Transcript

Ivar Fahsing: 
Well, good evening, everybody. And welcome to the Davidhorn interview summit here in Copenhagen and to this live podcast. And welcome to you as well, Laurence Alison This is why they’re strange, isn’t it? My name is Ivar Fahsing and it’s it’s an honor to hosting you tonight. we’ve been through, discussion Laurence on, I go straight to the ball.

Laurence Alison: (00:17)
We will.

Speaker 2 (00:27)
One of your great products, I have years of research, is called Orbit. It’s a rapport-based interviewing approach. And as you know, the ruling kind of scientific approach to interviewing is called PEACE Model.

Is this the death of PEACE

Speaker 1 (00:44)
No, absolutely not. And if I said anything to that effect, I’d probably be shot by Andy Smith, who’s the national lead at the moment. Yeah, I think there’s a bit of confusion. It’s definitely not a competitive model. And I think it is very sympathetic with PEACE If you read the original PEACE documentation, there’s nothing in it that is inconsistent with what we’re teaching at all. What I think has happened to PEACE a bit is some of it has been taught not as it was originally written.

And sometimes when we’re training people, some of the officers have treated it as very mechanical. You have to do this bit, you have to do this bit, you have to do this bit and so forth and so on. Even down to the inappropriate translation of the so-called challenge phase, where sometimes what we have seen in some UK interviews is they get right to the end and then suddenly they throw everything at the challenge phase. But that’s not in the original version of PEACE.

So I don’t think it’s a competitive model. I think it’s broadly sympathetic and congruent with what is taught in PEACE. And PEACE, as I see it, is largely a planning approach anyway, about the phases that are important to conduct and go through. and Orbit is very, very specific. It’s enabling police officers to understand the skills that are required to deal with people when they are being resistant or difficult.

not in a way to trick them or persuade them or cajole them or manipulate them, but to make that interaction reasonable, proportionate and fair. So if someone’s talking to you, don’t need any of the Orbit stuff because it’s working. It’s when you’re met with resistance or difficulty that those skills are important.

Speaker 2 (02:15)
So the church that we’re hearing in here now is not for PEACE.

Speaker 1 (02:19)
It is not for PEACE in there. I mean, it’s not for me to say, it? You know, PEACE has been around for a long time. It seems to be working perfectly well for UK police, so there’s no reason to change it. But there’s, for me, there’s nothing within what we’re teaching which is inconsistent or incongruent with what’s mapped out in PEACE.

Speaker 2 (02:35)
You’re so polite Laurence. I was saying in a break here there’s something missing. Could I suggest maybe this is like a turbo booster?

Speaker 1 (02:46)
You’re

trying to get me to say something bad about PEACE.

Speaker 2 (02:48)
More that, as you said, okay, let’s slip it then and say, what is Orbit not delivering?

Speaker 1 (02:54)
Not delivering. I think it doesn’t touch on a very important part of what is important in an interview, which is the decision making. You know, the cognitive processes about how you manage an interview, what the sorts of questions are, things like the strategic use of evidence, those elements, pre-interview disclosure, prepare statements, all that element of it, which we all know are important. You know, a lot of your work as well, Ivar and the decision making elements of it. It’s not a decision making model.

It’s a very specific model about how you deal with people differently, depending on the different forms of resistance. mean, going back to the PEACE thing, know, what PEACE doesn’t teach officers is how you deal with people when they’re difficult. And that’s what we focused on.

Speaker 2 (03:35)
It’s a very nice clarification to get because there are different models out there and sometimes you think of should we take A or B. Here you need two pills.

Speaker 1 (03:45)
Yeah, I mean, as you know, we’ve trained all over the world, have you and different police forces are using different things and we were talking about it before. You know, there’s a lot of confusion and if I was a frontline police officer being given interview training, I wouldn’t know what was going on because it does feel a bit pick and mix. You know, I think there’s too many ideas in the pot and my advice would be to the police is to interrogate any model that you are being sold.

What is the basis for you teaching me this? What data is it based on? What is the sort of data that is based on? When you make that claim, tell me what the claim is based on. Where’s the evidence for it? I mean, in the same way that you wouldn’t take a pill or a medical intervention with that, I would assume, knowing that it’s had rigorous testing. Yeah.

You know, I would want to know what I’m about to put if my body and that there’s been some testing of it. So not all the models that are out there are equally based on strong evidence.

Speaker 2 (04:40)
Absolutely not.

If you think about Orbit, we’d be discussing that I think in some communities, in some countries, flies very well, it’s very popular, especially in the Netherlands and the UK, and you’ve just been presented in Norway, I guess in Ireland, there are some offices I know is really fond of it. Are there places where you think this is more needed?

Then, other

Speaker 1 (05:03)
Well, I think it’s needed in the US because historically they’ve been using other methods which are not based on evidence, which have been endemic and are kind of ingrained in the DNA of how they operate. so I think weirdly where we can have quite a lot of impact probably is in the US. And I think that vehicle is slowly turning around. But if you’ve been using technique A for 60, 70 years, and that is the

preferred model just because it’s been around for a long time. I think that that is a hard message to convince people of. That said, you know, we’re working with the district attorney of the state of California, lovely fellow called Vern Pearson, who’s very responsive to it. And we go out each year and we do trainings there. And they’re trying to scale that activity up there. And, you know, it is, it is slowly turning around to the point where I think there’s very going to be very little

of these other techniques used in the state of California, at least. Plus also we’re working with the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, FLETC. They’re very responsive and my experience of the US with the HIG as well, High Valley Detainee Derogation Group, they’re quite responsive. They’re appropriately skeptical, but they’re pretty responsive to it.

Speaker 2 (06:14)
to ask you, because you also travel a lot around the world. I was just thinking maybe there is a cultural underlying issue here that is beyond or is not linked necessarily to interviewing more, are we taking lessons from this country or not? Who are you to teach me?

Speaker 1 (06:31)
Possibly, yeah, maybe. mean, in truth, we don’t really encounter that when we go to different countries. I’ve been surprised how receptive people are. There might be a little bit of resistance. I mean, I can’t name names, can I? There was one military group that we were with, I remember, a couple of years ago, and I remember walking in the room, and I thought, my God, this is going to be a nightmare. There’s about 30 of them, and they all tattoos, folded arms, and you could tell very experienced people.

And quite reasonably, they were sort of looking at a bearded psychologist and thinking, does he know? Fair enough, you know. But we turned it around pretty quickly through what we were talking about and being respectful to it and allowing discussion to come out and blah, blah. I haven’t particularly found that anywhere. I’ve found a healthy skepticism, but broadly a receptivity. But going back to your point about PEACE and PACE I do think in the UK,

Where our officers can be weak in interviewing is in a lack of persistence and a lack of rigor and a lack of fair and even-handed but firm questioning. I think there is a little bit of that, whether that is a pendulum swing from PACE where there’s a kind of reticence to, you know, probe a bit more, whatever it is, I don’t know. But certainly I see in some of our UK officers, you see a question asked and they’ll

be given a half an answer but not really an answer and they’ll go god I can’t ask I can’t probe on that because that’s like asking another question but I think if the person has given an incomplete answer you’re well within your rights to explore it a bit or if there’s a discrepancy in what’s been said well that doesn’t make sense you’ve said this but on the other hand we’ve got this so I think there’s a little bit of tentativeness in in some of our UK law enforcement and and whether that’s associated with PEACE I don’t know

I can’t say, but there’s certainly that element there.

Speaker 2 (08:17)
The reason I asked you this cultural question, remember you’re Asbjørn Rachlew know, a friend of both of us. We were doing training down in Beirut and partly funded by the European Union. So there were two high ranking officials coming down to inspect this training room just to see that the money was spent the way it was intended. It was a German judge and a French former Supreme court judge.

And they were kind of beginning observing from the back and just, you know, a little bit reserved. But then as the days progressed, they were getting more and more involved and enthusiastic around it. I thought, it looks really good. And then we went out for dinner and they were so, them were all in, oh, this is really good. And I said, so after a couple of glasses of wine, I said to say, isn’t it

Isn’t it fascinating? We’re sitting here in Beirut now. The German and the French judge and you’re very fascinated about what we’re implementing here in Beirut. And this is not implemented in any of your countries. So in the taxi back to the hotel,

I think it was a German that said, Ivar you surely know why. You must know why it’s not taken on in either France or in Germany. said, no, help me.

Speaker 1 (09:28)
British.

Well, fair enough.

Speaker 2 (09:29)
Wah agwin, that’s even a rate

Speaker 1 (09:31)
Well, I mean, I’ll give you another story. Not that this is interviewing relevant, but we developed a tool to look at resource management in indecent image cases. And as you know, there are so many individuals that are downloading, distributing, or in possession of indecent images in the UK and everywhere else that you can’t investigate all of them. So you have to investigate the ones that you think are much more probably.

involved in a contact offender as well. We’d like to pick them all up, but we can’t. We’ve got to go for the ones that are actually contact offenders. Anyway, for many years, we developed a tool and it started off in Kent. I was working with the police officer, Matthew Long, lovely fellow. He’s now got out of child protection, but he got very high up in the NCA. Lovely fellow, did a PhD with me. Anyway, for many years, we developed this tool and it was very good. It was very accurate. It was very accurate at correctly identifying those individuals that were much more likely to be contact offenders.

whilst also correctly identifying those individuals that were not likely to be contacted vendors. We then did a big project. We were funded by when we were in the European Union by the Fighting International. we’ve got some decent money to look at it in Estonia, in Spain, various other countries. And some of you may be aware of Hofstede’s work about cultural variability. And the question was asked, well,

in these different countries, maybe pedophiles are different, you know, so there may be different in the UK as to Estonia and this despair. I said, that’s no, you’re wasting your money. The tool will be the same wherever we go. I guarantee you the tool will be said. Anyway, we got data from Estonia and all these other countries. And unsurprisingly, the tool is pretty much exactly the same. Tiny, tiny variations. But each country wanted it to be called. You know,

ERAT if it was in Estonia or SPERAT if it was in Spain or FERAT at if it was in France because they wanted that ownership over their own tool. So I think there’s a bit of politicking and you know, whatever but as a scientist you just don’t care. mean it is what it is. It’s like with the Orbit thing. It’s not that we you know we’ve done studies of how to appropriately speak to child victims of sexual abuse in South Korea. The model’s the same.

honesty, empathy, autonomy, evocation, interest in values, thoughts and beliefs. The forms of resistance or difficulty might be different, embarrassment, shame and fear. But if you speak to people appropriately, if you are persistent, you are patient, you’re able to be versatile, you’re authentic, you’re interested, you’re listening, you get more information.

Speaker 2 (11:53)
Absolutely. I guess also the threshold for when you would call it unfair is a bit different. Well, in England you can’t ask a question twice. Why in Vietnam they’re happy if you beat you, but you don’t beat so hard.

Speaker 1 (11:59)
What do mean?

Well, that’s, mean, we were talking about this in the break, the idea of asking a question twice. I agree. I don’t think you can ask the same question twice. But I think what we do, which I was talking about a minute ago in the UK, we’re reticent to ask a question which has been unanswered. And I wouldn’t do that. If you said something to me now and I didn’t understand what you’d said, not because you being deceptive, I’d want more. Deceptive. And you wouldn’t think I was being oppressive in asking for it. If I kept asking you the same question, then that would be oppressive.

But if I’ve not properly explored what you said in, a spirit of curiosity and interest, then I think it’s perfectly okay. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (12:42)
Respect.

you very early engaged with practitioners in your research, which is something that is still with you as a researcher, that you have a very close and trustful relationship with practitioners.

Speaker 1 (12:56)
God, 1991 I think I did my undergraduate degree. Is that right? Anyway, it when the Silence of the Lambs was out.

and all the cool kids wanted to be offender profilers. And I worked with David Cantor, who’s an interesting man. We won’t go there. For a few years, and I was at the university of Surrey and all the cool kids wanted to be offender profilers. And I started looking at this stuff and most of it was complete bullshit. I’d come off the back of three years of academic study, rigorous adherence to scientific methods and people wandering around turning up at crime scene saying, think,

It’s a postal worker who hates his mum or whatever bullshit was involved. And David bless him came in whilst I was still a master’s student actually, and gave her gave me a huge pile of papers. And actually this developed my interest in interviewing and decision making. And it was a big pile of papers about that big. And I was only a master’s student as well. I was a lot younger than obviously. And he said, this is an undercover operation and it’s everything.

every letter, phone call and meeting between an undercover operative called Lizzie James and the target, Colin Stagg. And it was in the wake of the Rachel Nichell murder, who most of you are far too young to remember, who was murdered on Wimbledon Common in front of a three-year-old son. It was a horrific murder case. And there was a psychologist involved who was allegedly an offender profiler who gave a profile which was very ambiguous and vague and could have been pretty much anyone.

Colin Stagg was lifted for this, interviewed badly and an undercover operation was set up in which they provided a 30 year old woman undercover called code name Lizzie James who basically, this is a very short version of the story, develops a relationship with Colin Stagg and was kind of offering herself to him if he gave admissions about this offense, which actually he never did.

Speaker 2 (14:46)
Because

sure he was man enough for her.

Speaker 1 (14:48)
Yeah, exactly. So I did an analysis of this whole undercover operation and I was appalled by it. It was clearly coercive, corruptive. was all the confirmation bias that you would expect. The profile was bogus. Anyway, it never got to court. It was thrown out of the voire d’erre by law chief Justice Ognor, who described it as the grossest conduct and an overzealous police investigation.

And what was interesting about it was from a decision-making point of view, it was all over the place. It was like, this is the guy that we think it is. And we’ll look for all the evidence to confirm it. And the interview was bad. And you could clearly demonstrate statistically that the guy was being led, clearly being led. And my early career actually was directed, I got a

I realized I got a name for myself when I did various court cases and I was up in West York and they said, you know what they call you, you? I said, no. They said, you’re called the hatchet man. And I said, what does that mean? They said, because we get you in when a load of bogus psychologists have made up a load of bullshit and we get you into basically destroy, straighten up these dodgy theories. And I did a lot of that in the early 90s.

which was a good experience because it made me realize what rigor you needed if you were going to contribute to something which was meaningful and practical and helping the police. It better be what it is that you’re saying it is. And unfortunately, psychology, supposedly experimental studies that look good. Well, as we all know, there was a big, you know, sort of debate around the worth of psychology a while ago about its merits and its applicability and its replicability.

So certainly in the early 90s, a lot of my research was directed at basically dissecting problems with other theories. And I wanted to be not an offender profiler, but that interested me. But I soon realized, you know, I’d come off the back of a degree at University College London, which was very rigorous. And there was all this bogus stuff going on. But that was the early 90s.

Speaker 2 (16:43)
Yeah, exactly. Because I was fortunate enough, to have a lunch with, David. because I was considering then, if it was possible for me as an Norwegian police officer to do the Masters, And then we came into that he wanted to…

Speaker 1 (16:54)
there.

Speaker 2 (16:58)
a warners of what would be expected from us if they invested in master. And he said, I remember he said something like that. Remember guys, what your bosses want you to come back with is this neat, nice suitcase. And inside it is a big green who did it button. And he said, just, just be aware that’s not what I’m going to give you. I said, well, where are you going to give us then? And he said,

Well, I guess what we can give you is that we will help you so that over time you will help the Norwegian police think differently about their problems. I think this was very good advice.

Speaker 1 (17:36)
he’s a brilliant mind really in generating a new area of psychology, investigative psychology, which has not been present before. And he definitely brought new ideas to the field and there’s been progression, as you know, in the profiling arena. are studies now that can help us with geo profiling, there are risk management and David’s an awkward spiky character, but I respect and admire

you know

Speaker 2 (18:01)
I’m personally very thankful for his encouragement and for me warmth that he actually gave that time. I also remember another thing you said, you did this research on offender profiling and getting back to decision making. Because I remember what David said, well, what’s the alternative to if offender profiling doesn’t work, what should you do instead? And he said, better thinking.

You have to, you know, absolutely get better at doing what you’re doing. And because typically you’re overseeing pretty obvious stuff and the cases we’re looking at, there are obvious information if you’re overseeing or that you lost or haven’t addressed or… So that was the other thing, know, strengthen the way you think. And I think you also wrote that, you and him, in a research paper.

for the home office. I’m not getting into quoting you, but I think it was around late 90s, 1998, 99. The reason I remember it so vividly is that you said, I’m done research on decision-making together with my brilliant supervisors, Per Anders, Gunnar Öhl and Karl Ask at the University of Gothenburg, who you were working with at the time. I was thinking we need a model.

for how to think as a detective, just as a PEACE model or the Orbit that you have to have some kind of system to help you. What are you going to do then? Well, that’s quite generic one. And there was a quote from one of your reports that actually gave me that idea. What could that starting point was? B. And I think it goes something like this.

Good thinking is characterized by a thorough search for an alternative without favorizing the one already on mind.

Speaker 1 (19:44)
Cool, really good.

Speaker 2 (19:46)
It’s got a full name on it.

Speaker 1 (19:47)
I’m very impressed with that. Did I write? You’ve got a much better memory of my past than I do.

Speaker 2 (19:52)
I have to say, Laurence, I’m very thankful for that phrase because there are some Norwegian leading detectives in the room. think they also can testify that this became kind of the centerpiece of the decision-making part in the Norwegian version of the PEACE training. So this kind of actively identifying these alternative explanations of the evidence, different stories fit the same evidence?

And can we actually actively identify them in the interview? Can we actively rule it out or can it replace the suspicion? Where do you find more, you know, inference to the best explanation? What explanation does best fit the available evidence? So that became very important in the Norwegian and probably more important than the interview model itself.

Speaker 1 (20:34)
Well, mean, you I mean, as you know, you develop that work and as you’ll know, there’s a big litch on decision making. I mean, I think the only psychologist that’s won the Nobel Peace Prize is Dan Kahneman. And funnily enough, not for his work on decision making, because for all economics. But you know, all that Kahneman and Tversky stuff around confirmation bias, heuristics, et cetera, et cetera, you know, is all good stuff. And you will have drawn on that in your thesis. So, but look, I mean,

What I was interested in in the early days, because it sounded sexy, was what was going on inside the criminal’s mind. That was what it was all about in the early 90s. But you soon realized, or I realized, that I think you can make a bigger contribution if you understand what’s in the police officer’s mind. How they think, how they gather information, that I think is more important in many ways. And the two things in combination can either be done really badly or really well.

If you’ve got an open-minded police officer that goes into an interview and interviews correctly, then you’ve got a result. If you’ve got a closed-minded police officer that’s using confirmation bias and then coercive techniques, they’re going to get what they always thought they were going to get in the first place. But you know, that’s a tough place to be, it?

Speaker 2 (21:37)
Definitely,

So you actually flew in single-handedly to Gothenburg and spent two days with me, with Per Anders and Carl to kind of pin down how can this be done? Can we actually compare decision-making? Because I wanted to compare English and Norwegian detectives. It’s impossible actually to, across sectors, across countries, across jurisdiction, to compare good decision-making.

Speaker 1 (22:28)
And were they very different?

Speaker 2 (22:30)
They were,

I remember the first news that you should do this in the, the, in the, in the hydro suite. And I challenged that said, well, that’d have to be an advantage to the Brits because they’re to that. So we decided to do it outside of it. But what we found that Carl in those studies that we wanted them to see, can you identify the possible inclinations?

good thinking is. So you said, well, that’s good Ivar but don’t do that without a gold standard. It’s just, it’s not the number of hypotheses, it’s the quality of them. So that was another good advice that I picked up. I don’t, you don’t like phrasing here, but that was a very important advice. And then we do the Delfi process on identifying, what are the…

explanations than an unenviable person case and rapidly came to the agreement that there’s only six. There are only six possible explanations why someone disappeared. And all of them have underlying investigative needs. So they’re appointing to information needs. So we also asked them to see, you tell us what investigative actions should you do? And when we did that, the Brits came out with an average of 80 %

the gold standard, whilst the Norwegians had 41.

Speaker 1 (23:49)
what do you think that was?

Speaker 2 (23:50)
No training, no feedback, no training. Just like you and me. Or very little training. So that more training in England, they were more fit. I think, you know, that you have to have to rationalize why you’re doing this. There’s someone looking over their shoulder on the accreditation system. You know that when my plan…

Speaker 1 (23:51)
No train.

Speaker 2 (24:09)
is 24 hours old, someone will knock on this door and come on and check it. And if it’s not good, they will report on it. And if it’s not good after there are so and so many hours, there’s no days they’ll come back. I think mainly in England, they this to kind of stop them from spending money on bad investigations, but it also meant that they, you know, we

Speaker 1 (24:30)
Do they

have a different volume of cases though? the Norwegian officers add less exposure to cases maybe?

Speaker 2 (24:35)
I’ll be obvious. So, so, so, so you get bigger exposure, but there’s also the fact that if you, and it’s quite obvious when we can, I didn’t hypothesis it. was thinking that the difference would be not that big, then we realized there is no.

certification, is no reach, the recertification or anything. So there are, of course, there were some of the Norwegians who did really good, but there were some who were really poor. So the variance was extreme. then we were thinking this, you need a system. You actually need an accreditation to be a proper detective and you need to kind of retrain and re-prove that you actually still are up for it.

So that’s what came out of that research. interestingly enough, the Norwegian police directorate picked up on that. So now you have, we are slowly moving towards a system where you need the training before you get the job and you also need to get that kind of…

Speaker 1 (25:32)
Are

you having increasingly young detectives though? Because I think in the UK that’s true with us that they’re taking on because of resources and finances and everything else. The younger people are taking on quite high profile cases now, not necessarily with enough experience to sit down. I mean, we did a study on rape investigation and it was quite interesting. One of the manipulations that we did, it was a similar sort of study. We gave a…

A scenario to individuals around a rape investigation, we did develop a gold standard in much the same way in looking at the quality of the decisions. And to half the group, we said, right, I’m really sorry, but you’re under bit of time pressure today, so you’re gonna have to do this quickly. Even though we gave them exactly the same amount of time as the other group that we didn’t say that to. And what was quite interesting was individuals that had been investigating rape more than seven years. So you could have one officer that had been a detective for 10 years.

and done seven years in rape. First another officer that had been a detective for 20 years and had done six years on rape and that person would do less well. And it’s a bit like this is a random jump, but it’s a bit like the studies on people that can assess the quality of There’s actually studies on people that can look at pigs and say that’s gonna be a decent pig to eat. But it doesn’t transfer to cows.

Now that might sound random, but my point is it’s about domain specific knowledge. Exactly. So you could have been doing missing people. Exactly. For 20 years and six years on rape, but you’re not going to do as well as a person that’s been doing eight years on rape. Only. one of the things we don’t know much about at all is what the variation is in those different sorts of investigations. But seven years seemed to be a predictor.

Another predictor was a thing called need for closure, which is an individual difference to do with how tolerant you are of ambiguity. And we found that people that were highly decisive, but also tolerant of ambiguity tended to also do well on that task. And the other thing was we took a measure of fluid intelligence, which is the thing Raven’s progressive matrices, which is non-numeric, non-verbal, which is to do with how people recognize patterns.

So it’s pattern, recognizing complex patterns in information, open-mindedness, but decisiveness, lots of experience. And then the other thing, I mentioned this manipulation around time pressure. What we found was that the people that were particularly good at making the decisions, when they were under time pressure, did all the things that they had to do and were able to push out the redundant stuff quite quickly. Whereas people that had less than seven years,

weren’t very decisive, weren’t tolerant of ambiguity and had low fluid intelligence, got panicked by simply being told they had less time and didn’t do all the critical stuff. So it was quite interesting. in terms of, you’ve got to have some degree of experience. Intelligence is a predictor and of course training and exposure. that’s, mean, the other, sorry, I’m waffling there. The other thing that I’ve got increasingly interested in is

How do you get people to get better at doing a complex technical skill without having to make them go through seven years of dipping hit? Exactly. So, mean, you mentioned Hydra there, which is, I was involved in the early days of Hydra, which is a big immersive scenario based learning thing. And that was great. But I’ve got very interested in the concept of micro learning, the short learning, but repetitive learning. So,

There’s something, there’s emerging literature and micro-learning which might be relevant to interviewing, might be relevant to decision making. How do you get people to acquire a complex technical skill that normally takes a lot of time to acquire?

Speaker 2 (29:04)
So little bit of tennis every week instead of once a year.

Speaker 1 (29:06)
Yeah, exactly. You know, you’re learning tennis, do I spend eight hours with you and then disallow you from doing it again for another year? Or do I make sure you practice 10 minutes a day every day for three weeks?

Speaker 2 (29:16)
Do you think, as I said, the research on British and Norwegian homicide detectives showed, at least suggest, that certification, that you actually need to do something to get and to keep the certificate. Is that something we could consider the interview as also the interviewing world?

Speaker 1 (29:32)
depends on how it’s certified I is my sure answer to that

Speaker 2 (29:36)
Exactly. you know, probably you could think about it. You know, we have accreditation systems for all kinds of stuff. It’s mostly technical stuff, but also for processes. the interview is a process. And there are certain steps that shouldn’t be ignored.

Speaker 1 (29:51)
Yeah, I mean, it’s like anything, isn’t it? You want to make sure that the measure is a fair measure of what it is that you know that improves performance. It’s like, I mean, not that we need to get political again, but I mean, certain governments, who I won’t name, have over-engineered mechanisms to metricize performance. And that can also be a problem.

So my answer is it depends on the metric. It depends on the measure. It depends on how onerous it is and it depends what the intent is. The idea of measuring is clearly important. The idea of oversight and performance and scrutiny is important. But again, going back to the stuff on decision making, I’ve certainly, well, I mean, even going back to the things that we were talking about, the over-tensitiveness of interviewing, you want to make sure that it’s proportionate, that it’s fair, that it’s regulated and it’s not overdone.

Because the other stuff that I did on research on accountability was, I mean, as you know, my other areas of interest is critical instance decision-making and decision inertia. So in high profile instance where all options look bad, the worst thing you can do is do nothing, but that happens frequently. So, you know, we can all think of countless examples of problematic decision-making where people have been too slow to act or haven’t acted at all. And we know from the research.

Speaker 2 (30:48)
Thank

Speaker 1 (31:03)
that part of that is to do with the perception of accountability for owning a bad decision. And therefore, you know, I’ve got a cataclysmic option and I’ve got a bad one, but I don’t want to own either of these, so I’ll do nothing. So actually the bad one is better than the cataclysmic one. So, sorry, I’m waffling a bit, but yeah, I mean, think certification is a good idea, degree of scrutiny, as long as it’s a fair measurement and not over them.

Speaker 2 (31:26)
I think also we’re hosted this interview by Davidhorn and I think also technology can play a part. If you want to test people and want to certify people, you should be reliable and testable and consistent. that technology might play a part in that, whether we can document that skill and test it consistently.

and then probably it could be a future to see if it can be also effectively, you know.

Speaker 1 (31:53)
I mean anything that helps the observation of the detail of what’s going on in the interview room and you know we were all watching a presentation earlier about transcription and translation and technology to help observe all of that sort of has obviously got to be helpful.

Speaker 2 (32:07)
Obviously, and I guess you couldn’t have done your research on Orbit without recordings, could you?

Speaker 1 (32:12)
Extremely difficult. extremely difficult. Nearly all of our stuff was audiovisual. Some of it was tape only. I don’t think any of it was transcription only. I think all of it was at least audio. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (32:23)
I definitely think, we’re also talking about this on the summit, AI, how that can help us. I think some of the decision inertia which you find in your decision, critical decision making research, is also…

hampering interviews massively in interviews. So interviewers don’t know what to ask for. They don’t follow. They’re not able to kind of follow what does this mean? In my case right now. And you can teach them as much interview techniques as you want to. But if they don’t know what they want to know, how do they know what to ask? And then they start going in circles and then they annoy the suspect and you know,

Speaker 1 (32:38)
is also was.

Speaker 2 (33:02)
Fuck up the intro.

Speaker 1 (33:03)
Well, mean, anything that can help reduce the cognitive load is going to be massively helpful. Me and Børge have spoken about this. Any technology that can help organize the information or help give you a bit of a nudge or visualize it in an important way or just give you access to something that is going to be faster, all of that’s going to definitely be helpful. I mean, we’re doing bits of, not that I’m diverting off into another realm now, but we’re doing some work with DARPA.

around the use of AI in medical triage and mass casualty incidents. So, you know, when you’re getting flow within a hospital that gets overwhelmed because of a shooting incident, at what point do you hand over autonomy to a system? you know, looking at all of that, I think it’s important, but anyone that’s been involved in AI, either as an ethicist or a legal practitioner or a psychologist, will know that one of the important things is that you’ve got to keep the human in the loop somewhere, because what

what people are uncomfortable with is if they don’t know what the AI is doing when they’re doing it. So when we spoke to surgeons about AI around mass casualty, they said, yeah, yeah, we’re definitely in support of AI if it can take the load off us and if we get a surgeon can help us. But we want to know why it’s triaging in that way, which is perfectly reasonable. Exactly. So the AI interviewing stuff is quite interesting. I’ve been playing around with various different chat bots to see if I can lie to it successfully.

Well, I won’t name particular ones. There was one that I was really impressed by actually. I can say this, can’t I? Inflection. Has anyone tried inflection? Have you tried it now? It’s quite impressive. I actually felt bad saying goodbye to it. But what was interesting about it, a lot of the other ones that I tried, tried to pretend that they were human, which obviously I knew weren’t. And I say,

Sorry, I’m diverted now, you can cut this bit. But I was chatting to one of them and he said, Oh, hi Laurence, what are you interested in? I said, one of the things I like is artwork. And they said, Oh really? And I said, yeah. And I said, you like artwork? And they said, yeah, I quite like Picasso. And I thought, well, that’s bullshit. You’ve never seen a Picasso. I said, where have you seen a Picasso? Oh, I haven’t seen one. And so it was lying to it. was trying to do what we see interviewers do badly, which is be congruent with me and like me. But the inflection one didn’t lie to me. It recognized that it was a robot.

and it was straight, it said I’ve never seen any art in my life, I couldn’t tell you what it’s about. I thought okay, I can live with that. So you know what I mean? So from an interviewing point of view, I felt it was relatable, because it wasn’t trying to…

Speaker 2 (35:19)
somehow bullshitting, yeah?

Speaker 1 (35:20)
And it was quite good at metaphor. I said, well, we’ve been talking for about an hour now. I said, if I was an animal, what would I be? And it came up with an animal and gave quite a good description as to why. I thought it was quite clever. And it seemed rational within what I’ve, I know we’re diverting wildly. What animal was that? Octopus. So you’ve got your, you know, you’ve got your tentacles on a lot of things and you’re sliding around all over the place and quite mercurial, which is what I’m doing now, I guess. But I…

But that was an inventive, imaginative metaphor that I could relate to. Anyway, we’re going off PEACE. I mean, in terms of AI interviewing, I guess we’ll get there at some point. Because it’s never going to get tired. It’s never going to get pissed off. know, two things that are going to happen to interviewers, I’m now fatigued.

Speaker 2 (36:00)
And will, last question, will do you think, Laurence, at some time, robots or AI replace the human interviewer?

Speaker 1 (36:08)
It’s completely conceivable. I mean, even if you think about cognitive empathy, you know, if you’re, if I’m interviewing a 19 year old female that’s gone to Syria and had that experience and I’ve, will have a limited knowledge of it, an AI potentially would know every road that this person might have traveled. So I’ll have much richer, denser knowledge than I will.

So in terms of knowledge it will have it, it won’t get tired like I would either of it. So I don’t know, potentially.

Speaker 2 (36:42)
It’s like you said earlier, technically a robot can probably fly an airplane safer than a human pilot.

Speaker 1 (36:51)
Almost certainly,

Speaker 2 (36:52)
So it might be the same.

Speaker 1 (36:54)
Potentially,

Speaker 2 (36:55)
Thank you very much, Professor Laurence Alison

Transcript

Ivar Fahsing: 

It’s an honor to welcome Bragi Guðbrandsson to the podcast Beyond A Reasonable Doubt. We are in Reykjavik, Iceland. And the reason we are here today is that Iceland was the first country in the world that came up with a solution for how to take care of kids in difficult situation and in criminal settings that was called the Barnahus Model. And you, Bragi was deeply involved in this development. Could you tell us a little bit about how that came about?  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Yeah, yeah, that’s a pleasure. And thank you for taking the time to speak to me. Well, Barnahus has been, my professional mission for past 25 years or so. And you ask how did it come about? Well, the Barnahus is about sexually abused, victims of, child victims of sexual abuse. And I started my engagement this topic, in the early 1980s, it was in last century. I became a director of local social services and I stayed there for 10 years. I came across a number of cases where children had been sexually molested. I was myself lost in how to best deal with these cases. You know, hands on feel the pain of the children and the horrific situation that this met for these child victims. And from the very start, I started to speculate on how we could do better for these kids. In 1990, I became the counselor to the Minister of Social Affairs and when he asked me to be his councillor, I said I would do so if I would have the opportunity to work on the reform in child protection legislation in Iceland, which he happily accepted. And that led to the set up of the government’s Agency for Child Protection in 1995. I was appointed the director general of that agency. 

This Agency had main function to coordinate all child protection work Iceland, the whole of Iceland. The child protection system was overtly decentralized. We had 180 communes or local authorities in Iceland. And in each local authority, we used to have child protection committee. Over half of these committees had less than 300 people in populations. You just could imagine how really impossible it was to provide professional intervention into complicated issues like child sexual abuse. Besides, the time, Iceland was in denial on the very existence of child sexual abuse. But one of the first decisions I made as the Director General of the Government of Asian Child Protection was to do a research on the prevalence of child sexual abuse in the country. And the outcome of that research came as a surprise to all of us here in Iceland. There were a lot more cases that nobody had sort of envisaged. We had over 100 cases per year being dealt with in the different sectors, society, by the child protection, by the police, by the medical profession, and so on. But this outcome of this research demonstrated the complete failure of the system to deal with these cases as it sort of revealed the lack of collaboration between the different agencies that were responsible for dealing with this. It demonstrated the lack of professionalism, lack of or absence of guidelines for working these cases. And it really demonstrated that children were subjected to repetitive interviews with the consequent, you know, re-victimization that this involves. But you also could find cases where, you know, children were not even talked to because they’re in some parts of the country they didn’t really believe that the children were good witnesses or they didn’t have the capacity to speak to  children. So this was more or less in total chaos. There was no therapeutic support available in the country. There was no expertise in terms of medical in examination of child victims. So there was a huge work to do. 

One of the things that I felt in particular was bad was that children were dragged to the courts if an indictment was made. Children would need to give their court testimony in the courthouse and being subjected to cross-examination where the child had to face the accused person. This was of course very intimidating for the child witnesses. Now, this was the sort of scenario at hand in Iceland in 1995, 1996. I came to the conclusion that if we were going to do something about this, we need to do it centrally. Iceland is a small country with only at the time just over 300,000 people, just over 70,000 children. So we couldn’t build up these competence centers all around the place. I decided that we would set up a of a competence center that will serve children the whole of the country, whole witnesses, child victims and witnesses in the whole country. And we would need firstly to have expertise in terms of forensic interviewing. That was number one, because without the child’s disclosure, we can’t do really very much. So that was one. And number two, we needed to have a facility for medical evaluation, although child victims oftentimes do not have any physical evidence due to the fact that most of the cases we deal with are historic sexual abuse happened in the very past and the body has this great capacity for healing, so you wouldn’t have any evidence. It was necessary and also for, you know, give the child the whole sort of physical checkup not only look for the evidence, but also support the child and the child’s concern over own physical health, because often time child witnesses, they are concerned about being in any way harmed due to the abuse, even though they are perfectly healthy. So this is one part. And the third part was, of course, the therapeutic part. Now, the idea was really to have all the different professions work together within the one roof. Of course, this idea did not fall from the sky. It sort of developed discussions, developed from what was happening in the world at the time. That was very remarkable, particularly with regard to forensic interviews as a response to the sort of historical, or I should rather say, hysterical child abuse cases in the nurseries in America, Canada, even in Europe. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

If I’m not wrong, this is your area, Bragi but, I’ve read that in the 80s, it came up a lot of stories. Maybe it can be social development in many of the Northern Western democracies, this came up in a large scale. And some of them were proven to be true, some of them were actually proven to be false. So I guess that was kind of the environment of the time that this is coming up. It’s surfacing. We don’t know the scale of it. And it’s also, as you said, there is stigma here. And we have a problem to establish the fact. And in the chaos, I think, if I can summarize your observation, the ones who are truly suffering in that chaos is actually the kids. And they probably were, either if they were a true victim or not.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Yeah, yeah. And even if the abuse didn’t happen, they became victimized to this constant interrogation that they were subjected to.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

By the process itself.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Yeah, by the very system was trying to protect them. But I think you are right. Obviously, there were real cases of child sexual abuse within the framework of play schools, nurseries and so on. We know that, of course, that pedophilias, they go where the children are, nursery schools and are of course places that they go to look for prey. But on the other hand, what we do know now is that during this period in the 80s and 90s, there were a of false accusations or mis-interpretations and people were scared, parents were scared, well maybe naturally, know, they had heard about these cases, they’ve heard about pedophilia and sexual crimes and they were, they wanted of course to protect their children, that’s quite natural, they listened to their children but perhaps, you know, during a certain stage in the child’s rebirth, the child becomes sort of, I wouldn’t say obsessed, but interested in its gender identity and that includes genitals and breasts and things like that. They talk about it and it’s very easy for parents to misunderstand or to interpret children in the wrong way and not understand correctly what the message they’re trying to convey. These issues are so complicated to sort of detect. But of course, trained forensic interviewers that we know today who know how to elicit the child’s nanoteeth in a correct manner by applying evidence-based forensic protocol, avoiding the suggestibility that a normal being would probably be guilty of when talking with a child. We can now establish whether there is a real cause there for concern or not. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

You did something that I wasn’t aware of. You said you did some research on it here in Iceland. Can you tell a little bit more about why you did it and what you found?  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Well yes, the research was basically on the structural aspect of it, how the different agencies in society that were responsible for dealing with child sexual abuse, how they handle themselves in these cases. So I looked at the child protection, looked at the police and I looked at the prosecution and the court system and of course the medical system. Now out of the 100 cases, well the child protection should have been dealing with all of them because the law stipulated mandatory reporting to the child protection. However, the child protection system only knew about 60 % of these cases. And the police only knew about the 40 % of the cases. The prosecution only received less than 30 % of the cases. And the courts they only got, well, less than 10%. That was really roughly the proportion of the cases how it was divided. Now, why didn’t the child protection get all of these cases like they should have?  Well, I think it was because we had 180 child protection committees all around the country. The police was a bit skeptical of referring cases to these child protection committees because they knew they did not have any professional capacities to deal with it. So they thought it would probably be better if they did it on their own. The child protection didn’t contact the police either in their cases that they were dealing with. Why was that? Well, I suppose that they simply didn’t know how to deal with it. They may have done so informally. At least it was not registered in any case. Possibly they were, because of the state of denial that the whole society was in, they were probably not sure if this was really a case or not. Or if it was a case, they didn’t really know how to handle it, how to speak to children, how to talk to children. They didn’t really know how to work it through. And this is really what I was basically concerned with. To refer the kids to medical evaluations. Well, there was no specific, there was no specialization there. You could go to your family doctor or to the hospital, but then you would need to have at the time, we found out that you really would need to have some visible injury, so it was really a chaos. We were trying to work out, trying to map the actual procedure, but there wasn’t any. There was no procedure in the whole country. So that was really our main sort of findings that we needed to do, a professional guidelines on how to respond when you had this suspicion. That was number one. And number two, would have to have highly qualified forensic interviewers. And then, of course, the medical setting and so on. But at this was before the Google. So you didn’t really know if this structure of sort inter or multi-agency collaboration did exist somewhere in the world at the time. I did write and phone to my colleagues in the other Scandinavian countries and I did try to read as much as I could, but I didn’t find any place where this collaboration was taking place. Until a bit later on when by pure accident I saw an advert on the internet, in fact, on the conference in Huntsville, Alabama, of all places in the US. What caught my eyes was that there was the concept inter-agency collaboration in child sexual abuse. 

When I saw it, I decided I should go there. Then I learned about the children’s advocacy centers in the USA. And they were actually based on the same concept. And it started in the Southern States of the USA and it was in its infancy. This was a great inspiration for me. I could see there how these different agencies collaborated and worked under one roof. 

They had medical people coming over to do the medical evaluation, and they had therapists on a permanent basis there. Well, this would be exactly what we would need here in Iceland. It would fit nicely to serve the whole country, but I wanted to take it further. 

I felt what’s lacking in the USA model was number one, was an NGO. It’s a private…  

Ivar Fahsing: 

Like a lot of things in the States.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

So there was no obligation part of the police or the child protection, so I had to refer cases to it. And secondly, and that was very important, that you didn’t take the child’s for court purposes in these children’s advocacy centers. This was basically done for the police for investigative interviews and for the criminal investigation. And then the child needed to wait maybe a year or two until the actual court procedure.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

Then appearing courts.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

And then appearing court, yes and being cross-examined and subjected to cross-examination of the task. So, this was something which I did not like very much, but I wondered if we could sort of do it differently to take the good elements and to strengthen the model by number one, to have it operated by the public authorities to integrate into the welfare system. So it would be with the corresponding sort of mandate of the different agencies to refer cases to the partners. Secondly, if we could have the court judges come along and join us in this project. 

It was at this time that invented the term Barnaheussora. This was something which being used a bit before. When this slowly developed, we got some support from them, particularly from the prosecution. The prosecution particularly saw the potential in this. We then tried to have the set up as being the default procedure here in Iceland. At the time we had the legislation that court judges could not touch the case or come near the case during the investigative phase. It was only after the indictment had been made that they could come into the case. But at the time, Norway had a system which was called Dommeravhør, which was kind of an exception from the general rule that court judges should not be involved in the investigative phase, where they were supposed to take the child’s during the pre-trial states. Now, this is an arrangement that Norway has no longer. However, it was the solution that we found that was to have the court judges to take the child’s statement during the pre-trial state.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

Like a subpoena, in a way.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Yeah. It was only limited, the role of the court judge was only limited to that particular part. The idea really was to fulfill the basic principle of the due process.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

Exactly.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

You know, the due process consists of two, more or two dimensions. Number one is the evidentiary immediacy, so that the court judge would be able to see or sense the evidence directly without any interference. So by meeting the child and listening to the child, that requirement was fulfilled. And secondly, the requirement of the due process, which meant that means that the accused person must have the opportunity or his defense contradict, yes, to ask the child witness. So what the arrangement sort of came out of this was that we would have the child in Barnahus in one room with a forensic interviewer. And then in a different room, you would have all the representatives of the different agencies, the child protection, the police, the prosecution, and the defense. And this would be done under the auspices of court judge. So they would be able to observe the interviewer live. 

Following the interview, which was carried out by trained interviewer, according to a forensic interview protocol, the defence had the opportunity to ask the child questions, to offer alternative explanations and so on. This would all be video recorded and the video would be then accepted as the chief evidence, main evidence during the court procedure, the court’s proceeding, if an indictment would be made. So this was an arrangement that we sort of set up from the very start.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

So then saving the children in general for potential revictimisation, but by having to appear for cross-examination in court. So that was the level that you thought was missing in the US.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Yeah, absolutely. In this system, the child is only subjected to one when the child has given his or her statement, then the child does not need to be concerned about the justice system anymore. The child has done with the justice system. Now, I that there are other ways to do this. I know, for example, the other Nordic countries, including, for example, Norway, the court judges, they’re not involved in this procedure. But it is the prosecution who is responsible for the procedure. The defense will have this opportunity. In Norway, you have two systems. First, you have the interview with the child where all the different agencies are involved. But the defense is not there. Once the child has given his or her statement, then the perpetrator is interrogated or interviewed. And then you have the second interview, which is often referred to as a supplementary interview, which focuses basically on the diversion or the different account, the disagreement, the differences in the natterchiefs of the child and the accused. 

You get about 80-90 % agreement, then it’s about 20-10 % disagreement. So the second interview of the child focuses on this diverse narrative. Then the child is over with the judicial part. Both of these interviews are recorded and they can be played in court if an indictment is made. So the difference between the Icelandic system now or Banahus interview and the other Scandinavian is this one versus two. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

If we then go back again to when you started, you were in the Alabama in 1997. And you were in position, as I understand both, because you had historically seen the problem. You had an idea about the And based on that, the Barnahus was established as the multi-agency center for potentially victimized children. How was that received, because I imagine one thing is that you say the chaos and the 180 different agencies and of course varying level I would guess of competency and capacity, but I guess also one of the fundamental problems when it comes is kind of the all the different government agencies have different budgets. So how was this received and dealt with on a government level?  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Well, once we had carried out this research I mentioned, and we had seen that the prevalence of child sexual abuse was as high as the outcome of that research demonstrated. I think the Icelandic society wasn’t a bit of a shock, you know, because they really didn’t believe in Iceland at the time, the population, that child sexual abuse was an issue. Child sexual abuse was something which was, you know, infighting the States or the UK and the larger societies, but not in Iceland. So when this information came out, there was a bit of a shock among the nation. And there was a great debate in the parliament that something needed to be done. And which was to be expected. My agency, the government’s agency for child protection, was entrusted to put forward proposals to reform the system. So I really got the mandate to do whatever I thought was necessary to improve the situation.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

Fantastic. 

 Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

And so I looked for support from the prosecution, from the head of the university hospital in Iceland, from the police chief here in Reykjavik, and from the Federation of the Social Directors of Social Services in Iceland and so on. And they were mostly positive. Not all of them, but mostly there were. Particularly, I’m happy to say the prosecution was happy with it because they realized the problem, particularly in terms of the criminal investigation, that the police at the time, they had not the necessary training or the capacity to interview children. So they saw immediately the potentialities there for improving the criminal aspect of it. So they were fine. They were interested from the very start. But it was a different history with medical professions. At the time, they could do the medical exams through, by the application of a state of the art equipment, video colposcope, which we had never heard of here. And most of the kids who were examined in university hospital in Iceland, they had to be, well, they used anesthesia. They put them to sleep before they did the examination, which is not a very child-friendly way to do a medical evaluation and not very effective either. So when I approached him, I sort of asked them if they were willing to join us in Barnahus, if we could set up a medical suite there. They were not extremely keen on that and said, well, we need to have this option to use anesthesia in many cases and we can only do that in hospital. Then we don’t have the video colposcope, we don’t have the money to buy it. So I said, look, if I can finance it and I can buy it and put it in Barnahus, would you come? And they said, yes, then we would come. So I bought it. And when it came to Barnahus, I contacted them again and said, now we had the video colposcope in the medical room. Now I want you to come and start doing the medical evaluation. 

The first thing they said was, please bring the video colposcope to our new children’s hospital. We want to do it rather there… So they tried to resist. But in the end, they became so fascinated by the way in which children could be then examined and the possibility they had to communicate with the child in this child-friendly environment. They could perform their obligation in a much more effective way than before. Soon they became the strongest advocate for Barnahus. They pointed out that in Barnahus, children are so relaxed, they were not stressed in the muscles they needed to examine. They were so relaxed and it was so easy to examine the children compared to what was before that they became the strongest advocates for Barnahus very soon afterwards.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

I guess if you reflect upon it, you have probably two of the most powerful historical professions.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Yes.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

You have the lawyers.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

The lawyers.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

And the medical doctors.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Yes.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

So making them be able to invest and communicate. I guess you must have taken some diplomatic skills.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Well, it took a while. It helped me that Iceland is a small society and I had been a councillor to the Ministry of Social Affairs. So I knew these people personally. And that was something which was helped me a great deal. So they were ready to do it as a favor to, you know, as a pilot for maybe one or two years or so and see how it would evolve. So I think that was a part of the explanation as well. But they were not all in the legal professions who were happy about this. The defense wasn’t happy. Because they said, Barnahus, it’s not like a courthouse. The courthouse is a neutral ground, but Barnahus is biased. It’s publicly advocating children’s rights for children. So it’s not an objective place to do this part of the court procedures. But on the other hand, we argued, well, you know, the child is not a partner in court case. The court case is between the prosecution on the one hand and the accused person on the other. So the child is only a witness and it should be to the benefit of the innocent accused person to provide environment for the child so that enhance the possibility that the child will tell the truth. And in the end, they bought that, that as a child was not part of actual court proceedings, other than having a status as a witness. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

I can see the argument, of again, as you have to, some eggs if you want to make an omelette.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Yeah, yeah, yeah.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

And it depends on you see it. Either you acknowledge the fact that sexual abuse towards children actually do occur.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Yeah.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

But you don’t know in advance against who? And then you advocated a safer neutral space for where we investigate and take care of this. well, I know I can hear myself, I’m advocating for it, but I it’s interesting to hear that there were sceptical voices.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Yeah, yeah, it is. And it’s quite natural. It was something new and they had been doing it, you know, from the very beginning, the old way. And they knew that procedure. But this was something which was very revolutionary in a sense to have the child in a house, you know, outside the courthouse somewhere in a in a house in a residential area, to have a social worker or a psychologist who was trained to do the forensic interview and so on. And they had to be prepared to let go of some of the power they had in terms of controlling the situation in which the child gave his or her testimony. That was quite natural. But they did try to appeal those decisions or to take the statements in the Barnahus to the courts and all the way to the Supreme Court. But the Supreme Court said, our law of the procedural says that court procedures should take place in the courthouse. As a general rule, it’s up to the individual judge to decide where to take the statements of the witness. And there were, you know, presidents, for example, taking statements of prisoners in prisons or taking statements of people who were hospitalised, mental hospitals and so on. So there were presidents and if the court judge accepted and wanted to take the child statement in the courthouse, he had the power to do so. During the first years from 98 to 2002 or so, there was a lot of uncertainty concerning this while the system was trying to adapt to the new idea of Barnahus. But the worst scenario was however, the number of court judges, particularly Reykjavik, that refused to go to Barnahus and would rather take the child’s statement in the courthouse. So when this law was sort of changed, court judges got this responsibility to take the child’s statement during the pretrial state. Most of them in Reykjavík, they simply wanted to do it in the Reykjavík quarters. I recall inviting them up to the Barnahus to show it to them and said, look how wonderful this is. And they said, well, they responded, yes, this is wonderful. We may possibly use this for the next two or three months while we set up a child-friendly room in the courthouse, because we do prefer to take the child’s testimony in the  courtroom. So it didn’t really look very good in very beginning. But what happened was that the court judges outside of Reykjavik, you know, they did not have this facility in their courthouses and there were no plans of setting up in the child-friendly rooms at their courts. So they thought, well, why don’t we try it? And they decided to come one after another. And soon there were more and more court judges that choose to go with these cases to Barnahus. And in the end, you know, today everyone does. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

So the longer they were traveling distance from Reykjavik, the more interested they were in a way. In a way, bizarrely.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

That’s a paradoxical fact.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

It’s really interesting.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

And it moves like this for maybe a decade or so. And that’s another story because then the Council of Europe started to submit their guidelines on child-friendly justice and then they Lanzarote Convention. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

This is really interesting to hear and thank you for taking me down the history lane. If we didn’t think about it, now we leave Iceland behind for now. Because if I’m not wrong, this idea hadn’t been established as far as I know in any other country. So it was quite revolutionary.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Absolutely. Well, those who came next to it was the USA with the children’s advocacy centers. They did have, in fact, forensic interviews, had the medical evaluation and they had the therapy under one roof. But Icelandic Barnahus is the first one that incorporated the judicial part of it.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

And as a government service.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

As a government service, an integral part of the welfare system. That was for sure the first, and still it is like that, you know. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

Bragi, this is the reason why I’m so honored to talk to you today because I am also like yourself, fortunate enough to travel a lot in my work around in the world and in Europe. This is now an established model very much around Europe. So how did it spread?  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Well, that’s something with this very, very fascinating story in a sense, you know. I was quite convinced after Barnahus had been in operation for two years here in Iceland. How effective this was and how good this was for child victims. We did a comparative research here on how children experienced on the one hand going to the courthouse to give their statement and the other giving the statement in Barnahus. And there was a huge difference in terms of the child’s experience in going through this. So I had lot of data that I could share with others. And I gave the first presentation on Barnabas abroad in the Nordic Barnavarns Congress, the Nordic Child Protection Conference that was in Finland in Helsinki in 2000. And I could sense, you know, when I was presenting, the interest in that lecture hall. And soon I got messages from others wanting to know more about this. And then in 2002, I was contacted by Save the Children. And they told me they had been doing a research in Europe, comparative analysis of nine European countries on how they dealt with child sexual abuse cases. And they were just publishing a report called Child Abuse and Adopt Justice. And in that report, they had chosen Iceland as the best practice in Europe. And I was invited to come to Copenhagen to do a presentation on a conference where they were going to precept the findings of this research. And that, I think, was a turning point. I went to Copenhagen and I did two presentations And then the ball started to roll. 

The save the children’s organization, in Denmark, in Sweden and Norway, they all started to campaign for it. And we started to get requests from both professionals and from politicians, particularly local politicians and also members of parliaments from the other Nordic countries, if they could visit Barnahus. And as there is a lot of Nordic collaboration on the political level, oftentimes they were coming here for meetings and they would, come to Barnahus as well. I kept on receiving at the time many invitation to give a presentation in Scandinavia. So I could feel that there was this great interest. But still, it took some time, a couple of years. The Nordic country also had a collaboration within the Baltic Sea Council, the Baltic Sea States. There was a collaboration called Children at Risk that was set up in 2002. I was elected the chair of that collaboration. And the Baltic collaboration started also to promote this in the Nordic countries and in the Baltic Sea states as well. So at that time there was a lot of talk, a lot of conferences, a lot of discussions, but it was not really until in 2004 I was giving a lecture in Solna in the Police Högskolan in Stockholm. 

And in the break, I was, came these two big gentlemen to me who were the bodyguards of the Queen. And they said to me, the Queen wants to talk to you in the garden.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

The Queen of Sweden.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

The Queen of Sweden. And it turned out she was the Creator of the conference. And in the garden, she told me that she would be coming to Iceland the following year for an official visit and she asked if she could visit the Barnhus. I said, of course, you’re certainly welcome. And that happened. She came a year later and I can always recall that visit. It was amazing. She was supposed to be there for half an hour. She was there for more than one hour. She was so fascinated by this. And I was told that when she came back to the hotel, she called the director of the World Childhood Foundation, and asked, why don’t we have Barnahus. And a year following this, I received an invitation to deliver a speech in the inauguration of first Barnahus in Sweden. This was in Linköping in 2005. By that time, there was so much interest, both political interest and professional interest in Sweden that within very few years, you would have Barnahus in about 30 cities in Sweden. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

There’s a reason that we Norwegians call the Swedes the Germans of the North.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Yes.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

If they decide to do something, they do it quite efficiently.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Sometimes. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

Interesting. And at least from the Norwegian perspective, when Sweden has it, Norway wants it too.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Well, Norway came very soon. They asked to come for a study visit here in Iceland. And they came here in 2005. And 2007, only two years later, they start to roll this out in Norway. Now it’s in 11 or 12 Barnahus in Norway. Denmark came a little later started in 2013 and they did that very grandiose. They did that, the first of the Nordic countries to pass legislation to facilitate and to ensure that the Danish Barnahus would be a part of the official structure by mandating the local child protection, the police and the medical sector to refer cases to Barnahus and by then the ball started to roll. Soon Baltic Sea state, Lithuania was the first one, then Estonia and Latvia, down to Hungary and all the way down south to Cyprus, UK, Ireland. So it’s really still spreading. You could say that during the years from 2005 to 2015, it was basically the Nordic countries from 2015 and onwards, it’s been really the rest of Europe. And now we have, well, there was a report given out last year with the Council of Europe. 

It says 28 states in Europe had then started operating Barnahus. Of course, was different sort of co-operates. In some instances, it was Barnahus by default, like in the Nordic countries, or only in pockets, like in Hungary or Cyprus. And there were the 10 states in the pipeline to set up. I have been very much part of this progress I’ve enjoyed that. What has particularly played a very important role in this is the Council of Europe.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

Really?  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Yeah. It started off by, I was encased in the work of Council of Europe from 2005. In fact, in a different topic, it was in the rights of children living in residential care and on these guidelines, they incorporated the Barnahus principles limiting the number of interviews that children need to be subjected to to ensure that only trained interviewers were used, you forensic protocols, a child-friendly environment, all that. And explicit recommendations set upon us. And this was the guideline on child-friendly justice. And the following year, we started to draft the Lanzarote Convention. 

The Lancerote Convention was a breakthrough because it’s a binding convention to all member states of the Council of Europe. It has a very comprehensive content with regard to how states should fulfil their obligation for investigating child sexual abuse, and so it’s really, you know, intersectoral. It emphasizes collaboration and coordination and all the rest of it, which is basically the ideology of Barnahus. This was in 2012. I was elected chair of the Lanzarote Committee in 2016. In that capacity, I travelled all around Europe advocating and promoting Barnahus as well as the Lanzarote Convention. And so that was a huge effort. Now today, all states in Council of Europe have ratified the Lanzarote Convention. So they have now taken on these obligations. So that’s not really surprising that they are all implementing Barnahus, because Barnahus really is the only arrangement that can ensure that you meet the requirement of the Lanzarote Convention. And on top of this…  

Ivar Fahsing: 

It’s a solution in a way.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

It’s a solution, yes. And on top of this, the European Union, like they often nowadays do, they take the Council of Europe documents or guidelines or human rights instruments and they translated into directives. And 2012, they submitted the Directive on the Rights of Victims of Crime. And the same year, the Directive on Sexual Abuse and Sexual Exploitation. So it became, in a way, a law of the member states. 

Now, this all had its say, its great impact on this. But what I felt was particularly so wonderful was that the European Court of Human Rights, they came in with a new jurisprudence in these cases, in child sexual abuse cases, where they emphasized that the Council of Europe instruments, should be applied when states are dealing with these cases. The principles of these instruments should be adhered to in respect for the child’s dignity and psychological integrity and to avoid re-victimization of the child was an absolute requirement that the states needed to fulfill. And that had a great impact because the court has so much influence over the national jurisprudence. The committee has consistently recommended states to set up Barnahus if Barnahus is not existent or if Barnahus is existent, then the committee has recommended it to be strengthened to make sure that all children have access to Barnahus and that the Barnahus is strengthened by passing law to support Barnahus. 

So the Committee on the Rights of the Child has also impacted this very much so and it goes beyond Europe because of all nations in the world come to Geneva. So the basic ideology behind Barnahus this multi-agency child-friendly approach, is now the mainstream jurisprudence of the Committee on the Rights of the Child. So this has had enormous impact. So that’s why I believe we are seeing this growth, proliferation of Barnahus all around. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

I would like to ask you about, because there’s one specific thing that I think you are bringing, if we can bring the concept of Barnahus Bragi into in a general investigative setting. You said something that when you were doing this in Iceland in the first years, you did a survey on satisfaction. And I think that is a very interesting concept. Could you reflect a little bit about that dimension?  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. We did submit this survey to the parents and the kids. So it was quite comprehensive. Quite number of questions on all the different steps of the process. the difference that was scored, it varied a great deal. In some of the elements, perhaps there were not much difference, but others there was huge difference. And what really mattered so much was the child friendliness of the environment. The parents and the children, there was not a huge difference in the way which people interacted with them. They were all kind and friendly and so on. But somehow the child environment, child friendliness of the Barnahus made the whole difference. There were problems in the court, like for example, there were examples where children met their offender in the lift in the elevator going up, know, or they met the accused person in the waiting room. Also, they met people that were not particularly friendly in the corridors that were being taken to one of the courtrooms or something.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

Like scary situations.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

So it was absolutely clear that the courthouse was intimidating for some children, and in fact, many children, I should say. It was intimidating for the children. While the Barnahus was always, there were always positive associations in terms of their feelings and experiences, the way they came. It was really something which was a discovery. And when you come to think of it, you know, it has such a great impact also on the capacity of the child to disclose the abuse. The capability of the child to share the narrative, to disclose, is very much dependent on the level of anxiety. The more anxious the child is, the less likely it is that the child can give you the full narrative of his or her experience. And conversely, the more relaxed the child is, the more likely it is that you will receive the full and rich detailed narrative from the child. And this is something which very soon came out that played a major role in the Barnahus success.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

But don’t you think that would apply also to grown-ups?  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

I think so, yes. And therefore I have always believed this should not be exclusive for children. This should be also applied for all interviews and interrogations in the justice system, for example.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

I think you definitely have paved the way, at least pointed in a direction which I think should be… To the extent I know, there are very few satisfaction surveys when it comes to how people in general are interviewed and going through the process of a criminal justice process. So I think that in itself, that is a very inspirational idea that I definitely hope will spread beyond the child victims.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Well, I think in fact, although it’s not my area, police interrogations, but as I understand it, there has been this huge development into in this area and the Mendez principles is more or less based on the same principles of respecting the person.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

I still think we have a long way to go before we have integrated some of pioneering work on how we dealt with our children until we are able to see the same structures and cultures when it comes to how we deal with our interviewees and potential victims, witnesses and also suspects, I guess, in not only these kind of cases, but in all kind of cases, guess, the state or the authority or the different authorities as you have underlined here can sometimes be quite intimidating in general.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

But there was one element you mentioned, the cultural element in it, which I think is so important in this, because in the proliferation of Barnahus, when Barnahus has spread all over Europe, that is absolutely wonderful. And that is that you can see that there is not just one Barnahus, there are multiple Barnahus. I sometimes say that Barnahus is not a recipe for the cookshop of the future. It is rather, you know, you have in Barnahus the ingredients to make Barnahus, but you have to make it in line with when the your culture and your legal framework, your professional traditions and so on. So that’s why Barnahus well really should be called Barnahus concept rather than Barnahus model because it’s not a strict fixed idea. It’s more like a guideline to make a child-friendly, evidence-based structure to address these issues. So that’s why we see all these different types of Barnahus and different ways in which Barnahus have been implemented. There are differences in terms of who is operating it, how it’s structured and organized and so on. There are ways in which the justice system comes into it. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

I think we will wrap up this conversation by saying that also the, what you said, the general change in from interrogation where it’s more coercive and goal-directed exercise towards what the Mendes Principles are around, which is more process-oriented and value-oriented that requires a shift in mindset. And I think I want to thank you for enlightening me around this tremendous change of mindset that you helped firstly Iceland, but later as more than half of the countries in Europe and it’s still spreading. So by that, will say thanks a lot for a really interesting conversation.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Blessings all mine, I enjoyed it tremendously. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

I’ve learned a lot and I’m really impressed by the work you’ve done.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Thank you. Thank you so much.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

Thank you. 

Transcript

Ivar Fahsing: 

Eric Shepherd, welcome to this episode on the podcast Beyond a Reasonable Doubt.  

Eric Shepherd: 

Thank you.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

Today hosted by Ivar Fahsing from Dublin. We’re here today, Eric, because of the launch of the first Irish Mendez Center for Investigative Interviewing. It’s an historical event that w e have centers now working in the country, working across Europe to actually improve the quality of interviewing across Europe and indeed across the world. I have to say for me, that really made this an historical day was the fact that 10 minutes late, Dr. Eric Shepherd actually comes in to the lecture hall and that that’s happening here in Dublin for me actually made the day. And to the listeners, I just have to make clear why. For those of you who know my background, I started in policing in the late 80s. In 1993, I read an article called Ethical Interviewing. I think it was in a magazine called The Police Review. It was written by you. At first, it provoked me a lot because it kind of insinuated that police interviewing was not ethical. There was something missing. And you used words, if I’m not wrong on, there is a cuff culture in the interviewing room. All of a sudden I understand this is a person who knows what he’s talking about. And I had to face myself in the mirror. Ivar, is there a cuff culture in your interviewing room? And there definitely was. So first of all, I want to thank you for writing that piece because it definitely changed my own way of thinking of how I was doing my work, how I was relating to the people I was trying to work with, but also how I related to my colleagues within the police about how we thought about our own practice. So that was absolutely paradigm shift for me. But later also, when we introduced investigative interviewing to the Norwegian police, five, six years later, we didn’t want to go into just a training week. We also wanted to prepare them mentally and awareness, build up an awareness. But at that time, well, I should probably know police forces are not that affluent. So we didn’t have the money to kind of translate all the literature out there. And there wasn’t a reading culture in the police at that time. So we could only translate one piece and that is the only paper that was translated and handed out to police in Norway. I’m just saying this as an introduction that to show how much I appreciate you as a guest today and how much it means and meant to me and how much you are meant to my fellow police officers, at least in Norway. So that means that for me, this is a very, very special moment.  

Eric Shepherd: 

Thank you.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

I’m actually meeting one of my few academic heroes. So I also know that you also have a professional background, not just a theoretical background for what you’re doing and what you’re writing and what you’re saying. And that leads me to the first question. And could you tell me, and our listeners a little bit, why did you engage yourself? Why did you write that piece? Why did you engage yourself in police interviews and how they were done? 

Eric Shepherd: 

Where does one start? I suppose I came to working with the police service very much by accident. If I look back on my life, most of the things that have happened in my life have happened by accident. And my initial journey with asking questions, but being really interested in people’s answers was in the early 60s, which was in English history, The End of Empire. And I worked in an interrogation center in southern Arabia. And the interesting thing about that was before then I’d never thought seriously about a question or answers. Really, not at all. But in ensuing 10 or so years, by all sorts of turn, I became involved in the process of interrogation and teaching people to resist interrogation, really in a military setting. But of course, what happened was that we have our own kind of history in UK, and of course, people will come to places like interrogation centers in order to learn how to ask questions themselves so what it found my way through was eventually in the mid 70s, I had occasion to be given the opportunity to return to UK and to actually study psychology but also followed clinical training and qualified as a psychotherapist and did a PhD in the nature of people processing people’s answers when they ask questions, particularly doctors. And then towards the end of 70s, I decided that probably I should leave and try my hand at no longer being in what would be an environment of working for Her Majesty and so on. So anyway, I left and by sheer chance, I found a job with the Metropolitan Police. Metropolitan Police had had a very tortured kind of problem with regard to civil unrest in UK and particularly in the black community in South London. And there had been riots and there were riots elsewhere. And they were really quite keen to actually find another way of how officers would relate to people face to face on the streets, but also when they question them. So my job was to work in a team called Human Awareness Training. And that was when I started to try and develop some kind of way of explaining to police officers what made people tick when you were asking them questions, when you were relating to them. One of the things which really struck me when I looked at the way police officers see their job, and quite understandably, they see it as a process. And so very much it’s about almost a sequence of activities in order that if they take the activity, it’s right, they can move to the next. But of course, conversation doesn’t work like that. And one of the things which was really strange was, and again, you’ve mentioned it when you were introducing here, saying looking back at things called the cuff culture, cuff being the word for a confession, was the fact that, police officers, understandably, are very pragmatic. They’re very, they’re down to earth. Getting a job done can very easily become a matter of expediency. And if you do it quickly, all the better, and so on. So they’re kind of what you might call highly practical problem solvers. But of course, the problem about being a highly practical problem solver is that if you’re dealing with human beings, you’re dealing with a whole can of what’s happening on the inside of the other person. And that leads a lot of thought. Now, quite difficult to get a police officer to say, what’s happening on the inside? 

So what I did was I just drew two lines literally going east-west and one up-down and on one end on the kind of the western end of the line going across the page I put self and on the other end of the line east I put other and then I put on the up-down line I put totally in control and top and totally under control. And so what that did is it created four quadrants. And the important issue is, that very often what we find is that when people are doing their job and when they’re conversing, they’re really self-interested. They’re towards the self-end of the line, not towards the other end of the line. And what they want to do is keep control. Now that really therefore means they’re trapped in a segment which is self and totally in control, which almost destined them to actually want to dominate the situation, dominate the person. And what I found really strange, and I’ve never said this before, but in that paper you mentioned, what I found was that police officers ask questions as an anxiety reduction program. They ask questions to keep in control. They don’t really process the answer that much before they’re thinking about the next question. So what you find is when you look at it, a lot of historical police interviewing is just getting the person to confirm what’s in the police officer’s head. And I thought, well, that’s interesting. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

How was your article received?  

Eric Shepherd: 

Contentiously, the history to it really was that I worked with the Met through the early 80s until 1983, trying very hard to basically say that in order to be able to, for me, in investigative interviewing, which I coined in as a phrase in 1983, really was for me in 1980 when I was scratching around trying to describe how to manage conversation, because that’s fundamentally it. All police officers, all professionals, in the end, they have to manage a conversation with another individual. And the thing about conversation is a lot of people rather view it as a game of tennis where you’ve got a net, there you are, Ivar over there. So you ask me a question, over comes the ball, and I bat it back. Now that’s a crazy model, because there’s more to conversation than batting a ball back and forth. The other diagram I used to draw for the Metropolitan Police Officers was that lovely sign in infinity, so it’s a continuous loop. And what really happens is, rather like you and I now, there you are looking at me, your head’s moving, and let’s just it again. And the important issue for me is, what conversation is, is actually a continuous mutual activity that’s going on all the time. It’s not just me is the two of us. And what I have to do in order to understand where we’re going to get to where I’d like us to be in terms of covering issues is I’ve got to actually know that I flow into you and you flow into me. It’s very complicated. But it’s also simple. 

What has always struck me was that people use words like first impressions. The issue about conversation is that first impressions do count. The first thing you have to do is understand conversation and get your head around conversation. So one of things I’ve noticed is that people who are poor conversationalists are inevitably poor questioners, because they’re not that interested in what the other person, so a true conversationalist isn’t the person who does all the talk, a true conversation is get the other person to tell them things. And then of course what that does is it creates a different kind of relationship. So I thought of that, but if you get police officers, trainees to think about how conversation works and get them to actually polish their ability to get interest from the other person talking, then you could get them to this whole issue of what would be purposive conversation, which is investigative interview. Because an interview is only a conversation to a purpose. And so the important thing is, what you mustn’t do is be so besotted with the purpose and so besotted with the kind of procedures you’ve got to go through to get to that purpose that you forget to actually do the fundamentals of conversation. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

You make me nervous now.  

Eric Shepherd: 

Why’s that?  

Ivar Fahsing: 

I’m afraid now that my initial idea of the purpose of this conversation might ruin the conversation, but I trust it won’t. I would actually dare to repeat the question.  

Eric Shepherd: 

Yes, so I’ll continue.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

What did it, how was it received? Because as I said in my introduction, Eric, for me, the first time I read it, it was quite provoking.  

Eric Shepherd: 

Yes. Well, it went down like a lead balloon, I suppose, really. The real issue was that was probably the right idea at the wrong time. And one has to be entirely fair because to a certain extent, if you cast your mind back now 40 years, the golden opportunity I had was I moved from working with the Metropolitan to police to working with one of Britain’s smallest police forces, which is the City of London Police, which is right in the heart of London. And that was again another accident. The head of training, John, gave me a call and said, would I like to come round and have a chat about training the officers, because he had this idea about perhaps they can improve how they related to the public. And so on the training floors, literally on the sixth floor of Bishop’s Gate Police Station, opposite Liverpool Street Station, we took trainees through what was another way of how to relate to the public and how to ask questions. And I came up with a model which I tried to say to people, it’s a jigsaw, it’s not a linear thing. And I called it GEMC which was greeting, explanation, mutual activity, which is actually again a bit like the infinity sign and then close. And what I really tried to get across was that the greeting was literally from the very first time that encounter happened. So that in fact, it wasn’t greeted when you went into the interview room. It was, and this was a model that was be applicable from the very moment you collect the person themselves, if you hadn’t seen them before, or if you met them when they were being booked into custody and so on. And of course, coming back to this real issue that the critical period in which really matters first impressions is that four minutes. The first four minutes of every encounter is when we make our decisions about, we trust this person? Are they interested in me? And that’s the person looking towards the police officer. So the crunch to me, suppose really is that gave me the opportunity to say, right, that greeting was embedded there. But the important issue wrapped in that greeting is you send messages about how you feel about the other person. And fundamental to me, and again, it makes sense, is this notion of respect. So at the core of all human existence is which would matter to you, it would matter to me, to our children, their friends, whoever we’ve met today, is that fundamentally we know when someone doesn’t respect us. But we certainly know when someone does respect us as a human being. And that doesn’t mean they have to fall over and actually give us what we want or whatever. But respect is always, always detectable. And what really then for me, I started to chip together and say, okay, well, what are the kind of things that go with respect? And the first thing that really without that respect that this is a fellow human being, then you get nowhere. The important issue is if you go to look at traditional models of interrogation, people attacking their physical integrity, exploiting vulnerabilities, whether they be psychological, intellectual, developmental or whatever, you soon know whether a person asking questions has any respect for the other person. It’s pretty obvious. It shows. Now, if you’re an onlooker and see that, what must it be like to be on the receiving end? So for me, fundamentally respect. And of course, what I tried to do with my police colleagues was to say, actually respect in a policing context is you’ve learned to, it’s all about respect for the law.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

Yep.  

Eric Shepherd: 

And you’re there to uphold the law. But actually, as Emmanuel Kant said, you know, the cornerstone of law is respect for the person. And because why would you have law and so on if it wasn’t for people and the importance of do you regulate a society. If you say you respect the law, you definitely have to respect the person. So to respect the person, you also have to say, well, what about respect for information? So running through the whole thing of respect for people, respect for information and respect for law is the notion of integrity. Because let’s use, sadly, the American system. The American system, they’re still allowed to lie to a suspect. It’s still permissible. They’re still allowed to misrepresent evidence in order to progress towards their aim to elicit a confession from someone whom they believe or know to be guilty. But that’s always confused me because you know, can say, know, fruit of a poison tree. But the thing for me, I suppose, really is, you know, it then has to say, fundamentally, whenever a police officer or anyone asking questions, what society is doing is trusting them to have a particular moral position. 

And that moral position must be necessarily founded on ethics. And there are really two ways of looking at life in terms of moral position. We all have a moral compass. We displayed it in the way we behave, whether we’re a business person or otherwise. The way we do business demonstrates our moral compass, a way a clinician makes a decision about something, an operation displays their moral position. So moral position really only can be principled, i.e. it’s founded upon the nature of obligation to the other individual as a fellow human being. And the Greeks had a word for that, as they always do, is called deontic logic. It’s about the logic of obligation.  

Or you can have the alternative stance, which is what I mentioned before, is the one of expediency. Now, pragmatists, people who live, quote, reality, who do live the life of the streets, of working with crime, and so on, as they learn their trade, they are pragmatists. So a common denominator amongst police officers throughout the world is pragmatism. 

That this is the way they see the reality of the world. And of course, if you’re living in an environment in which the whole of the organization, managerially, organizationally, is founded on pragmatism of getting the job done, then what that will do is always favor expediency as a solution because it gets the job done and the quicker you do it, the better and the less resource you use, the better. So you can understand why if you come along with a position which is respect for the person, respect for the law, respect for information, it’s not very popular. 

So what actually happened was we trained successive cohorts of officers going through the City of London police. And then by sheer good fortune, the person I was working for in the Met was appointed Assistant Chief Constable in Merseyside Police, and she asked me to go and train there. They allowed me to develop conversation management, and we introduced that in 1985. It was the first force to train conversation management as opposed to interrogation techniques. 

We used to have people visiting from other forces. We would train them in a national course, how to train conversation management approaches to investigative interviewing. It wasn’t necessarily the issue about trying to ensure that it was about finding out fact rather than a confession. 

Then in 90, at the Metropolitan Police Headquarters Training Center, they had a conference about police interrogation and I think I might have been the third speaker and it was attended by the home office people and the press and others. And what actually happened was someone had gone on in front of me and advertised, the technique that they were using in a large police force in UK that was really founded on the READ technique in America. And the READ technique, as you know, is confession focused. So, the guy in front had, you know, trailer how you could go and send people on courses which were based on the READ technique although they called it a different name. I got up and I’ve written the paper on ethical interviewing. And so I remember finishing the whole thing, paper, I said, guys, I’ve always loved Greeks had a word for it, rather like Deontic Logic. And the Greeks have a word called Kyros. Kyros is a lovely word in Greek because it can mean autumn, but it means “the time,” “the right time” to do something. You have Kronos, which is chronological time, time past, time future, time now. And you have Kyros which is the right time and the right time to say to someone, I love you. The right time to say to someone, I understand. The right time to say, shall we think about it? The right time and I said, guys, it’s Kyros. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

Fascinating. I now see. I obviously learn a lot. Because in my head, know, investigative Interviewing starts somewhere even after that article. But you take me back now to the foundations of some of the elements here. And gladly so is also some of the core things that we try to convey in Norway. Why we had to start with ethical re-grounding and moral re-grounding. that fundamental respect for the human being you’re meeting in this conversation. And if you don’t respect that, if you don’t uphold that integrity, it can never be a true conversation. 

Eric Shepherd: 

Absolutely.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

So I’m really glad to find out where does that actually come from. I found a real source, I think. Thank you. What’s your idea about, is this a cultural thing? To what degree does this differ? These fundamental things that you’ve talked about so far in the conversation, are they different if you go to Korea, the US, Africa? 

Eric Shepherd: 

That’s a question that needs a lot of thought. My view is that clearly there will be cultural differences. Yes, the countries I’ve been to, that’s very apparent. But I suppose that the issue for me is it may be you’re reflecting on what I’ve said so far, Ivar, is that I try to find commonalities in people rather than the differences. And what seems to me to be is that fundamentally, whether it be Japan, whether it be Thailand, whether it be Southern Arabia, whether it be Germany, whether it be Norway, whatever the case may be. What’s really struck me, and I gained work in America as well, the issue for me is that I’ve always been completely taken by the fact that when I talk about issues to do with human beings’ respect and so on, actually that’s the lingua franca. People understand it. 

But what really strikes me is that there may be different ways of managing this interactive process, but fundamentally I have never found anything other than the commonality of a human being knowing when they’re being treated in a way where they are respected for what they are. And it’s an easy interesting thing. You don’t have to like a person to respect them. And the issue for me is that what respect does is it, you evidence it as much as anything by a whole array of other behaviors that point to it. If you can reflect in the way you literally converse and you interact with this person and you respond to what they say and what they often may not say but be voicing non-verbally as it were in the way they look at you and they may they respond so that desolation desperation fear failure to comprehend all these kinds of issue really again, produce apathy. You soon know when a person is totally without any feeling towards you, your position, what’s happened, the circumstances. Down the other end, the extreme end, is sympathy, but in the middle of that line is empathy. So what empathy is about is getting around to the other person’s side of the circle and looking back. So it’s kind of an issue here that that’s a fundamental key because then at least you can understand what’s going on potentially inside this person’s head, inside their heart. it’s almost like a creative kind of process, isn’t it really? You won’t know, you can only just try and say, what must it be like? Now, where the principle thing comes in is when you use that to their disadvantage. So I think that actually, once you know how a person’s from there, that’s where your moral compass comes in. You don’t exploit their position looking back. There was a lot about how the police interacted with people who were intellectually disadvantaged. Most police officers know when someone’s not very bright. It’s called understanding. I used to live in a village. The guy used to cut the grass. Everyone knew he wasn’t very bright. And in fact, police officers are very pragmatic people. I’ve found them incredibly good at reading people who are not very bright. Empathy is therefore very important. 

I think you’ve got to also be supportive to a person. And if you show even the most minimal support to someone, you know, it plays you back in spades as it were. It gives you the kind of issues of them. And of course, you can give us support. Yes. But also you’ve got to be positive. You’ve got to actually, you’ve got a job to do. You’ve got to journey to travel, but you can also therefore, it’s not what you do, it’s how you do it. Is that lovely saying? I think the other thing is you have to be open with a person. Now, sometimes you can’t disclose everything and there things that to you, it makes no sense. But we do know that in fact, a degree of openness is essential. Because that openness is as much to do with notion of explanation and understanding why, why now, why here, these kind of issues. And I think the other thing is that people know very, much about respect is that other behavior, people soon know when you’re being judgmental. So I think being non-judgmental is actually, you can demonstrate being even-handed. 

The other thing is, I think, which goes with it, is a thing called straightforward talk. You say things that actually a person will understand. Therefore, empathy says, this person, they’re intellectually disadvantaged. They’re developmentally disadvantaged. Therefore, you need to talk in the way that they will understand the world in their way. And then I suppose the last thing is, and it goes back again to where we’re at now. Why do we relate to each other? Fundamentally, there are only two forms of relationship in life that emerge when you meet a person. You either talk across the person or that’s an across relationship or it’s up-down, you know? And if you are occupying a position like a police officer, it’s very easy to slip into the up position, which automatically creates a person in a down position. So up-down relationships are to be found in teachers, at the tort, doctors in the treated, parents, sometimes the children, these kinds of issues. So up-down relationships are very symptomatic of organizations, which are actually, in the case of the police service, behind the whole process of investigation of which investigative interviewing is only one part. So what really strikes me is positional ways of looking at conversation are fatal, absolutely fatal, because what you have is this issue to me is that if you talk across to a person, they know you’re talking across to them. What I’ve done here, Ivar, is to say, at the centre is respect, but you evidence respect by empathy, by supportive, by being positive, by being open, by being non-judgmental, of straightforwardly talking to someone and talk to them as an equal. And I found that way back in the early 60s when questioning terrorists. That I think questioning terrorists is always going to be stressful. Quite a challenge and I didn’t know then that what I was evidencing something which I later wrote out as an acronym response you know respect, empathy, support of this positive and of course that makes sense as well because in that first four minutes that’s what you’re evidencing your response. That’s it.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

That’s it. I can feel it, that there is a certain energy that going, is more intense between us when you talk about obvious cases of injustice. How does that motivate you, Eric? And how does that relate to our conversation on interviewing and conversation management? 

Eric Shepherd: 

For a greater part of the early period of working with the police service and looking at what were, issues to do that you could say were misconduct, mistreatment, all these other kinds of issues. What really struck me was it was all too easy blame the person who was actually given the task of carrying out something which was almost pre-programmed. You’ve very beautifully described it way back at the beginning of the cuff culture. Now what really strikes me is that what’s most apparent is that our awareness that the confession became institutionalized. It was basically in the 19th century with the formation of police forces. And the very first police force was obviously formed in UK with Maine and the Metropolitan Police. But you could see that, in fact, before then, that systems of justice have worked by people securing confessions. By the time you got to the late 1900s, what you had was in effect this notion that we needed detectives. So the very first detective force was found, found in only half a dozen detectives within the Metropolitan Police approved by the Home Office. And the interesting thing about it is again, it was all testimony evidence. And what would they, they were great pragmatists. And what you can see is that what they would do is instantly read the situation. They’d arrive at a case theory and then they’d, where is the likely suspect? The suspect came into the frame and then the whole object, the exercise was to secure from this person a confession. So what really struck me when I first started in 1980 with the Metropolitan Police was how much Metropolitan police as exemplars of the UK police service, but other police services, is they were trapped in the whole confession business. So how did you get a confession? How did you get it quickly? And of course, What you would do, is you wouldn’t arrest the suspect, you would invite them to the police station, you would bring them to the police station as they were not under arrest. They had no legal protections. So they would be held there, not under arrest, held incommunicado. They would not tell the people if they were around when they were arrested, say in their home or wherever, a place of work, where they were taken. So they didn’t know where they were. So the common denominator was that people will be held incuminecado psychologically. And of course then what would happen then is they will be left to sweat it out. They could be left there for days. so the important issue is by the time that we do know human beings, most human beings can’t cope with isolation. And so once they are removing the isolation, there is this huge internal pressure to say something rather than nothing, anything to anyone. So the crunch to me then is that what you would then do is engage in an almost programmatic way of inducing a person to confess. And the interesting thing about it for me is that again, you can see it in repeated across the world in different cultures. What would happen is once you got the person to the point of agreeing with what was put to them as what had happened, so the whole object of the exercise was to coerce them, capitulate them. And there was a couple of, three rulings in UK. In effect, what you’re really doing is coercing a person. And when you coerce a person, what you’re doing, rather like the Reed method in America, what you’re really doing is inducing them to stop saying things they would like to say, like, I’m innocent, I don’t know anything, and to induce them to say things they wouldn’t say, which is, I did it, all right. And once you look at the dynamics of the whole thing, the important issue is that at that stage when the person says, okay, I did it, what would then happen is in the UK context is the officers would have a, what would be a statement form at the top, they would write the caption about kind of giving you their free will and things like that at the bottom as well. And then what they would do is give the form to the individual and they would write out. But because there was no recording, no one ever knew that in fact what would happen is that the person would write down what was really they were being directed to write down. So what looked like a confession very often contained the words and so on. And if you look at it, the proof of it is I bet you as a Norwegian police officer when you look back at the old confessions, they were always chronological. Now, human beings do not tell narratives chronologically. The other thing they would do is they would contain vocabulary, terms of phrase and items that would only be what the police officer would want in there. Things that they didn’t want in there would be left out. So, the important issue is they were entirely self-serving with the police officer documents. And of course, it was incredibly difficult to prove that that was, in fact, one of my longest miscarriage of justice cases was a guy who served 27 years in prison. And it took me 13 years or so working on that case to actually get to the point where we could prove that they weren’t his words. But the important issue for me, is that the journey traveled is that now we know with the world of scientific advance, with the world of technology, CCTV, all these other kinds of issues. Although testimonial evidence matters, it probably most matters from witnesses. 

And I found myself saying in the end, if you don’t get the witness interviewing right, you’ll never get the suspect interviewing right. Because if you look at it, what has been the poor relation of interviewing, investigative interviewing, has been witness interviewing. We put all this effort into suspect interviewing. We might have specialist witness interviewing. We might have actually special case interviewing and things alike, as it were. But actually, what happens is that testimonial evidence, which still matters, is generated by women and men who actually say, tell me what happened. The vast majority are not electronically recorded. The vast majority are written down by a police officer, actually mentally editing what’s being said to them. And what we do know psychologically is that if I’m a police officer and I’ve interviewed person A, person B, person C, when I get to person D, I’ve already got a mindset which influences how I’m going to shape what this person says. So what you find is, is that the quality of witness interviewing across the world is desperately poor. And that is because what they are doing is relying upon human ability to hold in memory, also with their disposition also with confirmatory bias, also with their own kind of case theory that what they think happened and so on. So a witness statement is always a highly edited, kind of subjective reflection of what the person actually said. Now, if you then go on to interview a suspect on the basis of X number of witness interviews and you don’t have any DNA, you don’t have any video, you don’t have this, you don’t have that, then you can see why I say if you don’t get the interviewing of witnesses right, how are you ever going to get the interviewing of suspects right? And my last thing I suppose really here is that I think it’s really, really totally appropriate that we should continue researching about how people investigatively interview suspects. However, I would raise one kind of very problematic question. Can you tell me how many research papers you have read which really looks at how people cope with the presence of a legal advisor in an interview and actually if that legal advisor is engaging something called active defense. And that really matters because most of the models you see are devoid of a legal advisor present. But the other thing which really does matter to me is prepared statements. 

But the important issue to me is I’ve always been thrown by the kind of the inattention to a very basic fact. If you have a legal advisor advising a suspect all of your planning in the world won’t overcome the real problem to do with what’s called disclosure, disclosure of evidence. As you introduce the notion of an investigator meeting with a legal advisor before that interview ever starts, that legal advisor will rely upon what is disclosure. They will therefore advise their client. That client’s response is very much based upon that legal advisor’s decision making of the investigative interviewer. Strategic use of evidence, could, and please correct me if I’m wrong on this. You can reduce it to this idea. It’s delaying the disclosure of something until you think it’s the right time to say it. Do remember this Greek word, kyrok, the right time? Well, I have to turn around and say that, yeah, you have to make difficult choices. But if I’m a legal advisor and there is no disclosure or limited disclosure, then my client’s not going to answer your questions, which poses a very real research problem. Or my client is going to generate a written statement, most pre-prepared statements they’re normally short, they’re mostly non-committal and they give minimum account for what’s been said to them. So it’d be a really foolish legal advisor to actually allow their clients to put in a completely nonsensical, manifestly lying account and so on or whatever. But anyway, by the way you look at it, if you’re an investigative interviewer, that’s the next level of difficulty we’ve got to sort out. How to manage decisions about disclosure and working with legal advisors because that is an interesting problem, needs researching.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

Absolutely. Where I can say, generates a lot of issues, what you say, but of course you have to put all this into context.  

Eric Shepherd: 

Absolutely.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

It’s like, do take me back to our first national new training programs in Norway in the late 1990s and early 2000s, where we came from a culture where you were actually trying to reduce the impact of that legal advisor, even get him or her out of the room. that was the first thing that we, you know, I said we needed an ethical reorientation, much inspired by your work. I said, what does that mean to your relationship to that legal advisor? How can you activate that? That can give you balance in that interview. And obviously here we shouldn’t go too far into national differences when it comes to procedural law. But of course in a country like Norway, it’s not this legal advisor will have all the documents when they come to the station that here you are. And of course there can be things that here you cannot share with your client at this point. But you should know this is where we’re starting. So that will kind of be the the the fundamental for your advice. That’s number one, which is different in Norway and England, for instance. And the other thing is that in Norway, if you’re a suspect, you’re right to not do you’re right to silence is absolute. You can literally leave the room. You don’t have to sit there. I think it’s absolutely appalling to see in a such a civilized society as I think about England and Wales as that someone is actually obligated to sit there and say no comment. No comment. If I don’t want to interact with you I don’t want to interact with you. It’s a fundamental human right I think. So that’s also different in the way the whole context of interview and I think that does something. You know what you used in the word early on, integrity. So just that legal thing that you can’t leave the room. 

It’s also a fundamental breach of human integrity I think also a breach at least violating some fundamental ideas about the burden of proof and the right to freedom. 

Eric Shepherd: 

I totally agree. I mean, it seems to me to be one has to be sensitive to differences between countries across the world. I don’t blame people for behaving in the way they do given the circumstances they’re in. I spoke about moral compass. So your moral compass is either going to be principled or it’s going to be expedient. Okay. So either or you can’t be expedient and principled. The question to me then is what happens is the evidence of our moral compass is our behavior. And our behavior is evidence of mindset. Mindset is a disposition to think and reason and interpret and to make decisions and to take actions in a particular way. So that’s your mindset. Human beings are really, really vulnerable from infancy onwards to developing a mindset for the circumstances in which they find themselves. So a child vis-a-vis their parents in the family. And so what you find is, that human beings are particularly disposed to developing a fixed mindset. That fixed mindset is one that responds to reward. And human beings respond to reward. And so what we do know is that people who are given the task of investigating or investigative interviewing, really what that displays in their mindset is how they’re prepared to act in ways for which they’re going to be rewarded. Are they going to be given a: You’ve got a cuff. Well done, confession. You got it quickly. And by the way, have a promotion. So the important issue for me really is if you stand back, we as psychologists should see that we can develop and quite rightly, approaches whether you want to look at it linearly, then whether it be your preparation and planning, engage and explain, account, clarify, challenge, close, evaluation and so on. What you can see, all of these kinds of, whether it be GMAC greeting, explanation, mutual activity, close and so on, what we do know is that people will follow what they think that model is, but actually what they’re really implementing is their mindset which is showing their moral position. So you still get people. So what we need to be is very savvy as psychologists is to now take a step back and say, how do you develop the managerial environment in which what we say is, okay, case theory? Well, we really ought to think in terms of alternative case theories, not just one case theory. And let’s think what evidence is said from an intelligence background or whatever. Rather than one explanation, think of an alternative one and another one. What do barrister say when you go to court? Officer, I put it to you there was another explanation. And of course that catches police officers out. I didn’t think about that explanation. So the crunch to me is in order to have the effort to go out and look at different case series, means that you’ve got to look at the evidence. And what we find now is that fine-grained analysis, dominating the detail, understanding it, is a fundamental activity which is outwith the interview situation. So what we should be doing is training people how to handle detail, how to create different case theories, how to actually evaluate evidence, how to, really in the end, stand back from it and say, right, okay. And what seems to me, my final point here is this, you and I have worked in investigative teams and what we do know is that it is still looking towards the chief, the leader, the leader who basically will often, whether they like it or not, whether they really intend to, tend to be the monopoly of what would be the case theory idea. And of course, what really is happening in the world of other organizations is how do you invite the other people to actually contribute to processing? So I think that the next thing coming out from investigative interviewing is looking at how investigative teams work and how actually they work whole process of de-biasing, actually combating every possible form of biasing, of which most are born of a thing called confirmation bias. I think there is a rich area for that area for Mendes, which says, let’s look at how the organization works, how the team works, how that works and the psychology of it. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

I will now try to round it off. So thanks a lot and I hope we can invite you back on a later occasion.  

Eric Shepherd: 

Only too pleased. Thank you for being so patient. Thanks a lot.