Abstract
Two studies examined the immediate and longer-term impact of specialist training on sexual assault investigators’ use of best-practice questions and relationship evidence. Investigators completed mock suspect interviews immediately and 9–12 months following a 4-week specialist course that concentrated on the Whole Story approach to sexual offence investigations. The training had an immediate positive impact on investigators’ use of non-sexual grooming details, and a long-term positive impact on investigators’ use of relationship details. It also increased the use of open questions and decreased the use of specific questions, with performance sustained for open-depth questions and specific yes/no questions. Specialist training can improve investigators’ ability to adopt a narrative interviewing approach and ask about relationship details, yet skill erosion remains an issue that future training programs need to address. Incorporating relationship evidence into investigative interviews in an open-ended manner may be a key strategy for improving understandings about victim-offender dynamics in sexual offence cases, which could have implications for attrition and conviction rates.
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Data Availability
The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
Notes
The PEACE model is an approach to investigative interviews that includes five stages: planning and preparation, engage and explain, account and clarification, closure, and evaluation (see Griffiths and Milne 2006 for a more detailed overview).
When Mauchly’s test of sphericity indicated that sphericity was violated, the appropriate correction (Huynh–Feldt or Greenhouse–Geisser) was applied to the degrees of freedom.
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Thank you to Dr. Elli Darwinkel for help with coding.
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Tidmarsh, P., Sharman, S. & Hamilton, G. The Effect of Specialist Training on Sexual Assault Investigators’ Questioning and Use of Relationship Evidence. J Police Crim Psych 38, 318–327 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11896-021-09446-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11896-021-09446-x