Detecting Deception Among Child Molesters

For the first time, response patterns of guilty individuals who continue to deny their guilt related to child molestation are being scientifically compared to persons who are accused, questioned, and not charged (innocent). ... [ view full abstract ]

For the first time, response patterns of guilty individuals who continue to deny their guilt related to child molestation are being scientifically compared to persons who are accused, questioned, and not charged (innocent). The results show a clear distinction between response patterns of the two groups. This has been made possible by the cooperation of various law enforcement agencies in the United States that have provided redacted interviews with suspects who were accused, questioned, but not charged due to a variety of reasons (alibi, passing a polygraph, recantation, etc.).
In this presentation, video examples demonstrate 8 deception "techniques" used by these guilty offenders, and demonstrate a scoring instrument that has been designed to identify these techniques. The implications of the research findings have been called "groundbreaking" and "game changing." Dr. Turner has designed an easy-to-use scoring instrument that can be completed by interviewers in the course of their interview with a suspected child molester. Data analysis has shown a clear distinction between "innocent" deniers and "guilty" deniers, and ongoing data collection continues to support these exciting results. Such an instrument, with enough of a sample size, will allow, for the first time, an empirically supported method for interviewers to determine whether the suspect is engaging in deception or responding in the manner that truly innocent suspects respond.
The workshop introduces the instrument, and shows, via video examples, how to recognize the 8 most common techniques of deception used by guilty child molesters who deny their offenses. These techniques have been shown to be commonly used by guilty deniers, and they simply are not present in innocent deniers. At the end of the workshop, a sample case is given and scoring is performed as a group by the attendees with Dr. Turner.