Pitfalls in Interviewing Victims
In the assessment of victims, pay special consideration to issues that may affect the ways in which the victims may react to your interventions. You need to do your homework and be aware of issues of possible relevance to the particular person or families you will be interviewing, whether you are:
Interviewing a victim as part of a psychological evaluation for the court
Working with law enforcement and need information to help in the prosecution of a crime
Working as a consultant to an attorney who is defending a person with a history of trauma
Some of the factors possibly influencing people’s reactions to their traumatic experiences and their receptivity to certain manners of interviewing include:
Age, gender, and sexual orientation
Religious or spiritual beliefs and background
Cultural or ethnic background
Education and intellectual functioning
Physical illnesses
Language proficiency
Tasks:
Select two of the factors listed above and explain in detail how they may affect your approach in interviewing and assessing a victim. Support your responses using examples and references from your textbook and other resources, such as websites. Include the references at the end of your posting.
All written assignments and responses should follow APA rules for attributing sources.
Solution Preview
Being a law enforcement employee and requiring information to help in the prosecution of a rape case, there are various ways in which interviewing of victims must be carried out so as to come out with clear information regarding that case. This is a traumatic experience and there are factors which probably influence people’s reactions to those experiences as well as their receptivity to certain manners of interviewing (Martin, 2005).
In interviewing a rape case on a male individual will be difficulty as numerous of them do not want to concede the fact that they are sexually abused. In that case this will be difficult for an interviewer to obtain the actual information that can lead to a clear information that can aid in prosecution of that crime.
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