Alliance For Children strives to meet every need for families impacted by the trauma of child abuse. Through a multidisciplinary approach, our goal is to rescue hope, restore trust, and rebuild lives for each child who needs our intervention.
A forensic interview is one of the core services provided at Alliance For Children with the purpose of lessening trauma for possible child abuse victims and assisting an investigation by gaining as much accurate information as possible. Forensic interviews are conducted by a trained professional with a child or in some cases an adult who has developmental or communication delays. Forensic interviews provide children with an opportunity to tell their experiences in a safe, open-ended way that allows them to talk about an instance of experiencing or witnessing sexual abuse, severe physical abuse or other violent crimes. The interview is video recorded and watched live by the investigators so that the child will hopefully only be interviewed one time, and not by the multiple investigating agencies involved.
Forensic interviews are an important part of our work because they allow for a child's voice to be heard by a neutral person whose goal is to gather information in a trauma-informed, developmentally appropriate way while keeping the child's well-being in mind.
The word “forensic” simply means that everything an interviewer says and does must be defendable in a court of law. It is a non-threatening, non-leading conversation that gives children the opportunity to talk about a possible abusive experience in a fact-finding way. Last year, Alliance For Children conducted 1,677 forensic interviews with suspected victims of child abuse or child witnesses to violent crime.
To learn more about the dynamics of
child abuse disclosures, read here:
