Exploring how attorneys address grooming in criminal trials of child sexual abuse
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Stolzenberg, Stacia N
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Abstract
Grooming is a common tactic among perpetrators of child sexual abuse (CSA). It is important that grooming is addressed in court to explain the unintuitive ways a child may act when they have been victims of abuse. The present study draws upon 134 transcripts of CSA criminal trials to establish how attorneys talk about grooming in court. Only 1.8% of attorney's questions addressed grooming behaviors. The majority of these focusing on exposure to pornography (27%) or boundary pushing (19%). Invitations elicited the most productive reports of grooming from children. There was a statistically significant difference in the proportion with which defense and prosecuting attorney's raised grooming issues, with prosecutors raising grooming issues more often than defense attorneys. We suggest that attorneys consider devoting proportionally more time to addressing grooming in court, to help jurors demystify common myths surrounding CSA.
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Behavioral Sciences & the Law
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41
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6
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© 2023 The Authors. Behavioral Sciences & The Law published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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Subject
Criminology
Law in context
Applied and developmental psychology
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Psychology, Applied
Law
Psychology
Government & Law
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Denne, E; Stolzenberg, SN, Exploring how attorneys address grooming in criminal trials of child sexual abuse, Behavioral Sciences & the Law, 2023, 41 (6), pp. 488-503