Johns Hopkins Undergraduate Law Review

June 18th 2024 | Natalie Bernstein

Edited by Grace Ma

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

Natalie Bernstein, JHU Class of 2027

Hello, my name is Natalie Bernstein, a writer for the Johns Hopkins Undergraduate Law Review, and I am here today with Professor Thomas Lyon, the Judge Edward J. and Ruey L. Guirado Chair in Law and Psychology at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law. In addition to degrees from Dartmouth College and Harvard Law School, Professor Lyon notably holds a PhD in developmental psychology from Stanford University. Lyon is past-president of the American Psychological Association’s Section on Child Maltreatment and a former member of the Board of Directors of the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children. At USC Gould, Professor Lyon directs the USC Child Interviewing Lab, which conducts research and forensic interviews with children who have been victims of maltreatment or who have witnessed violence. In addition to authoring and contributing to over 250 articles and presentations in both law and psychology, he has conducted more than 280 training sessions on child testimony with judges, attorneys, law professors, social workers, psychologists, and reporters.

Thank you so much for agreeing to speak with me today, Professor Lyon!

Professor Thomas Lyon, Judge Edward J. And Ruey L. Guirado Chair in Law and Psychology at USC Gould

My pleasure.

Bernstein  

To start us off, can you give a brief overview of the work you do?

Lyon

All my research is designed to maximize the productivity of children’s reports and to minimize suggestibility. I first got into this business in the late 1980s, when I finished law school, and I worked in children’s services division of Los Angeles County Counsel, which meant I represented the county in cases where they had to remove children from their parents because of abuse or neglect. At that time, very little had been written about how to interview children, and there were cases— actually at the very same time I was working in the criminal courts building downtown in LA, there was a case called the McMartin preschool abuse trial going on in the same building. In these cases, very young children were making bizarre allegations of abuse against their daycare operators. It became clear that many of these allegations were false. And the reason was that they had been suggestively interviewed by interviewers who really did not have any research to guide their questions. At the same time, the cases I was dealing with were cases where children clearly had been abused, but often said they had not been abused. It was difficult to know how to question them, to encourage them to tell the truth. So, I became interested in this problem, because on the one hand, you had false allegations, because people did not know how to question children. On the other hand, you had false denials, because people like me did not know how to question children, who were recanting allegations that almost certainly were true. I thought, it would be good to figure out how to question kids. And so then I went back to school in developmental psychology. Everything I have done since has been designed at dealing with this dilemma between pushing kids too hard, and creating false allegations, and not encouraging children enough and creating false denials. 

Bernstein

That is really interesting. Thank you so much for going into that. Could you go a bit more in depth on what you do at the USC Child Interviewing Lab and how this work ties into your legal scholarship?

Lyon 

We actually interview kids in cases where they are alleging sexual abuse. This is something that we have done for the past ten years for the Los Angeles dependency courts. One of the great things about being back at USC as a law professor is I have good relationship with dependency court. Now we do dozens of sex abuse interviews a year. We also transcribe the interviews that other Los Angeles child advocacy centers conduct and then after doing these interviews, we use the transcripts for our research. For example, in one of our recent studies, we looked at the efficacy of questions that specifically asked children about what the perpetrator did with his hands, or what the child did with his or her hands. And what we showed was that this is the kind of question that is not leading, it is not suggestive. But it allows the child to go into details that are extremely important in sexual abuse allegations. And so we both do practice where we do the interviews, but we also do research where we use the interviews as archival data, and we are able to identify the most productive means of questioning children.

Bernstein

That is really interesting; thanks so much for going into that. You mentioned you got your PhD in developmental psychology— how has that background contributed to what you do at the lab and how you conduct your scholarship?

Lyon

Oh, it is everything I do. What I learned in grad school was how to do experimental work with children. Obviously, identifying how children’s cognitive and social skills and understanding changes with age. And then my first foray into applied child psychology research in the legal field was examining how attorneys asked children questions about their understanding of truth or lies as a means of qualifying to testify. It was a very simple matter; I basically just created tasks for assessing children’s comprehension of the words truth and lie. And I was using the skills that I had learned as a developmental psychologist, but I was applying them in a context where their answers were important, not just for showing their understanding, but for their ability to qualify as competent and be allowed to testify. 

I did not learn as much about observational work in grad school. And what I mean by observational work is when we look at the interviews that are actually conducted, and we look for the productivity of different question types, that is not experimental work, because we do not have a control group. We are asking all kids the same questions. But even then, I learned enough about some issues of statistics in grad school that allowed me to understand how to do that kind of observational work as well. Currently, everything I do is formed by my grad studies, whether it be the statistics underlying the observational work, or the methods that I learned in conducting experimental work. 

Bernstein

That makes sense, and that is super interesting. I think it is fantastic that you have managed to apply that background to the legal context. Regarding interviewing techniques, you mentioned making sure that the material is not too suggestible, but also making sure that children feel comfortable coming forward and do not omit information. What are the general best practices and things to know when interviewing children, particularly in contrast to what we might expect from adults?

Lyon

I will focus on that last part of your question, which is things that you might not already know. 

The first thing to understand is rapport building. So adults intuit that it is probably a good idea to build some rapport before asking the child about something as sensitive and difficult to talk about as sexual abuse. What people do not know about rapport building is that you should not be talking. You should not be doing all the talking— you are building rapport. And interviewers do all the talking for two reasons. 

The first reason is they ask a lot of yes or no questions, which means that you are doing a lot of talking and the child is simply answering yes or no. And part of that has to do with the fact that a common characteristic of children is that they answer questions using as few words as possible. If you ask yes or no questions, they are just going to say yes or no. As a result, the interviewer is inevitably talking a lot more with the child than the child is during rapport building, even though the goal of rapport building should be to get the child to talk more. 

The other reason why people talk a lot in rapport building is in order to make friends with the child, they talk a lot about themselves. So you say, “Oh, when I was a kid, I used to like soccer, blah, blah, blah.” That is great, and that does have some benefits. But again, you are talking too much. And the more you talk, the less the child will talk. That is the first thing: you should talk less during the rapport building, and let the child talk more. 

The second thing is the kinds of questions we ask when we are asking about abuse. What messed us up in McMartin and these other cases, is that the interviewers, in order to overcome the child’s reluctance, deliberately asked very specific questions, yes or no questions, and even leading questions. They did that because if they did not, they did not think the child would disclose. The problem is that because they became more leading, they increased the risk of false allegations. That is what we saw in McMartin. [Such questions] increase the difficulty that I just mentioned, which is that even if the child was abused, they would simply say yes or no in their responses. The second problem is that people do not have a good intuition for how to overcome reluctance. Now, that is something we are still working on. There are still lots— hundreds of thousands of children— who have not disclosed and will not disclose [abuse] because we do not know how to ask them these questions. But what we have learned is how to ask the questions if the child is willing to disclose and has disclosed. And in those cases, we understand that, you know, we can build rapport, ask open-ended questions, get them talking, and then continue to ask open questions once the child has disclosed in order to elicit a complete report of abuse.

Bernstein

That makes sense. It is great that your lab has figured out how to help those kids who are disclosing already. When I looked at your work, I noticed several articles focused on specific age groups, like adolescents. What particular things are there to keep in mind, depending on the age group an interviewer is working with?

Lyon

That is a great question. So, a few simple guidelines. Children younger than five are extremely difficult to interview. It is not a coincidence that the children in these cases that look now like false allegations from the 1980s tended to be preschool children, children under five. They might have been a little older than five when they testified, but they were talking about experiences they had when they were three or four years of age. And we do not even interview three-year-olds. We actually know that the techniques that we have found, and that others have found effective for kids as young as five, do not work with three and four-year-olds. And we also know— and I learned this from my dissertation was on the difference between threes and fours— that when it comes to their understanding of knowledge, threes have profound difficulties in some basic understandings that affect their ability to be good witnesses.

Once kids are five, though, they are actually quite good witnesses, much better than we think. Because they actually respond really well to those open-ended questions that I just described. And they continue to improve up through their grade school years. Then you hit adolescence— and now the difficulty is not that they have some cognitive limitations, or some immaturity. Now that they are adolescents, they have all the problems that adolescents have, with their emerging sullenness and their emerging sense of independence; they are actually extremely good at being evasive when they do not want to answer your question. So adolescents are challenging for a very different reason that has less to do with cognitive abilities, and more to do with the different perception they have of adults, and the different ways in which adults have to learn to negotiate their conversations with them.

Bernstein

That is really interesting. And it makes a lot of sense.

Lyon

Right. And let me just add one more thing. An interesting thing to think about is what is the perfect child witness? I would say, the perfect child witness is nine or ten years of age. The reason for that is they are not a teenager. They still like adults— that changes totally when you become a teen. Those are the children that we most underestimate, because of the ways in which we ask questions. If you do a poor job of questioning a nine-year-old, they are going to look like the younger child, but if you do a good job, you are going to be amazed at how productive they are. One of the most exciting things for me is when we are asked to interview a nine-year-old, and I think Okay, I know we’re going to do great, because the previous interviewers will not have understood how to ask open-ended questions. By asking open-ended questions, we get amazing amounts of information from these children.

Bernstein

That is fantastic. It really shows the importance of making sure you are using the proper techniques to get the right results. With this kind of knowledge of which kids are more responsive to questioning in mind, do you think this may influence who perpetrators choose as victims, like you tend to see that they tend to go after younger children due to their cognitive limitations? Or is it kind of universal?

Lyon 

This is a great question. I do not know as much as I should about how perpetrators select their victims. Of course, there is a lot of work that has been done on just the pedophiles, and what ages they are most attracted to, and that probably has a lot to do with it. I do not know much about that. It is certainly the case that perpetrators will deliberately select children who they think are less likely to protest in the beginning, and who are less likely to disclose once the abuse has begun. Sure, that is true. Assuming someone is sexually attracted to very young children, then they are likely to select the children who are most vulnerable. Another part of it, though, is just availability. The fact that people so often abuse children within the family or within the home, I think has a lot to do with just the fact that those are the children that are most accessible. Those are the children that are the most trusting, right? The least likely to resist, because it is your parent, or your stepparent, or your mother’s boyfriend. Yes, they will definitely select the most vulnerable children, and the children who are least likely to disclose. 

Bernstein

That is terrible. Actually, as part of a position I have at Hopkins tutoring children, we had to go through child abuse training. I remember that is something they mentioned in the training: that just because it is someone who is really close to the child who you would assume would not harm them, that can actually increase a child’s vulnerability, and you should keep an eye out for that kind of thing. 

You spoke a little bit about accessibility. Along with age groups, I also noticed there were victims with different experiences, for example, victims who are sex trafficked, or abused, or from different backgrounds. Are these different factors also things to keep in mind, depending on the kind of maltreatment that the victim has experienced?

Lyon

I actually think there are fewer differences than people assume. That is a really interesting question because there is a lot of research being done now on trafficked youth. It is a very popular topic. They often say, “Oh, they are more reluctant to disclose.” I do not think that is true at all; I think it is purely a matter of when and how we discover that they are being abused. That is really important to understand. Most trafficked youth are discovered because the police arrested them for prostitution. They are not disclosing abuse, they are discovered. And when they are discovered, they tend to be extremely reluctant. They do not want to talk to the police, they do not admit their relationship with the person who is pimping them. But sexually abused kids are much the same. The reason why sexually abused kids seem to be more willing to disclose is because we only know they have been abused because they disclose. But in situations where we also discover— without the child disclosing— that they were sexually abused, you get the same result, you get the same resistance, you get the same low disclosure rates. That would be true of children who we have discovered they are texting a man who is abusing them, right? You ask them questions, they are going to look just like sex trafficked youth. I think that sexually abused kids look quite similar across these different types. What we are really saying is: what does it look like when you accidentally discover a child’s being abused? That is when you get a real sense of how reluctant the typically abused child is, because the typically abused child has not told anybody about their abuse.

Bernstein

That is an interesting perspective on the issue. You talked about the different practices and what this kind of looks like in your work. How do you try to get your work implemented in the legal system? I know you and your colleagues create guides for educating practitioners and work with them. What does that kind of work look like?

Lyon

I do a lot of training. And in 2005, I developed a protocol for interviewing children that is called the 10-step interview, and that is now taught in something called California forensic interview training. It is taught statewide to people who are child advocacy center interviewers. 

Bernstein

Fantastic. 

Lyon

Yes, that has been great. I have been really proud and excited to see how that has spread in popularity. So really, it is through that process. I have done a little bit of legislative work— it is extremely difficult. I have done a little bit of work with the courts, where I have encouraged them to adopt certain practices; those have been limited in their success. I would have to say it is mostly done through kind of spreading the word and then people voluntarily picking it up. That is what has worked best for me, as opposed to the coercive, “court says you have to do this,” or “legislature says you have to do that.” I have not had much success in that route. 

Bernstein

That makes sense. One would hope that the people interviewing children would have enough of an interest in their welfare to look into the best practices for interviewing and try to follow them to the best of their ability. 

Is there anything you would like to share before we wrap up?

Lyon

No, I think you have done a good job of covering the issues. Fantastic.

Bernstein

Thank you so much for the compliment. And thank you so much for speaking to me today. If people are interested in your work, whether academically or career wise, are there any resources you would recommend they look at, and how should they check out your work?

Lyon

I will first recommend a book, and then I will tell you about the research I have done. The book I like is Michael Lamb’s Tell Me What Happened. The protocol that I developed, I really just stole a lot of material from what he and his colleagues have done. That is just an amazing work. It is in its second edition, and it covers all the developmental issues, and all the practical issues with interviewing children. If you are interested in following the work I have done, the easiest thing to do is to Google USC Child Interviewing Lab. On our web page, it covers who we are and what we do. And you can go to the Publications page and find all my writings.

Bernstein

That is great. Thank you so much for again for agreeing to speak with me today, Professor Lyon, this was an incredibly fascinating conversation. I gained a newfound appreciation for the importance of making sure that these interviews are being done properly so we can make sure kids feel comfortable when they are coming forward about abuse and mistreatment and get the help they need. Thanks again so much!