Grooming, the largely nonviolent tactics used to seduce children into sexual abuse, shifts healthy adult-child relationships into patterns of abuse. Grooming provides a framework for explaining delayed disclosure, recantations, and lack of evidence in child sexual abuse cases (CSA). Yet researchers have not established how grooming behaviors are addressed during the investigation and prosecution process. Across 4 studies I explored how grooming is addressed by legal and investigative actors. Across Studies 1 and 2 I analyzed a series of 138 forensic interviews and 134 trial transcripts to establish if and how interviewers and attorneys address reports of grooming. In Study 3 I examined 31 cases of expert testimony to explore whether experts reference grooming. In Study 4 I explored, experimentally, how attorney questioning and expert testimony related to grooming can influence perceptions of child credibility and subsequent case verdicts. In forensic interviews (Study 1), grooming questions comprised less than 5% of all questioned asked and primarily related to exposure to pornography (46.8%); interviews may be missing an important opportunity to raise grooming with children. In criminal trials (Study 2), less than 2% of attorneys’ questions addressed grooming. “Tell me more” questions yielded the most productive reports of grooming from children when compared to every other question type. This suggests attorneys should consider raising grooming more often, using open ended “tell-me-more” questions when they do. In expert testimony (Study 3), grooming was referenced in 52% of cases. Expert testimony often addressed boundary violations (19.4%) with no specific reference to their source of their knowledge. Experts should consider raising grooming in a larger proportion of their cases and mentioning the source of their knowledge when they do. Finally, I found no impact of grooming education through expert testimony or attorney questioning on perceptions of child credibility or subsequent case verdicts (Study 4). The manipulation in this case may have been too weak, suggesting the need for replication. Training with these legal actors is an important avenue to educate them on grooming and how to raise grooming issues with the children they encounter.

Cognitive heuristics, or mental shortcuts, sometimes give rise to biases that can influence decision making. These biases may be particularly impactful in a legal context where decision making has lifelong consequences. One such legal decision falls upon social workers who are often tasked with providing custodial recommendations in child custody cases. Across a series of 2 studies, I explored the role of confirmation bias in social worker decision making, the potential value of blinding to reduce bias, as well as social workers’ perceptions of their own biases. Social workers were given detailed case materials describing a custody case between the state and a father. Participants were randomly assigned to read a previous examiner’s positive evaluation of a father, a negative evaluation of the father, or were blinded to a previous examiners rating. Social workers engaged in confirmation bias, such that those who read a positive evaluation of the father viewed him more positively than participants who read a negative evaluation of the father, despite the fact that all of the actual case evidence remained constant. Blinding did not appear to mitigate the bias. In study 2, social workers viewed themselves as less biased than their peers and less biased than other experts in a different field – signifying the presence of a bias blindspot. Together, my findings suggest the need to further explore how bias might affect judgments and also how to mitigate biases, such as making experts aware of their potential for bias.

When children allege sexual abuse, there is rarely medical evidence or eyewitnesses, making their testimony in trial a primary factor in assessing their credibility. However, little is known about what may be unclear to jury members making verdict decisions. In some districts, jury members are allowed to ask questions of the child witness at the end of their testimony. The current study utilizes a sample of trial transcripts from Maricopa County, Arizona where children ages 5-17 years old have alleged some form of sexual abuse; a jurisdiction where jury members are permitted to ask written questions. Cases were analyzed to assess: 1) if jury questions were asked and how often these questions occurred, 2) what content they asked about, and 3) whether occurrence or frequency of jury questions related to case characteristics (i.e. child age, child-perpetrator relationship, severity of abuse, frequency of abuse). It was hypothesized that 1) juries would ask questions mostly about the dynamics of abuse and disclosure, 2) these questions would primarily clarify information previously discussed by attorneys during direct- and cross-examination (instead of asking new inquiries that went undiscussed during testimony), 3) there would be more jury questions as child age increases and 4) more serious cases (based on case characteristics) would have more jury questions. Results were mixed. Jury members often asked about the dynamics of abuse and disclosure (abuse details, statements regarding abuse, the child’s subjective reactions), but case characteristics of child age, child-perpetrator relationship, and severity of abuse did not have a relationship with the presence of jury questions. However, cases where children alleged multiple instances of abuse were more likely to receive jury questions, which may allude to the misconception that children would disclose abuse right away and not let multiple instances occur. Although the sample size is small for generalization, it is an important first step for future research to further examine jury questions, improve attorney questioning techniques, and better educate the general public about the dynamics of child sexual abuse cases.

While incarceration can be detrimental for inmates, the children of prisoners can suffer from behavioral issues, poor school performance, and a higher risk of crime and delinquency across the life-course. Separation from one's family is part of what makes

incarceration a punishment, but what can be done to ensure that this punishment has the least harmful effect on children? Prison visitation presents an intriguing opportunity to lessen the potential harms of parental incarceration. Using data from the Arizona Prison Visitation Project (APVP), the current study focuses on inmates who were parents to minor children and seeks to determine: 1) do different types and different amounts of prison contact (in-person, phone, and mail) correlate with changes in the quality of parent-child relationships and 2) does a change in parent-child relationship quality correlate with a change in child behavior. The results from the analysis suggest that visitation and mail contact are associated with positive increases in parent-child relationship quality.

Also, positive changes in parent-child relationship quality were associated with a decrease in the odds of children having behavioral problems during incarceration. This study provides some support for the ability that prison contact can have to increase relationship quality, which in turn, may decrease the presence of behavioral issues in the children of incarcerated parents. Future directions in policy should consider measures to subsidize or refund contact costs, encourage contact between parents and their children, and involve children in in-prison programming designed to improve contact and relationships between parents and their children.