A counselor helps child victims

'Child molestation cases need different approach'

By Kim Rahn

A growing number of children have fallen victim to sexual crimes, however, they tend to have difficulty in clearly expressing their thinking and memories of the incident. Therefore conducting investigations into child molestation cases requires extra care and a deeper understanding of the victims, a counselor said.

Choi Sun-hee, a counselor at the Gangwon One-Stop Support Center, also emphasized the importance of making the child victim feel comfortable during questioning.

Choi is one of 19 people who received 180 hours of special education to become the nation’s first experts on the investigation of sexual offenses committed against children and disabled victims. Among the 19 are counselors, female prosecutors and police officers.

The course, organized by the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, was designed to create a better investigative model for molestation and rape cases against children and the disabled, and thereby spare them from giving repeated testimony they are currently forced to make.

Child victims aged under 16 usually have their questioning video-recorded, so that they don’t have to repeat the testimony and recollect the crime. The recording is used as evidence, so that they don’t have to confront their attackers in court. But courts sometimes refuse to accept these, casting doubt on the credibility of the testimony.

“Child and disabled victims of molestation sometimes change their testimony ― not because they are lying but because they are incapable of properly expressing their thinking,” Choi said.

She said counselors and investigators need to question them in a way to induce voluntary responses.

“When asked in ‘yes or no’ questions like, ‘this is what he did to you, isn’t it?’ child victims are pressured to choose between yes and no, even when they don’t remember the situation exactly or they have something else to say,” the counselor said. Such questions can result in inconsistent testimony, which later the court doesn’t accept as cohesive evidence and consequently acquits the offenders of the charges.

There are also other difficulties in questioning children, she said ― for example, they talk very well about the incident but become silent when recording starts, or they sometimes fabricate answers unintentionally, following leading questions.

“So, investigators need to make the children feel relaxed. Also, before beginning questioning, they should tell the victims that it’s okay to say ‘I don’t know’ and that they can correct the investigators’ words if they think differently,” said the 41-year-old counselor with five years of experience in the field.

Choi also talked about the need for a different approach in questioning the mentally challenged victims of sexual assault, saying such people are adults physically but their mental ability is that of a child.

“As such victims have difficulty expressing their thinking, attackers often claim the victims proposed sex first or seduced them,” she said.

In many sexual offenses against mentally-ill women, molestation or rape is committed by multiple numbers of men, usually neighbors, over a long period of time. In this sense, Choi noted the irrationality of a law, which doesn’t acknowledge rape if the victim “didn’t resist desperately.”

“Such offenders approach the victims as kind neighbors and gradually develop intimacy, offering them food or other presents. So when the assault takes place, the victims don’t resist desperately, because they don’t exactly know what is going on and they don’t think the men are bad people,” she said. “They don’t want to recognize the men, who used to be kind, as turning bad suddenly. Offenders take advantage of this, so investigators and judges need to understand the point.”

Counseling centers estimate less than 10 percent of child and disabled rape or molestation cases are reported. “Parents, hoping what the children said happened is not true, tend to wish that the children had misunderstood what happened, rather than act to catch the offenders,” Choi said.

But these days, as related laws and systems have developed to better protect child victims, more and more parents are reporting such cases. “Reporting even a ‘minor’ sexual offense is encouraged, because it can prevent ‘more serious’ future crimes,” she said.