesting finding, is that they use different methods of resisting the interview in court versus police interviews, forensic interview transcripts

 

TH: Because I’m wondering what you make of that, because it is interesting that in court it’s a little bit in terms of what they’re doing, there’s a part of it that feels to me less reluctant and more resistant.  Like trying to assert some self-efficacy, like some sense of your own personal control there.

That doesn’t seem to me to be there to the same degree in what you’re describing about their reluctance with police, but I could be totally wrong. So what do you make of it?

 

SC: Yeah, I think it does depend because the courtroom context is, you know, it’s an adversarial system, so especially under cross examination, there is a lot of biting back and forth between this narrative and that narrative.

And you do have to be nitpicky with like, you know, I don’t agree with the word choice used here. This is what I would say about it. So I think the courtroom context is just set up for that more adversarial nature. But that being said, even in police interviews, there are a lot of guidelines that are misaligned with how we would interview adolescent witnesses or victims of abuse where the lines just get blurred, you know, that police interviews are often influenced by their training and using the read technique and more interrogation tactics. And because, you know, minor sex trafficking is kind of entered the scene recently at– Legally like laws have not been passed or pre the 2000s and a lot of police officers still do see minors that are sex trafficked as both offenders and victims.

A lot of of the time they are interviewed right after being picked up off the street. And I guess there’s just a lot of reasons for the police interview to be a bit adversarial as well. But those vary a lot more than you would see in a more confined testimony.

 

TH: You know, to your point that police have their own specialization, right?

And generally they’re expected to be interviewing offenders, not victims, at least as it relates to kids and youth. I mean, this is really what the whole outgrowth of the CAC model was about, as ensuring that, you know, if someone’s going to be interviewing a kid, then it needs to be somebody who’s specially trained and they’re trained in something that isn’t the read technique, for example, primarily.

You’re not coming from a place of, this person must be lying to me. And so, which, you know, when you’re interviewing an offender, there is always that in the back of your mind because a good person knows the time, frankly, they will be lying, you know, so, or hiding things or whatever. So it is, I think one of the things that your study brought up to me is like, is the right person even interviewing these youth?

Because I think that the study wasn’t done in a comparative way with a neutral forensic interviewer that is non-police. And I just wonder, which we don’t know the answer here, this is just speculation, but I’d like to believe that the results might have been at least slightly different, you know?

 

SC: Yeah, absolutely.

Like we do not have that study already done. So like, I can’t say definitively, but just reading these transcripts, the police and the attorneys in court do not follow the same ten step protocol I’ve seen in a lot of CAC interviews with forensic interviewers and forensic interviewers are trained in mitigating some of this reluctance, at least informally, you know, with rapport building strategies.

Stopping and checking in with the child and just really being a supportive force in that interviewing process that to no fault of the police, they’re not exactly trained in the same way as forensic interviewers. And I think that’s what’s really exciting about this line of work is that once we build up more empirical evidence and what works then eliciting information in this population or even in adolescents in general, I believe it is aligned with the police as well. They want to elicit, you know, case facts, information that will aid in prosecution, and we just need to develop better ways in training all sorts of people in the process.

Social workers, attorneys, judges, police officers, forensic interviewers in how to increase productivity and decrease reluctance to help with case prosecution, but also to reduce risk of revictimization in these youth.

 

TH: As you were talking, I was thinking about back when I was a CAC director, I call everybody kids, so don’t think, I mean young kids necessarily, but youth that would come in who had been trafficked, that sort of thing.

And first of all, let me just be honest, that they were often not happy to be there. And CAC or no, because of all the things you’re saying, you know, they’ve been removed from a trafficker. They may see that person as their boyfriend. And they are worried about downstream effects and or potentially getting in trouble.

And I mean, teenagers are just mouthy. I mean, let’s be honest, that that’s just true. And so, I mean, there are a lot of things, no matter what the setting is, no matter what the training is, where there’s gonna be potentially some reluctance where. I think the field has come a long way though, and recognizing that rapport building may take more than one session.

You know, kids have to be ready to talk at the bottom line or they’re not gonna talk, or they’re gonna start doing things that kind of undermine the interview because they aren’t ready. And we’ve certainly seen that. I just really appreciate this focus on various players in the system because as you say, we want everyone within the system to know how to talk to these kids in a way that’s going to be respectful and able to elicit the information needed, because there’s not always going to be a specially trained forensic interviewer at the hand.

And in court for sure, it’s gonna be the prosecutor and it’s going to be the defense attorney, not some other third party that’s gonna be questioning these. And so I just really appreciate looking at this. One of the things that surprised me a little bit is, prosecutors listening to this are gonna pat themselves on the back a little bit, because while there was reluctance there by comparison to the other groups you looked at, it was less. And I’m wondering what you attribute that to. I mean, to me it’s obvious why it would be less than the defense attorney.  But not necessarily as obvious to me why it would be less than the police. And so do you have any speculation about that? Again, knowing we’re not saying, you know, what does the literature say because you guys are doing this groundbreaking work, but what do you think that’s about?

 

SC: Yeah. To me, like reading through all of these interviews and transcripts, I can see a marked difference in the prosecution. They clearly seem to be on the side of the witness, so their questions are not, you can tell they’re not really trying to catch them in a lie, so to speak. I think that the witnesses can probably anticipate what the prosecutor is going to introduce in court. So they have already prepared, not prepared remarks, but they already know what to expect, so they kind of already know what they will respond to their version of the facts.

So I think it’s when they receive questions that are worded in a way that it totally takes them back, or they’re given evidence in the police interviews that they don’t know whether it’s true or not. Like, oh, this person said that you were here this night. They don’t know what to believe. So I think it’s more of this trying to catch them in a lie or catch them off guard with certain introduction of facts that I think in the direct examination with the prosecutors, it’s less evident that that’s going on there.

 

TH: Well, and I will say I think a lot of prosecutors have had some training in trauma-informed work. And so I think that, you know, I wonder to what extent that is also playing a role here.

The other thing that I was wondering related to that was just the timing. Police officers are gonna be right at the moment, these youth are being picked up right, and taken off the street, essentially. That’s when that interview is going to happen typically, whereas the prosecutor isn’t gonna talk to them for many months.

In fact, it might even be a year later, a year and a half later before this is gonna come to trial and they’re gonna be having this conversation. And so I just also wonder to what extent police officers are dealing with people in a moment of extreme crises. And I think we’re not all our best selves in that moment on either end and prosecutors are dealing with a survivor who has had many months to, you know.  Not only anticipate what this is going to be like or even get treatment or those kinds of things, but also, you know, and I would just say informally, often by that point, they no longer think the offender is their boyfriend or some of these other elements that were the point of contention, even in the original contact.

So I wonder to what extent that is playing some role in these differences in reluctance and amounts of reluctance that you’re seeing.

 

SC: Absolutely, in my opinion. I do think that definitely plays a role here. But again, no studies have really looked at that.

 

TH: You’ve got a lot of work to do, Scarlet, we’re tasking you with many a studies on this conversation.

 

SC: I know there is so many factors to look at here, but timing definitely is a huge issue. I would say even to your point with the initial contact with the police following, being arrested that night and getting interviewed, you know, a couple hours later at like 4:00 AM that’s obviously a really particular context here.

Like usually with forensic interviews of child sexual abuse, those arise out of the child has come forward, usually disclosed to a caring adult. They’re ready to talk about it in essence. And here usually the first interview comes out of that initial contact with the police. They’re arrested, they’re interviewed, so that is a huge difference there.

And then with the court testimony later on, it could be months, it could be years. It does take a really long time. You don’t know who they’ve had contact with in the meantime, in terms of the prosecution team or caseworkers or even repeated contact with police officers in repeated interviews. So that probably plays a huge role in how much reluctance that they exhibit later on, and that’s what we kind of see with that group that didn’t end up testifying later on, is that they were extremely reluctant to the police in that first interview. So if we could try to figure out ways to, when we identify that group, that is probably unlikely to make it to testimony, ways to build rapport with them and maybe decrease their reluctance down the line. That would be huge in aiding in prosecution of these cases.

 

TH: Let’s start by not arresting them. I mean, it’s like, you’re kicking off this whole thing on the wrong foot if you’re arresting kids and youth because you’re guaranteeing reluctance, I would say, in what’s gonna happen after that. And I think some states have done a good job of putting public policy in place and putting laws in place that would make that highly unlikely or even forbidden.

So, you know, I think context makes a difference in terms of some of these things. There are some states that are sadly still considering kids who are sexually exploited, “child prostitutes,” and think that they’re somehow saving them from something by arresting them and putting them in juvenile detention and starting along convoluted process.

I think we’ve been grateful to see over the last 20 years a significant reduction in that.  There have been wonderful nonprofit groups that have driven policy changes in a number of states, but I think just even this study points out to the fact that there’s more policy work that needs to be done because you know that old saying about that, you only get to make a first impression once or whatever it is.

It’s so true. If you’ve already started off the relationship, on a very fraught note, you can only imagine that you are going to have to dig yourself out of a very deep hole from there. And so we want that first contact not to already set enormous barriers.

 

SC: Yeah, and by arrests, it’s not necessarily, you know, formal arrests, but the way that a lot of cases are even identified at first is through like sting operations

 

TH: They’re taken into custody. Is this the way they think of it? ’cause they’re shuffled off someplace.

 

SC: Yeah, and it’s not necessarily that they’re making a formal arrest, but it’s just the entire context of the way that they’re identified is through this whole operation where they have to be handcuffed and taken into a police station and then interviewed there overnight.

It’s just we need to figure out better ways to do that. And there are a lot of police officers that are really trying to bring in the science to their interviewing techniques and how they go about identifying victims because at the end of the day, they absolutely want to help these adolescents, and of course they want to aid in the prosecution, but it’s just we don’t have the right handbook for these professionals in dealing with how to bring them a way that might be more of a rapport building strategy instead of like a rapport tarnishing strategy right off the bat.

 

TH: As you were talking, I just wanted to put my head down in my hands and weep. I mean, I just like everything that you were saying about that process. To the extent that that is what is still going on, let you know. I think as child abuse professionals, we’ve gotta do greater outreach. I mean, there are 969 Children’s Advocacy Centers around the country.

The vast majority of them see kids up to the age of 18. The vast majority of them see kids who have been trafficked, the vast majority of them see kids that are involved in cases of abusive images. If law enforcement don’t know that or don’t have a close enough connection to know what to do, when they discover this going on in the middle of the night and what resource may be available to them, then there’s work we need to do on our side to make sure that we are extending the availability of our services in a way that no law enforcement officer feels like, oh yeah, 3:00 AM I need to take this person down to the station and give them a good grilling and see what happens. Like that’s just.  That’s on all of us, I think, as communities to say that that’s not how we want these youth to be interacted with, and that there are better ways of handling that. And even in places where there aren’t Children’s Advocacy Centers or they don’t serve kids up to the age of 18, as you say, there’s things we can do to provide technical assistance and training and support to make sure that even in those instances, you know, these kids are getting better treatment because it does no one any good for them not to be treated in a trauma-informed way.

 

SC: Yeah, the work is being done. It’s just, you know, slow to implement, like bringing science to the streets, so to say. It’s hard to get everyone involved in these research studies that can be tediously long and they’re published in scientific journals that a lot of practitioners do not regularly get access to.

So that’s why having conversations like these is really important to bring everyone together and get everyone kind of on the same page of where we are, where we need to fill the gaps, and how we can all work together to improve this process.

 

TH: Absolutely. And to your point, everyone wants to do the right thing.

It’s not about that. Like I don’t want any part of our conversation to be construed by anyone, as you know, we’re bashing police or this or that. People are doing the best they can with the information they have. We started this podcast for the very reason you said, I like to try to push out information in a digestible way from folks doing leading edge research that you know, lots of times practitioners don’t have time to sit down and read a long journal article.

They can digest this while they’re running, jogging, doing the laundry, driving down the street, whatever, you know? So lemme ask you this. You  know, when you think about the implications of your research, beyond the fact that everybody needs to have a better grip on making sure that their first contact with these youth are likely to generate, or at least express whether or not the kids take it up, but you know, express support as opposed to feeling like an interrogation.

Is there anything else that you just say, these are some obvious implications for practitioners, and if I could just get them to do two or three things differently than they’re doing right now. Here’s what I’d want them to do or pay attention to.

 

SC: Yeah, I would say just making it really evident that you are on the side of the witness here.

So when they are showing some pushback in the interviews instead of pushing forward and kind of having, you know, that adversarial relationship we’ve talked about. I think just giving them a second and saying, I know this is really hard to talk about. If you need a second to collect your thoughts, I’m just trying to, whatever the goal is, to know more about X, Y, Z.

So to really just explain in plain terms that you’re trying to help this youth and that’s your main goal. I don’t see that a lot in the transcripts that I’ve read, anything like that. And I do feel like in forensic interviews that is a really, really helpful tactic that these interviewers use when, a youth, a child is being particularly reluctant to respond.

That I’ve just seen that they usually give them a second to collect their thoughts, to calm down a little bit, let them know that they are with a caring adult that wants to help them in the process. So I think just with, yeah, anyone involved, police officers, social workers, even attorneys in court, if you can get that message across in whatever way feels organic to you.

I think that could really help. But again, the research is not there yet to fully link those things, and I think that’s a great next step is to look at different strategies of support and rapport building and how those relate to reluctance. That’s something that can help us build that toolbox to help these practitioners.

 

TH: Wow, since this area of study is kind of in its infancy, I think that you’ve got lots of very interesting areas to explore for the future, and I’m excited to have you back after you publish your next paper that’s digging into this a little bit further. I’m just wondering, as we kind of close out the conversation, is there anything else that I should have asked you and didn’t, or anything else that you wanted to make sure that we did talk about today?

 

SC: Yeah, I would say just one thing I would love to hone in on really briefly is just we talked about the gap between the initial interview and then the testimony that might occur months to over a year later. I think it could be really important, and this again has not been studied, but to build rapport across interviews across this time and across people involved in the process. So if we had some more communication between the police officers and the attorneys and the caseworkers here where they could establish repeated rapport with these youth, I think that could really help in forthcomingness and comfortability and all those things that could increase the likelihood that these cases are prosecuted successfully. So I think just, just thinking about how we can all kind of integrate our pieces of the puzzle here to help surround youth with supportive processes in this whole legal system.

 

TH: Well, I just really appreciate you diving into something that has not had much, if any look previously, especially with such a vulnerable population, you know, I think it would be hard to find a more vulnerable population than the one we’re talking about.

And I just thank you for the special attention. You’ve given it through your research, and look forward to talking to you again. Thanks again.

 

SC: Thank you so much for having me.

 

TH: Thanks for listening to One in Ten. This episode is also available on our YouTube channel at NCAforCACs. But whether you listen or watch, for more information about this or any of our other episodes, please visit our podcast website, oneintenpodcast.org.