Episode Transcript
Hi, this is Rachel on recover. We're here with Tyler and he's going to tell us a little bit about himself and then he's going to answer some questions for us.
All right. Rachel, I really appreciate you having me on. So just to tell everybody a little bit about myself and Tyler counsel, I'm the child advocacy studies or cast director for Zero Abuse Project, if any of you have, you know, attended and listened in on on a previous. Session, One of our colleagues from Zero Abuse was also on there. Allison Faye 0 Abuse is a national independent nonprofit that's dedicated to ending child abuse. And CAST actually is a traditional academic program that we help colleges and universities deploy to better prepare child protection and child serving professionals for recognizing situations where a child could be at risk for abuse or suffering from maltreatment and then putting an end to those circumstances. In addition to that, I also work in the field. I've worked as a forensic scientist and now I'm a forensic expert for zero abuse project. I've worked in both private and public laboratory settings, and then currently I work as a medical legal death investigator, a deputy coroner for my county, where I investigate the cause and manner of death as necessary. I also work with the Indiana State Department of Health to that end on providing sudden unexpected infant death investigation or sooty training investigation best practices and information for our coroners and multidisciplinary team or MDT personnel both in state and I also trained on this topic nationwide. So again, really, really thrilled to be here. How did you get into forensics?
So Rachel, this is a pretty personal story and just. For those of you that are that are listening in, I do want to kind of give a notification in terms of it being a traumatic story, but it's truly what what drove me to this field. My uncle, whom I never met actually was found one day and allegedly was to have died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. That's what we were told. It was suicide. Now this was decades ago, well before forensics had really taken up its mantle as a prominent you know. Prominent field for investigations and certainly before there was a greater emphasis on training and death investigation too. Now, my aunt at the time was a registered nurse and she was one of the people that had to come and make positive identification of the body. And she noticed Rachel that there were ligature marks on his wrists, which didn't really add up with the story as to how he died. I mean, this was supposed to be a suicide. How how are his hands bound like that? And there was no bindings found on him when he was found. These ligature marks were their postmortem. So being completely honest here, it just didn't make sense as to why his wrist would be tied shortly before or after the death and why those marks would be left behind in a suicide situation. This tale is is from a traumatic perspective, sort of haunted my family for years and it caused so much trauma in our family. But it was really the vehicle for me to approach all three areas where I work, forensics and death investigation and education, to see how I could help others to shed light on these situations where they too might have questions. And the trauma is building up to what I would argue could be dysfunctional levels. And by helping them through forensics and death investigation and by, you know, teaching them about these principles and and giving them knowledge and skills, you know, my hope is that we can give them some kind of Peace of Mind. Yeah, those are really tough situations.
It is, it's it's oftentimes very traumatic. I mean, even when it's a natural death situation, it's, it's them saying goodbye to to their loved one and trying to give them the Peace of Mind from the cause and manner of death. You know, trying to give them that I think can be very empowering and help them on the road to recovery and finding a new normal. Yeah, I mean and well, considering. So many women and survivors, you know, there are survivors and then there's that. Don't make it in our situation, right? We don't really talk about that very often.
No, we we don't cover enough, unfortunately, about what happens when abuse becomes so severe that someone dies. You know, I I think that child abuse and death are sometimes arguably just depending on your your circumstances and your culture and values and upbringing. We can be stigmatized topics. I know here in the state of Indiana where I reside and work. You know one of the big challenges that we saw was an uptick in child abuse related deaths. We need to have those important conversations and bring awareness to to both of these topics. And that's one of the ways that that I work at 0 abuse you know and kind of my day-to-day is being able to provide information on these topics, raise general awareness and then provide training and education to those that that actually need the knowledge and skills to go forth. And to prevent these kinds of deaths and to intervene when these kinds of situations happen, I mean when a when a child is passed, we need to give a voice to the voiceless and ensure that justice is served in those circumstances where abuse led to a child's passing. Most definitely yes.
Tell us a little bit about your your daytoday work and for a zero abuse project.
Sure. No, it's it's always something different every day. There's not really a set routine and it's pretty varied as you can imagine. Just with the gamut of things that I work through as forensics and death investigation and training and technical assistance and then helping folks from the cast side of things for for propping up these programs at colleges and universities. You know, a given day I might be working on new content for our cast toolkits. So for example, we are actually funded right now by the US Department of Justice in the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, Rachel. And so we're creating these tool kits. They're going to allow schools to launch our cast curriculum at no cost and to flexibly deploy it. So these schools are going to be able to take these these tool kits and launch our our courses at no cost potentially for their their college or university. You know I I could spend all day in meetings. Prepping for training and giving resources to new faculty and into their learners and acting as a guest lecturer. Sometimes I work with faculty or just interested in making a leap to talk about and to teach child maltreatment concepts through CAST. We actually just did a study Rachel, looking at the prevalence of child maltreatment, child protection concepts in higher education and we actually found that out of our four year public schools, over 60% Don't actually teach on the topic of child maltreatment, prevention and intervention, which I thought was pretty wild. What that means is that a lot of great folks that are working in our field in the MDT, they're learning on the job and that comes at a kind of a twofold cost, right? It comes at the cost of them potentially being burnt out. And leaving the field forever, the bigger
concern is that it puts children at risk for being handed back to their abusers through that trial and error kind of learning that they're forced to embrace when two and four year schools don't prepare them for the realities of child maltreatment. So to that end, again, another part of my day might be hosting our training, you know, where we try to catch folks on the front lines and train them on the knowledge and skills they need to better investigate these kinds of cases. So you might find me on a given day also just working with my colleagues here 0 Abuse to provide that kind of training or writing publications or doing research that can really help drive the field forward and put an end to child abuse and neglect. Oh yeah, I mean that can't. I mean it's it happens every day. And, you know, I don't think a lot of our, you know, first response people know how to even deal with that, like Frontline. Our mandate reporters so to speak, right. So you know looking at some recent studies the the average individual going to a four year school, they may get anywhere from zero to four hours of training on this subject. A lot of our frontline folks as you're probably well aware I mean for example law enforcement they they don't have to necessarily enter two and four year degree paths. So what we see is only about 30% of them going to a four year school. And when we look at that in context that means that a lot of them are just learning on the job and don't have a functional awareness until they're properly trained through continuing education or through their own in service and preservice training. Looking at some of the data, I can tell you roughly about 40%. There was a study that that I like to look at and insight for people not in the know that really looked at you know, first responder awareness and identification of child maltreatment. And they found that about 40% of them just did not know what maltreatment looks like and about another 40% didn't even know when they saw clear cut signs of physical abuse and neglect alone. Right. Which is is a pretty
discerning type of abuse, right? You can typically looking at pattern welts and bruises and things like that. You know, you may come to that conclusion pretty quickly that physical abuse might be happening in the totality of the other pieces of evidence. But they didn't even know what to report or how to make a mandated report. So yeah, that's the biggest challenge, is that so many people today just do not have the the education and the knowledge to confidently and competently step in when there's a cry from a child for for help. When it pertains to maltreatment. Yeah, I mean, and let's not even get into sexual abuse. I mean.
No. As you go down the gamut of of different typologies of abuse, you know where do we see the typical typologies that people are are cognizant of? Right from from public media, from social media, from the news, right. There's a general consensus and awareness of physical abuse and child sexual abuse just based on the stories and the narratives that are that are fed to us. But time in and time out neglect is the number one typology of maltreatment that we we traditionally see. A lot of people don't even recognize bullying and sibling on sibling violence, interpersonal violence as potential types or triggers or risk factors for maltreatment or direct maltreatment events themselves, and emotional neglect, spiritual abuse or neglect too. These are all things that that we oftentimes don't see people talking about, and that's why the child advocacy studies the CAST program really does matter. Because, I mean that stuff has longterm effects as well and we don't even see it until much later,
right? The entire lifespan of an individual, when we look at the risk factors and we look at the the cooccurring factors, it can affect your, especially at a child's level. The biggest concern I would argue is brain development. You know when when we see all of this trauma building up and the adverse childhood experiences that create this trauma and this toxic stress it. It stunts their development. It can halt that, it can delay it, It can impact it permanently. And then we have to think about the longterm consequences with their health. You know both, when I talk about health, I really talk about the whole gamut. I'm talking about their emotional and and mental health. I'm talking about their physical health, their ability to succeed and thrive from a social interaction and relationship based standpoint. All of these factors. You know, all of these, these different levels of our, our social, ecological system, I should say are truly impacted by these events. Yeah, I mean especially even like secure attachment. I mean, I mean, I don't know, I'm single and I'm in the dating world and it just amazes me how many of you know people are out there with an insecure attachment style. And and to not have an insecure attachment style, you just have to respond to your kid 30% time.
Right. I mean even in my own experience, in my own survivor experience, specifically as a survivor of of maltreatment. You know I'm, I'm on medication now as a middle-aged man because of the anxiety and the stress. It it just constantly turned on the pumps in my stomach. I I was at a point, Rachel, where my esophagus had shrunk down because of the acid reflux because of always being. Nervous and anxiety stricken, right. Because it it was trauma that wasn't addressed and I didn't know even that what I was experiencing because I was in a very closed sort of vacuum growing up. I didn't realize that this was abuse that that I was in a situation where I was being both abused and and neglected. And so yeah, I, you know I'm on prescription medications because as a result of this my long term physical health was. I mean I totally get that. I mean I grew up in a household with a pedophile and a. Borderline. And still, I mean, like, it's had huge impact on my physical and emotional health. I mean, and when it got bad, my, you know, I've always had GI issues, always had bladder issues, always had just, you know, anxiety. I mean, I finally got my anxiety treated, so I don't shake the room anymore, but I mean. That was four months of narrow feedback and then finally got rid of my PTSD with another two rounds of I did EMDR for a year and then I did EMDR for another six, did narrow feedback and then went back and did EMDR.
And I'm sorry to hear about that. I appreciate you sharing that story. And again, I'm really sorry for those experiences. I'm glad that you're able to share that confidently to the listening community. So that. Folks can learn that they're not alone in isolation out there and that there's others like you that have survived this and that there is treatment and there's methods to get you on the road to recovery. I mean that's that's where again with the CAST program being education based, we just need more people educated on these topics, you know, we need more people that are trained and aware. Of the different typologies of abuse, how to make an effective mandated report. I mean, that's really what CAST is about, right? Is getting people that baseline fundamental knowledge of what that is the mandated report. How to detect maltreatment. You know, how to work within a multidisciplinary team. If you're an educator, how to detect, you know, these signs where someone you know a child and their their family might be at risk for abuse or or what abuse looks like and then how to you know in the grand scope of things. Work towards effective communication with that child. We have 92 programs in 30 states cast programs and what we've seen consistently because it is an evidence based program is that the the knowledge and skills there. When someone takes on this cast learning they they are significantly increased. People do realize their role in preventing and stopping child abuse. So I know that I. You know, talking to you it it's akin to preaching to the choir, if you will, for an analogy because you understand this, You understand how impactful education really is and how we can effect change. And I think that education is a true primary driver for, for ending child maltreatment. Yeah. I mean, because a lot of, I mean a lot of parents parent the way that they were parented. And it's not even necessarily parents that are, you know, the first, you know, right. No, it's a it's an intergenerational challenge. I think that a lot of parenting is kind of coded into us from our own social values and experiences. If you don't see any other parenting styles and aren't familiar with it. And I know that even when children are born right, our our hospitals and our nurses and our doctors, they try to do due diligence, they do have
some prevention trainings. But we can always explore what an evolution of that might be and I think one of the big things especially when it comes to early childhood and and birth is really honing in on what effective, positive, you know and compassionate care based parenting skills are like in breaking that cycle of intergenerational violence. I think that training absolutely should be focused on that. I mean that's one of the biggest wins of cast I'll be honest with you that I always explore is. Even if you're not a child serving professional Rachel. Even if you aren't going to work as law enforcement or a prosecutor or a teacher or a doctor or a lawyer or nurse. You know, just taking the cast courses and being a better parent. Being a better citizen. Understanding the impacts and the ramifications of aces right. Those adverse childhood experiences. Understanding just how we can position instead of allowing our children to to walk through life and mature into adulthood with. Less optimal experiences where their financial outcomes, their educational outcomes and their health outcomes are affected. How we can instead prop them up and empower them. That's what we want out of cast. I mean even if someone just comes through the program and has a better sense of that and understands that, hey, you know, for example, corporal punishment, we know that the studies show that it does diminish, you know, your brain matter. If we can teach them that that's, you know, something that shouldn't be advocated for and that there's other positive parenting techniques out there, that's a victory in our book, right? Because that keeps another child or a family with multiple children safe. And that's just one less situation where violence is is perpetuated into the next generation. Okay. Let's tell us what is the most pivotal information in preventing child abuse?
I'm going to go back to what I said earlier. If you want to stop child abuse before it starts, if you want to intervene, it's it's really getting folks educated again. As I mentioned earlier, talking about those statistics, you know, 40%, almost 50% of of first responders are unsure if they're witnessing child abuse neglect. And just as many first responders don't know what to report. You know, if you don't know what child abuse looks like, then how do you know when a child's at risk for it? How do you know when a child is suffering from. Abuse, neglect. So I think education is a primary driver. You really need to be able to recognize the red flags when abuse may be imminent so that you can stop it before it starts. You know, does that end? As an educator, both by my profession and credentialing, I just can't stress enough that we need every single child serving professional, from our daycare champions to our educators. I would even say anyone that just interfaces with the child. I mean landlord right, Landlords and renters. You know, and these property owners, they need to understand this your your parcel delivery service individual that that sees a situation where abuse or neglect might be occurring. Any child interfacing individual in this nation across the world needs some kind of training on these concepts, be it through our postsecondary education pathways, preservice or inservice or continuing education, you know? Across America we're we're just generating people to go forth and serve from our colleges and universities and they they only have that one to four hour window. And this was a series of studies that our our Chief Program Officer for Education and Research Victor Vieth has has tuned me into and This is why CASP was really developed is that we we only have one to four hours of training on this topic at most in higher education that I mean we're only giving you just a a day to a couple of weeks of content on this. So what that's doing is without this education, without this knowledge and awareness, we're leaving children in this vulnerable state of perpetual suffering. And again, what happens the two endpoints, good professionals learning on the job get burnt out and
leave. I mean on average we're talking about teachers. You know, we lose teachers year in and year out. I think some of our, our kind of title one some of the more. Schools that are financially, economically disadvantaged and and that struggle about half of them will turn over in a year. You know, just depending on the stats that you look at about you know an approximate 30% of teachers might leave the field in a year. I know that for social workers it's around take your pick, right. I mean we see ranges varying from about 40% to 70% or more. Some states are even having you know this dire state situation with with child protection workers and family case managers where. It's almost 100% turnover, Rachel. And so that's why education, that's why a program like CAST that can be deployed flexibly at your colleges and universities at no cost. That's why it matters. And in fact, that's why our team is actually working. You know, the casting is working with an Indiana group at Washington Community Schools. We're we're trying to change things and affect things even beyond that postsecondary world. We're working with the Stigma Stoppers Club there, which is really focused on eradicating stigma around mental health disorders, substance use disorders. And adversity and trauma. And so we're working with them even to create tool kits beyond the federal grant, tool kits that we're creating for the colleges and universities for gas. We're creating tool kits for the classroom to recognize that trauma and to mitigate it. So again, education really is pivotal in preventing child abuse. I mean education is always power, so.
Right. The more minds we can change and empower, then we're going to change their hearts and we're going to change how we react, how we respond to children and how we invest in them. Okay.
What are some good procedures when interviewing children when it comes to abuse?
That is a fantastic question. That's a question that I think everybody should be thinking about in the back of their mind, especially if you are a mandated reporter, which in most states, anybody that's going to intervene the life of a child is a legally obligated and obliged mandated reporter. Some of the tips that I have, you know, first and foremost, if you don't have forensic interview training, I would not recommend to try and forensically interview a child. I would get them to your local. Child Advocacy Center, I don't think a lot of people know about the CAC model or are familiar with these agencies and what they do. So again educating folks on that and the fact that we do have within our our communities, these Cacs where someone trained on for example, forensic interviewing using a protocol that's well established and has been defended in court like 0 abuse has the child first model. You can be able to conduct in that conversation in a trauma practicing manner. Now, if you're a mandated reporter and you are in a situation where a child is disclosed and you really do need to conduct an interview to to get some basic information to determine next steps and to get those details to make that competent mandated report, you know I would avoid asking leading questions. A good example, you know, so your dad was the one who did this to you, right? Don't. Don't lead and create those biased questions because it can jeopardize your investigation and cause a lot of challenges there. Avoiding why questions. I think a lot of people are inherently inquisitive. You know, that's just humanity in and of itself. We always are are searching for knowledge, right? Not being judgmental though, and and being trauma practicing would mean avoiding that, you know, well, why did this happen? Why did you dress like that? Those are just those kinds of questions that would only serve to trigger and potentially, you know, harm the child and maybe cause them to to not want to open up further. This is a moment where they're in this situation of crisis. And they're coming to you in that outcry for help. I would make sure then to to that end is getting trained up and understanding what a minimal facts finding interview is so that you can get the basic details to make a mandated report if you believe that you know that's necessary or or to get information that helps you decide if that's not necessary too right. Inclusion
and exclusion are both equal perspectives on which we stand when we're trying to determine if maltreatment has occurred, you know. I think that being able to have that minimal factifying interview and collect those descriptive details without skewing the investigation or introducing subjectivity or bias, I think that's really important. I think letting the child you know talk or conversely don't talk is really important. Not trying to force or coax them in one way or another to to give you information and just always practicing. Act of listening and giving feedback loops. You know, I always ask clarifying questions when I'm on the scene and I try to use their own language, right? Using their own developmental language and the words that they use, in short, can be really helpful. And if you're on scene with children, you know, I as a death investigator have been on scene with multiple children, oftentimes in a family. If there's interviews that are necessary, again, make sure that you conduct those interviews at your CAC with someone skilled inferensic interviewing and ideally you need to write best practices. We don't interview these children altogether. Right. We we need to separate those children out and interview them individually. So those are kind of the tips that I have when it comes to communicating with children. And always remember too that this is not an interrogation. We should always want to build rapport in a reasonable manner. So interviewing and differentiating that from interrogation is really important for our kids and keeping them safe. And then another big thing is because children naturally, right, they they pull at our heartstrings. We want kids to be safe. It's still really important to set you know, your realistic boundaries and not over promising during an interview or embellishing what may or may not happen or what can be done in a situation. But being realistic and transparent with the children is is something that I think is very conducive to that interview process.
