Tom Garmon
Child Molestation Investigator
We try to take a team approach. We find that you have to do a lot of listening, more so than questioning. Patience is one of the things you need, especially when you’re dealing with children. Although you don’t want to interfere with their lives and you don’t want to victimize them by repeatedly talking with them, it may take a younger person a few visits just to be comfortable being around you. We don’t rush the issue with the kids. If they don’t feel like talking that particular day, we’ll reschedule. We try to be patient on that. We find that by exhibiting the willingness to do that, they do open up a little more readily.
What I tell victims is that what we want to do is to prevent this from happening to someone else. We can’t turn back the hands of time, but we do want to utilize their resources and what happened to them to keep it from happening to somebody else. That’s where we start our interviews with any victim that we deal with.
We try to give control back to the victim. Even if it’s just in little things, like where do you want to sit. The attacker took away their choices; we try to give some of it back.
Small chairs and tables are a must for young children. The person that did this to them, usually was towering over them. With a child, obviously the attacker is always going to be bigger than the child. If it's an adult, at the time of the assault, they're down on their back, with somebody over them. We suggest, even when you're talking to an adult in the interview situation, even at the hospital, sit down beside them so that you're face level with them, don't stand up and talk to them. It's better to wait until they're out of that prone position, because that's again the position where the assault took place. We do suggest that the officer get on their level. It's the same thing with the kids. It helps us break the ice with them. We don't use the table as a barrier; we use it as a tool. We'll sit down, we'll color, we'll draw. It also gives us an opportunity with the younger kids to evaluate their developmental level and actually to pre-qualify them for their knowledge and their credibility. We have a coloring book; it's called "what's my job in court?" It's got a message in there from the DA and it's a coloring book that goes over who the people are in court. There's the District Attorney, police officers, judge, court reporters. It's even got a little pop section where they can see the courtroom. They can set the characters. It's got the rules of court. We always stress to them, there's only one rule that matters, that's the first one listed: Always tell the truth. We utilize the book for that purpose, too. We find that that coloring book has been very helpful. We've even had some kids who've come back, a couple of years later, and said “I've still got it at home. I still take it out at home and look at it. It helps me remember what it was like to be part of a team.” The thing about it, with kids, the case doesn't come into the office and go straight to court. There's a time lag there. What we do a lot of times, we'll take the drawings they did and we'll keep them in our files, so that when they're in the next time, we'll pull those out. We know that they're coming back for a re-interview, we'll pull those and hang them on the wall, to let them know that we haven't forgotten about them. Sometimes it gets to be a little extra work, but they're worth it. It's just a piece of paper in a file, but yet to them, they say, “hey, they remember me.” Even if it's a name of a dog, we might have jotted it on the back of the file. It'll kick into their minds that we remember them. I think that helps break some ice the second time around, to warm everything back up to where we left off in a previous interview.
Anatomically correct dolls
This is one of my pet peeves. You should never, ever pick one of those things up unless you have been totally and completely trained in their use. You sit there talking with the child and tell them that this is an anatomically correct doll. This is how a person looks. Well, it's not. These are hand-stitched dolls. They are dolls. They are anatomically correct; they do have a vagina or a penis. They have the body orifices that can be utilized for demonstration. But if you ever look at these dolls, the positioning sometimes is wrong. The vagina is not where it really is. It's too far moved. If you tell them this is how things are on a human body and yet a child knows that things were done to them and then they try and do it with these dolls to show you what happened, and things don't fit, the child becomes confused. That's why you've got to make sure that you're using it with the proper aged child and that you're trained in how to use it. When we use it, and it's very, very minimal, it's more for geography than anything else. We use it for positioning, not “show me,” or “let's reenact what happened.” “Can you put this doll in that same position? If you can't, that's fine.” We try not to stress the anatomy part of it, because it can be very, very deceiving. I've seen kids very confused with those things.
Computer modeling
We're rapidly approaching the age where computers are going to be a big asset. I have not utilized it yet, but we are beginning to use it for structural-type things, more so than the actual bodies of people. We may use it to construct a room or a diagram for the kids. We may use it for the car. I know that on the Internet there are some sites that give you a virtual tour of certain automobiles. If you can find the same style car that you're talking about, you can take the kid through this virtual tour and have them show you on this, where things were on a car. So this is rapidly moving into the place where we're going to be seeing that in the next couple of years. You're going to be seeing programs set up for this.
Drawings
What I still go back to, if there are any problems with the child either communicating to us what happened, or there's any uncertainty, what I still find to be the most helpful are the drawings. The drawing of the front and back of an adult male, adult female, small child, teenage child. Then not only can you do some more qualifying with the child by going over body parts, it also gives you the opportunity to come to a common language, which is one of the problems that you have with dealing with children.