Dr. Suruchi Sood
Social Science Director, CHILD USA
The third and final blog in the Twice Wounded series on child sexual abuse survivors and the legal system.
Blog 2 ended with a simple observation: every mechanism that retraumatizes child sexual abuse survivors in court points to something that could be changed. How interviews are conducted. How courtrooms treat child witnesses. How legal professionals learn about trauma. This blog takes each of those in turn, what the research says works, where it has been tried, and what still stands in the way.
The answers are not new. The gap is not in the science. It is in the will to act on what the science already shows.
How Interviews Are Conducted
The first opportunity to reduce harm comes before a child ever enters a courtroom. How a child is interviewed in the early stages of a case, how often, by whom, and in what setting, shapes both the quality of the evidence and the psychological cost to the child.
The standard model routes children through multiple interviews: police, child protective services, prosecutors, and sometimes more. Each repetition is a separate exposure, another retelling, another stranger, and another occasion to be questioned or doubted. Research has found that children who testify multiple times, face long delays before trial, and give evidence in the presence of the defendant show higher anxiety and more behavioral problems, with effects detectable years after the legal process ends (Goodman et al., 1992; Quas & Goodman, 2012).
The Barnahus model, developed in Iceland in the late 1990s, directly addresses this. Its name means “children’s house,” and the concept is straightforward: place all services, forensic interview, medical exam, and therapeutic support under one child-friendly roof. A trained specialist conducts a single interview in a safe, age-appropriate setting. Investigators, prosecutors, and other professionals observe from a separate room. The recording serves as the legal evidence. Children generally do not have to appear in open court. Norway and Denmark have gone further, making this model mandatory by law (UNICEF, 2025).
In the United States, Child Advocacy Centers (CACs) operate on similar principles. A multidisciplinary team coordinates around the child rather than routing the child through separate agencies. CAC cases involve fewer interviews and faster access to mental health support than cases handled through traditional pathways (UNICEF, 2025).
Even simple preparation steps make a measurable difference. A national survey of 153 district attorney offices found that courtroom tours, walking a child through the space before the day of testimony, and having a support person present in court were the most commonly used protective measures and among the most highly rated by prosecutors for both reducing children’s distress and supporting accurate testimony (Goodman et al., 1999). These measures cost almost nothing. They still fail regularly. Victim Support documented cases in England and Wales in which children had been carefully prepared for a specific court venue, only to be told the day before that the venue had changed. In one case, a support worker arrived early at the new building and walked the child through it before the hearing began (Victim Support, 2024). These failures were entirely preventable. They were entirely routine.
How Courtrooms Treat Child Witnesses
The second area of reform concerns the courtroom itself, the measures available to protect children when they must give evidence, and the consistency with which those measures are used.
Cross-examination, where defense lawyers question witnesses, is the most distressing element of the legal process for child survivors (George & Lowik, 2025). Strategies that force graphic recall in public, challenge a child’s credibility, and exploit minor inconsistencies do not produce better evidence. They overwhelm a child’s ability to think clearly, generating the very inconsistencies that are then used to attack them (Plotnikoff & Woolfson, 2011).
Several protective measures have been developed in response. Pre-recorded testimony captures a child’s evidence before the trial and plays it for the jury later, removing the stress of live performance under public scrutiny. Closed-circuit television (CCTV) allows children to testify from a separate room, out of the defendant’s sight. Intermediaries, communication specialists trained in child development, rephrase confusing questions before they reach the child so that what the child hears is something they can actually understand and answer (George & Lowik, 2025).
In England and Wales, Section 28 of the Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act 1999 allows cross-examination to be pre-recorded. The national rollout was completed in 2022. Yet Victim Support found that survivors were regularly talked out of applying for it by police officers and prosecutors who did not have the legal authority to refuse it. Only a judge can do that (Victim Support, 2024).
In the United States, the Supreme Court confirmed in Maryland v. Craig (1990) that CCTV does not violate a defendant’s constitutional rights, provided a court makes a specific finding that a particular child would suffer serious emotional distress from the defendant’s physical presence. Yet a 2024 legislative hearing in Maryland illustrated how little that constitutional permission translates into practice. A senior prosecutor with seventeen years of experience in child sexual abuse cases testified that her office had never successfully used Maryland’s existing CCTV procedure. The legal standard required proof that a child would be literally unable to speak in the defendant’s presence, a threshold so high it was never met (Maryland HB 141, 2024).
Independent support workers, known in England and Wales as ISVAs (Independent Sexual Violence Advisors), are among the most effective courtroom protections available. In Victim Support research, survivors consistently named their support worker as the most important source of stability throughout a process that can stretch over years. Support workers explained what was happening when police and prosecutors went silent. They found back routes into court buildings to avoid the defendant. They sat beside survivors during evidence when judges allowed it (Victim Support, 2024). One young participant described her CHISVA (a child-focused ISVA) as her “safe person.” The same young person said she “couldn’t have done it without having her next to me” (Victim Support, 2024, p. 19). Yet the research found that support workers are routinely blocked from courtrooms or actively discouraged from attending by prosecutors who believed a supported witness would appear less credible to the jury (Victim Support, 2024).
How Legal Professionals Learn About Trauma
The third area is less visible than the others but equally important: the knowledge, attitudes, and professional culture that lawyers and judges bring to the courtroom.
George and Lowik (2025) studied four decades of legal reform in Australia aimed at improving how child witnesses are questioned. Successive waves of legislation changed the written rules. In court, practice changed little. The barriers were cultural rather than legal: professional norms that treated aggressive questioning as a mark of competence, judicial reluctance to intervene for fear of creating grounds for appeal, and resistance from bar associations to any external oversight of lawyers’ conduct in court.
Victim Support’s research put numbers on what that culture produces. A review of 38 sexual violence trials found that at least one question rooted in victim-blaming stereotypes appeared in 73 percent of cases, including in sessions where pre-recording was being used (Victim Support, 2024). Survivors were asked what they had been wearing, whether they had been drinking, and whether the assault was simply “regretful sex.”
The fix that researchers propose is not radical. Courts should establish basic ground rules before cross-examination of a child begins: no compound questions, two questions forced into one, no repetition of questions already answered, and no misleading phrasing. Judges need clear authority to intervene when questioning crosses into harmful territory, without fear that intervening will provide grounds for a successful appeal (George & Lowik, 2025). George and Lowik (2025) add one more specific recommendation: judicial training on trauma and child development should be co-designed with people who have lived experience of the legal process, not developed in isolation from the people it is meant to protect.
What Needs to Change: Practical Steps
Across all three areas, the research points to a consistent set of practical actions that do not require new laws, only the consistent application of existing law.
During interviews, every child should be interviewed once by a trained specialist in a child-friendly setting. Multidisciplinary coordination through CACs or Barnahus-style models should be the standard, not an innovation. Pre-trial preparation, including courtroom visits, clear explanations of what will happen, and a consistent support person, should be offered as a matter of course, and the offer should hold firm even if the venue changes (Victim Support, 2024). Assigning the same prosecutor to a case from start to finish, known as vertical prosecution, is associated with better outcomes for children and more guilty pleas, and costs nothing to implement (Goodman et al., 1999).
Regarding courtrooms: special measures, including CCTV and pre-recorded testimony, should be fully explained to child witnesses and applied without gatekeeping by officers or prosecutors below the judicial level. ISVAs and CHISVAs should be formally recognized in court guidance, and their presence alongside survivors during evidence should be treated as standard practice rather than left to individual discretion on the day (Victim Support, 2024).
On professional training: mandatory training for judges and lawyers in child development and trauma is not optional. Katirai (2020) argues that voluntary compliance has failed and that real reform requires accountability mechanisms for legal professionals who fail to apply existing protections, alongside dedicated funding to sustain training over time rather than treating it as a one-off exercise.
The Gap That Has to Close
Everything described in this blog has been implemented somewhere. Barnahus has operated since the late 1990s. Section 28 exists in English law. CCTV is constitutional in the United States. The UN and UNICEF have published detailed, practical frameworks for child-sensitive justice (UNICEF, 2025).
The problem is not a lack of knowledge. Plotnikoff and Woolfson (2011) found that even jurisdictions with formal legal protections for child witnesses consistently failed to use them. Victim Support (2024) found that survivors experienced a “postcode lottery” where access to their legal rights depended on which officer handled the case, which judge presided, and whether a support worker happened to be allowed into the room that day.
Katirai (2020) argues that this is structural. A legal system built around adversarial contest and institutional inertia will not reform itself to prioritize child welfare. That requires deliberate policy pressure, mandatory training, dedicated resources, and real accountability for courts and practitioners who fail to apply protections already written into the law.
The research tells us what works across all three areas, how interviews are conducted, how courtrooms treat child witnesses, and how legal professionals learn about trauma. The question is no longer what to do. It is a matter of whether those who run the system are willing to do so.
References
George, A.-J., & Lowik, V. (2025). Rethinking cross-examination: Reducing retraumatisation for victims and survivors of sexual assault. Australian Journal of Family Law. https://doi.org/10.1177/1037969X251359080
Goodman, G. S., Taub, E. P., Jones, D. P. H., et al. (1992). Testifying in criminal court: Emotional effects on child sexual assault victims. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 57(5).
Goodman, G. S., Quas, J. A., Bulkley, J., & Shapiro, C. (1999). Innovations for child witnesses: A national survey. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 5(2), 255–281.
Katirai, N. (2020). Retraumatized in court. Arizona Law Review, 62(1), 81–136.
Maryland House Bill 141 — Criminal Procedure — Child Abuse Victim — Testimony Taken Outside the Courtroom. (2024). Legislative testimony package, Maryland House Judiciary Committee, January 2024. https://mgaleg.maryland.gov/mgawebsite/Legislation/Details/hb0141?ys=2024RS
Maryland v. Craig, 497 U.S. 836 (1990).
Plotnikoff, J., & Woolfson, R. (2011). Young witnesses in criminal proceedings: A progress report on Measuring up? Nuffield Foundation / NSPCC.
Quas, J. A., & Goodman, G. S. (2012). Consequences of criminal court involvement for child victims. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 18(3), 392–414.
UNICEF. (2025). Reimagine justice for children. UNICEF.
United Nations Economic and Social Council. (2005). Guidelines on justice in matters involving child victims and witnesses of crime. Resolution 2005/20.
Victim Support. (2024). Suffering for justice: Sexual violence victim-survivors’ experiences of going to court and cross-examination. Victim Support.