When a child discloses abuse - the knife edge between criminal or family court proceedings
When my children first started disclosing, it began as smatterings of words and bizarre statements. Enough, but not enough to make sense of what they were saying. Certainly enough to know something was wrong.
As the case escalated rapidly with social work and police involvement, I was shocked to realise that what they told me just didn’t count - that without testimony during a police interview, in controlled conditions, there would never be a criminal case against him. Even in my naiveté, I knew that my young girls were unlikely to retell what they told me -particularly as it was largely nonsensical - but in a police station, with people they had only just met, the odds were not good.
It didn’t stop me hoping, praying, in the few times the police or social workers spoke to them, because I knew that if they did, there would be proof - not just the hearsay that came from me.
At the beginning, it was one of the things that shocked me the most: that my children were expected to disclose in a one-off interview.
But in the family courts, it did count. I was able to testify, along with family members they had also disclosed to, as the judge can rule based on the balance of probability, not the burden of proof required in criminal cases. Unlike criminal cases, where guilt must be proven ‘beyond reasonable doubt,’ family courts decide on the ‘balance of probabilities’—meaning which version of events is more likely true.
But it wasn’t until we stood in front of the Appeal Circuit Judge (he, of course, appealed the Fact Finding proving him guilty, delaying at every possible turn) that someone actually stated the bleeding obvious - that my daughters had been groomed for a year, by their father, not to tell anyone for fear of retribution. It’s so obvious, but the timeline and investigative process (at least in the UK) does not account for that.
Research has shown that when children talk about abuse:
Many children do not tell immediately
It is most likely delayed when the perpetrator is a trusted adult (London, Bruck, Wright, and Ceci (2008)) Link
Trauma disrupts memory and language (Lamb et al. (2008)) Link, and trauma narratives are likely to be short and disorganised (Gail Goodman et al., 2003) Link
Children often don’t have the vocabulary or language for sexual acts
If children fear consequences (as mine did due to 12 months of grooming), they are more likely to recant (London et al. (2008))
Memory gaps and emotional avoidance are normal
Metaphors and drawings (I have pages still of drawings of his ‘dick’) are common
I saw all of this with my children. From the way they started to disclose - fragments, which they dropped in with humour, which I look back on and see as emotional avoidance and a way to test the water for fear of consequences.
They made their first joke whilst we were on holiday in Italy (later they told me it was because they felt safer and had planned to do it that way so they were out of the country).
It took me months before some of the disclosures made any sense -how can a child describe sperm or ejaculation? They simply do not have the knowledge or vocabulary. This, coupled with the way repeated trauma impacts narrative, memory, and language, makes me wonder how they conveyed the extent of the abuse at all. I had to spend my life with a notebook akin to DI Goodman (Death in Paradise), so I could jot down phrases and words nonchalantly so I didn’t show them that I was capturing it all. It was before voice memos, which now would make it a whole lot easier but, I am sure, more excruciating to recant.
Some things still don’t make sense to me, and I may never know if they were true or if it was their interpretation and words. However, I was clear in my legal and court documents to use it all, and I think that may have gone in our favour- that I didn’t have all the answers. I was also honest about the recanting. Again, now with hindsight, I realise this also demonstrates typical behaviour of abused children.
But most importantly, they didn’t tell me everything in one ’sitting’. It was protracted, over time, the gaps and fragments in their words and narratives sometimes providing the most insight.
It was what they didn’t say that gave as much to the disclosures as what they did. It was their movement when they told me, veering from the closed, hunched drawings of one, to the other who used to dance and imitate wxxxking (it was scarily good).
It’s clear, though, that the process for interviewing children who disclose is fundamentally very far from what the research tells us is actually required. And whilst this chasm remains, criminal prosecutions will be few and very far between.
