Multidisciplinary Responses to the Sexual Victimization of Children: Use of Control Phone Calls

Abstract

This descriptive study addresses the question of the value of one-party consent phone calls regarding the sexual victimization of children. The authors reviewed 4 years of experience with children between the ages of 3 and 18 years selected for the control phone calls after a forensic interview by the New York State Police forensic interviewer. The forensic interviewer identified appropriate cases for control phone calls considering New York State law, the child’s capacity to make the call, the presence of another person to make the call and a supportive residence. The control phone call process has been extremely effective forensically. Offenders choose to avoid trial by taking a plea bargain thereby dramatically speeding up the criminal judicial and family court processes. An additional outcome of the control phone call is the alleged offender’s own words saved the child from the trauma of testifying in court. The control phone call reduced the need for children to repeat their stories to various interviewers. A successful control phone call gives the child a sense of vindication. This technique is the only technique that preserves the actual communication pattern between the alleged victim and the alleged offender. This can be of great value to the mental health professionals working with both the child and the alleged offender. Cautions must be considered regarding potential serious adverse effects on the child. The multidisciplinary team members must work together in the control phone call. The descriptive nature of this study did not allow the authors adequate demographic data, a subject that should be addressed in future prospective study.

Keywords

control phone calls multidisciplinary forensic interviews offenders cautions

In cases of alleged sexual victimization of children, the multidisciplinary team (composed of law enforcement, child protection services [CPS], the district attorney, mental health and medical personnel) coordinates its various tasks from investigation to provision of care for the child. From the perspective of the investigating team, the medical exam of the child is seldom indicative of sexual abuse (De Jong & Rose, 1991; Heger, Ticson, Velasquez, & Bernier, 2002; Kellogg, Menard, & Santos, 2004). In the vast majority of cases, there is no third party witness or none willing to come forward (Sgroi, 1982; Summit, 1983; Taylor, 2007). Often corroborative evidence has not been discovered. The alleged offender is typically unwilling to confess. There is an all too familiar standoff between the child’s disclosure and the word of the alleged offender (Cross, Walsh, Simone & Jones, 2003; Summit, 1983).

This descriptive study addresses the use of a “one-party control phone call,” a tool to corroborate a child’s disclosure regarding being sexually victimized, following a forensic interview conducted by a law enforcement officer (The International Association of Chiefs of Police, Inc., 2004). Using the information gathered in the forensic interview is usually the first step in determining whether there is enough information to justify legal intervention and facilitating safety planning for the child. It is at the conclusion of the forensic interview when the law enforcement personnel decide whether or not the one-party control call is a tool that can be used.

The control phone call is defined as a phone call made under the “one-party consent law,” where it is legal to record a phone call or conversation as long as the source of the call consents and has full knowledge that the communication will be recorded (Digital Media Law Project, 2007). This tool has captured the suspect admitting his or her offenses within the discussion with the child or adult making the call. While this technique has been described in other situations, such as homicide investigations (People v. Wahlert, 2005) and trademark infringement cases (International Trademark Association, 2012), the authors have not found any studies or research on its use with child victims of sexual abuse. One published anecdotal description of a case where the tool was used by law enforcement is that of Samuel Manzie (K. Lanning, personal communication, July 13, 2011; Mansnerus, 1999). In that case, the law enforcement officers misjudged Samuel’s motivation to participate in the control call leading to Samuel actually warning the subject of the call to law enforcement intentions. The outcome of that case was tragic for all parties involved.

This study documents the uses of such calls in child sexual victimization cases, the positive benefits, and potential negative consequences for the child and offers guidelines for the future use of this tool. The authors address the use of the call within the context of a hypothetical common case timeline of a child sexual victimization case. The benefits of coordination among all members of the multidisciplinary team for successful resolution of these cases will be identified. The Lee Gross Anthone Child Advocacy Center (CAC) in Buffalo, New York, is the coordinating agency for the multidisciplinary team within Erie County that has a population of 921,046 and 26 police departments which range in size of 768 for the City to three for rural villages (U.S. Census Bureau, 2016). The State Police Investigator was used to conduct the forensic interviews because she was specifically trained for the task and her policing authority crossed all jurisdictional boundaries.

As a practical matter, children 7 years old and older usually are capable of and have the social skill to carry on a phone conversation. Selection of children to make the call involves, but is not limited to, the following issues. The child would need to be intrinsically motivated to participate in such a call and would need to be able to carry on a phone conversation with the adult in question. The interviewer would determine whether that was a pattern between the two people. As the call needs to seem a natural occurrence between the two, the child would need to be sufficiently comfortable with maintaining the deception regarding the ostensible purpose of the call verses the actual purpose. If these conditions could not be met, then the investigator could have an adult make the call. Limitations in this option can be encountered. If the caller is an adult, the target of the call can deduce that the child has made a disclosure, thus putting him or her on guard. The intrinsic motivation of the adult caller is not the same as that of the child who made the disclosure. The adult caller may have divided loyalties and may inadvertently cause the call to be unsuccessful. These are some examples of the factors influencing the investigator’s decision regarding who is to make the call attempt.

Whenever possible, the calls were made the day the child completed the forensic interview or within a few days afterward. Factors that governed the timing of when to make the call involved, but were not limited to, the following: risk of potential future abuse, time needed to construct a safety plan around the child involving members of the multidisciplinary team, engaging other adults to be supports for the child, accessibility of the alleged offender to receive such a call, and any other issues unique to the child or legal situation. Given that this was an investigative tool, legal and tactical issues were very high on the decision tree of the investigating officer. The whole process needed to conform to legal evidentiary requirements.

Method

In the study period of January 21, 2009 to June 10, 2013, 894 children and adolescents underwent multidisciplinary interviews at the Lee Gross Anthone CAC in Buffalo, New York, with the New York State (NYS) Police Investigator/Forensic Interviewer. The officer was assigned to and was embedded in the CAC. On her own initiative, she developed the tactic of applying control phone calls to child sexual victimization cases. The officer was a member of the NY State Police, a department with over 4,900 sworn troopers. The CAC handles approximately 1,100 cases per year. One of the authors became aware of anecdotal reports of control phone calls and legal success with them. This prompted examining available data about the calls. The information had been documented for law enforcement purposes only thus limiting available data for research purposes. There was no ability to retrieve additional data about those cases. Information was not available for how many children made a disclosure in the forensic interview to this interviewer. By the end of the study period, 54 control phone calls were attempted. Fifty-three of the children who had made a disclosure in the forensic interview were determined by the investigator conducting the interview to be appropriate for attempting a control phone call. The other child of the 54 in the study was determined by the interviewer not to be appropriate for attempting a control phone call for reasons that will be addressed in the discussion that follows.

The age range of victims for whom control phone calls were conducted was 3 years to 17 years. The mean age is 12.84 years. Fifty-one participants were female, and three were male; 44% of the children were Caucasian; 38% of the children were African American; 11% of the children were Hispanic; 3% of the children were Asian; and 3% of the children were Biracial (Caucasian/African American). According to the U.S. Census Bureau data, African Americans make up 13.9% of the population of Erie County (U.S. Census Bureau, 2016). The authors have no information regarding the high level of disproportionate representation in the study.

In most of the cases, the control phone calls were made by the children. There were a few calls made by the parent. The authors examined the process carried out before, during and after the control phone call. The client demographics were on the CAC client database, and the investigator/interviewer recorded demographics and charging issues on the NYS Police record keeping system. Each call was digitally recorded and managed under NYS Penal Code.

The authors created a database for the 54 recorded calls, coded by the investigator drawing from her case notes, the CAC database and the court outcomes of the cases. The CAC and law enforcement databases did not capture all the information that the authors wanted for the study. Those databases were constructed for different reasons and could not be used to retrospectively retrieve data for all cases, such as relationship of child to the offender. In some cases, it was a family member and so noted, in others it was not described. If the alleged offender was known to be represented by an attorney then by law a control call could not be attempted. Databases did not capture the frequency of this issue. Unsuccessful calls were not documented in any database. This limited more detailed analysis of the data. Prospective studies can remedy this deficit.

In this descriptive study, the authors looked at all the forensic interviews that were conducted by the same NY State Police Investigator at the CAC from January 21, 2009 through June 10, 2013. All the control phone calls that followed these forensic interviews were studied. Elements which the study examined were as follows: the victim age, victim gender, family or living situation (e.g., foster or respite care), relationship of the victim to the offender, the communication dynamics between the two (offender to victim), the identity of the caller (victim or other case-related person), and the outcomes of the control phone call (ranging from: lack of data to legally proceed, to control phone call recorded confession resulting in plea or conviction at trial). Limited information was available regarding the impact on the child of doing the control phone call. This was because law enforcement personnel did not track that type of information.

Results

In this study, the investigator completed 894 forensic interviews. Fifty-four percent of the children (483) were under the age to be able to make the call attempt themselves or were not appropriate for the technique for other reasons. The total number of children potentially available for this technique was 411.

In 50 of the 54 control phone call cases, the defendant took a plea of guilty to the top count. In three cases, a trial took place in which the control phone call recording was admitted and convictions were obtained. In only one of the three cases was the child required to testify. As referenced above, in one of the 54 cases, the child was deemed by the forensic interviewer, who was the State Trooper, to be too emotionally unstable to proceed with the call. An assistant district attorney had a different police officer work with the child to attempt the call. The child decompensated during the call by losing the ability to maintain normal or appropriate coping behaviors, resulting in the failure of the call and the child being admitted to a psychiatric hospital for an extended period of time.

Table 1 illustrates some cases taken from the 54 cases in the study. The cases in this table illustrate not only the relationship of each child to the alleged offender but also the dynamic of each relationship. This firsthand knowledge regarding the relationship patterns offers the mental health clinicians better choices for intervention. The six cases in Table 1 were selected because they represent the elements of the four categories that all the cases could be placed in. These categories are (a) intrafamilial sexual abuse, (b) extrafamilial sexual abuse, (c) emergent cases (very recent disclosures or needing rapid legal response), and (d) nonemergent cases (those where more time is available for investigation and planning). All the cases at the CAC fall into one or more of these categories. The six were selected because they most clearly could be placed in the classification scheme and represent the full range of cases that were investigated. Each best highlights the positives and negatives of the tactical decisions made by the investigator.

Table 1.

Case Dynamics Illustrations.

	A	B	C	D	E	F
What is the investigatory outcome of the control phone call?	Led to rapid case closure	Led to confession and plea	Led to confession and plea	Led to confession and plea	Led to confession and plea	Failed to generate a prosecutable case
How is the control phone call meeting the needs of the child?	Validation and emotional relief	Closure and emotional relief	Validation	Prevention of further abuse	Met the child’s goal to protect her siblings	Failed to meet the child’s psychological needs
What is the age of the child?	12	16	14	7	16	15
What is the cognitive ability of the child?	Age appropriate	Age appropriate	Age appropriate	Age appropriate	Age appropriate	Age appropriate
Child’s linguistic ability to converse with the alleged offender	Age appropriate	Age appropriate	Age appropriate	Age appropriate	Age appropriate	Age appropriate
Emotional/psychological state of the child in the interview	Strong and motivated to make the call	Strong and motivated to make the call	Strong and motivated to make the call	Strained but motivated to make the call	Strong and motivated to make the call	Fragile, unable to manage emotions in interview
Child’s physical limitations	Slight speech impediment	None evident	None evident	None evident	None evident	None evident
Relationship of the alleged offender to the child	Second cousin	Authority figure	Uncle	Father	Father	22-year-old friend of family
Dynamic of relationship between alleged offender and child	Groomed at time and no longer under control	Seduced at time and no longer under control	Compliant victim at time and no longer under control	Forced to comply by the Court	Loved offender, more protective of sibs	No personal connection
The child’s support system	Strong paternal	Strong family	Strained family-MH supports	Great-aunt	Strong maternal support	Mother and MH supports

Case Descriptions

The following case descriptions are provided from the actual calls. They are meant to illustrate the types of case dynamics that should be taken into account by the investigating officers. The list is not meant to be exhaustive. Some of the identifying information was adjusted in the service of confidentiality; the changes maintain the integrity of the case descriptions. The appendix to this article is a more thorough review of the guidelines an investigator should consider prior to making a control phone call. It is strongly encouraged that the district attorneys be consulted regarding applicability to individual jurisdictions.

Case A

A 12-year-old female with parents no longer living together. The alleged offender was mother’s cousin. The investigator found the child to be an accurate reporter of events and made complex arrangements to initiate the control phone call in a situation where the child was going to be emotionally supported by her father. The alleged offender committed suicide shortly after the call. The call lasted more than 15 min. The child’s goal to gain her mother’s belief regarding her victimization was achieved.

Case B

A 16-year-old female who was a volunteer at an institutional medical facility. The offender was a physician in the same facility who seduced the adolescent. He acknowledged this within the first few seconds of the control phone call. This led to him accepting a plea. The adolescent experienced closure, validation, and emotional relief.

Case C

A 14-year-old female who fits the definition of a compliant victim. “The term compliant is used to describe those child victims who in any way, partially or fully, cooperate in their sexual victimization without the threat or use of force or violence” (Lanning, 2010). Her offender was an uncle. This adolescent had significant psychiatric problems and her uncle was designated by mental health providers as the “safe person” she could turn to when the conflict at home was very high. Disclosure of the abuse was accidental via a note written by the victim that was intercepted by a parent of a friend. The offender acknowledged his abuse of the adolescent very quickly in the call and tried to blame her. The child’s goal to have responsibility appropriately placed on him was thus fulfilled. He took a plea.

Case D

A 7-year-old female who was living with her great-aunt. The offender was her father who had recently reentered her life and over a period of time was able to gain the trust of the Court so that he obtained repeated overnight visitations. It was a purposeful disclosure by the child because she did not want to re-experience the prior multiple episodes of painful anal intercourse. Mental health supports were put in place prior to and during the time period in which the child made the call. The offender gave a full disclosure upon being confronted by the recording of the call.

Case E

A 16-year-old female who was living with her mother. The offender was her father. It was a purposeful disclosure with her goal being to protect her younger sisters. While she was very motivated to make the call to protect her sisters, she also felt guilt and took on inappropriate responsibility for her father’s well-being while he was in prison; for example, the child spoke to her therapist about feeling badly that her father was alone in prison on his birthday and holidays. This case underscores the need for therapeutic support during the legal process and beyond.

Case F

A 15-year-old female who was living with her mother. The offender was a 22-year-old family friend. Although she gave the appearance of being a bright young female, she was in treatment for self injurious behavior prior to the sexual victimization. As cited elsewhere in this report, the State Police forensic interviewer determined that she was emotionally unstable and decided to not do a control phone call; however, the local authorities wanted the adolescent to participate in a control phone call and another police officer facilitated the call in another location. The adolescent emotionally deteriorated during the call and the call failed to achieve its intended goal. Her emotional deterioration continued into the next day leading to her psychiatric hospitalization. She remained hospitalized for a period of 1 year.

The case of the 15-year-old girl in this table illustrates the need for caution in choosing candidates to participate in the control phone call. Once chosen, the child should have continuing support and reevaluation throughout the call process—before, during, and after the call. This should include input from mental health clinicians. Similarly, the child’s pediatrician may have valuable insight to the child’s development and the potential impact of chronic medical conditions the child may have. The child’s value as a potential source of evidence should not override the fact that the child is, first and foremost, a developing human being. The child is very vulnerable to exacerbation of her or his ordeal by the very people who intend to help the child. What we do for the child, we do to the child.

Discussion

This is a descriptive study with limited amounts of information available to the authors. At the time the control phone calls were carried out, they were done exclusively for law enforcement investigative purposes. A large, prospective study would answer questions the authors were unable to address. These questions could include how many of the forensic interviews resulted in disclosures and who participated in the control phone call (the child or what other person). However, even with the limited information in this study, the results clearly indicate the notable value of the control phone call as an investigative tool in selected cases of alleged sexual victimization of children.

By way of setting context, the authors constructed a common case timeline (Figure 1) to summarize the child’s ongoing interactions with various unwitting professionals before and after a disclosure of sexual abuse and utilizing the categories defined by Dr. Roland Summit in his seminal article the “Child Sexual Abuse Accommodation Syndrome” (Summit, 1983). His article identified and categorized the salient issues related to child sexual victimization not previously understood by law enforcement and clinical practitioners. Prior to the investigators’ involvement with a child, there would have been an unknown amount of time that the offender abused the child in secret, took advantage of the helpless nature of the child and took advantage of the child’s methods to accommodate to the abuse. The cumulative effect of this on the child would not be readily known at the time of disclosure and investigation. The adults surrounding the child may not comprehend the level of stress the child would be experiencing at the time of disclosure. Thus, Summit provides us with a beginning framework to think about how best to respond to the child at the time of disclosure. The implications of law enforcement using a tool such as a control call would need to be evaluated within this context as well as within a legal context.

Figure 1.

Common Case Timeline.

Although Summit primarily addressed the patterns noted in intrafamilial sexual victimization cases, the authors found his formulation applicable to a broader range of child sexual victimization cases. This timeline depicts the course of cases without the use of the control phone call. Post disclosure, it was common for cases to take 12 to 24 months to reach legal closure. The use of the control phone call can significantly diminish the post disclosure stress by decreasing the intensity and length of the criminal case timeline for the child and for all concerned.

The authors observed in this study that the control phone call process has been extremely effective in intrafamilial and other child sexual victimization cases. Due to the damaging evidence of the control phone call, offenders chose not to go to trial and took a guilty plea thereby dramatically speeding up the judicial processes. The police investigator has only needed to testify in three of her 53 cases where control phone calls were used. A significant benefit of the control phone call process has been to reduce the need for children to repeat their disclosures to multiple interviewers. In 52 of the control phone calls, the alleged offender’s own words save the child from the trauma of testifying in court. In each of the three cases in which the alleged offender’s self-implication did not prompt him to take the plea, the control phone call was admitted as evidence in court and each case proceeded to conviction.

A successful call corroborates the child’s disclosure for not only law enforcement but also for the child, the parent, and the mental health clinician. The recording of the control phone call provides a significant advantage for the mental health clinician and medical providers by supplying firsthand data instead of the usual much filtered information about what the child experienced and what the dynamic of the relationship has been. This leads to better choices of interventions by the clinicians. For the child to have the alleged offender admit his or her guilt in the presence of another adult is a curative factor. It is their moment of truth. The children often said “I told you so!” to the investigator to express their personal sense of validation after the call was completed. When a mother questions the child’s disclosure, a successful control phone call has the benefit of prompting the parent into a supportive relationship with the child which can have a lifelong impact.

Thus, the work that law enforcement does with the child can make the clinical work go smoother and faster. If the mental health clinician has access to the recording of the control phone call with the language of the child, the clinician can work with the child using the child’s own language. Apart from videos or photographs, listening to the call is the closest the clinician will get to having raw data on how the child and the alleged offender communicated. The call can be used as a clinical intervention to teach children how to appropriately evaluate the intentions of adults.

Conclusion

Based on this study of the 54 cases cited as well as the adverse effect for the 15-year-old girl, the authors recommend a careful control phone call process such as was devised at this CAC. Such a process has been illustrated in guidelines in the appendix. Adherence to such standards will increase the likelihood of forensic success while decreasing the chances of an adverse effect on the child or adolescent participant.

This study illustrates the significant forensic success with the control phone call process. At the time this study was concluded, 38 of the 50 states permitted some form of the use of this tool (Metropark Communications Inc., 2015). Utility beyond law enforcement includes aiding treating clinicians to more adequately understand the dynamics of the sexual victimization of children and aiding CPS in designing intervention strategies. CPS workers can hear and learn about the emotional interactions between the child victim and the offender. Understanding the emotional implications of these interactions is invaluable in providing for the safety and ongoing care for the child in question.

This study was an initial examination regarding the use of control phone calls in a child sexual victimization population. The study suggests research can be conducted in collaboration with law enforcement and the National Children’s Alliance (NCA), an agency that sets the standards of care at the national level. There are a variety of research opportunities both regarding the child and regarding the significant people in the child’s life. Appropriate protections for these young victims can be established to test the long-term impact on the child’s familial and social relationships following law enforcement intervention.

More study is needed to refine these ideas into operational tactics. This success is tempered by the risk of adverse effects for the child participant. Caution is strongly advised in selecting the candidates for participation in the call and in providing support to the participant before, during, and after the call. Based on this CAC’s experience, the following guidelines for control phone calls are offered.

Footnotes

Appendix

Acknowledgements

A special thank you is offered to Kenneth Lanning, Retired Supervisory Special Agent, FBI and Dr. Mark Frank of the State University of New York at Buffalo for their consultations on the article and the appendix.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author Biographies

J. William Canavan is a pediatrician in private practice and is an attending physician at Women and Children’s Hospital in Buffalo New York in the Child Protection Clinic. Through this capacity, he is the Medical Director of the Lee Gross Anthone Child Advocacy Center (CAC) of BestSelf Behavioral Health in Buffalo, New York.

Christine Borowski is a retired New York State Trooper. From 2007 to 2013, she was co-located at the Lee Gross Anthone CAC where she was in the role of investigator. In this capacity, Sergeant Borowski developed the use of control phone calls with children who have been sexually victimized.

Stacy Essex is a clinician and the VP of Clinical QI/COA Accreditation at BestSelf Behavioral Health in Buffalo, New York. She provides clinical supervision and training to staff and provides expert witness testimony in child sexual victimization cases in both Criminal Court and Family Court.

Stefan Perkowski is a clinician and a consultant at BestSelf Behavioral Health in Buffalo, New York. He provides clinical consultation and training to staff and provides expert witness testimony in child sexual victimization cases in both Criminal Court and Family Court. Mr. Perkowski was a founding member of the Lee Gross Anthone Child Advocacy Center.

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