Episode 09.
The problem with sexual crimes – conversation with Dr. Patrick Tidmarsh

Transcript

Ivar Fahsing: 

Welcome to the “Beyond a Reasonable Doubt” podcast, Dr. Patrick Tidmarsh.  

Patrick Tidmarsh: 

Thanks, Ivar. It’s great to be here.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

It’s such an honor to have you on, I have to make a confession. You know, I’ve been working with all sorts of serious and relationship-based crimes for more than 30 years. The reason I’m so excited to have you on this podcast today is that during all these 30 years, I guess I had never experienced a concept that has brought in so many new dimensions and tools for practitioners as “The Whole Story” concept.  

Patrick Tidmarsh: 

Thank you.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

The first time I learned about it. I kind of felt, wow, this is kind of rocking my whole understanding. And I have to say Patrick, I thought I was a man who knew about how to deal with sexual crime and relationship crimes. But I instantly understood that, Ivar, you are actually doing victim blaming. 

Thank you for coming and I just wanted to ask you if you could take us in to how does, how did this come about? Where did it start?  

Patrick Tidmarsh: 

Well, I think with all of this, it actually starts with the offenders. And we know we always say in training, offending starts with offenders and a bit of anything will do, but actually policing didn’t really know that, you know, I mean, we will come back to that later. But to your question, if you understand who sex offenders are, because we started, I started working in offender treatment, I worked in offender treatment with adults and adolescents for 20 years. If you’re listening to them day in, day out, you begin to understand who they are, what they do, how they do it, why they do it, and then the impact that then has on the people that they do it to. And moving across to policing, a while back now, it was clear that there were lots of people within policing who knew bits and pieces of what was going to work, but structurally policing didn’t really understand sex offending. For example, working in the police force that I did in Australia, there was a rape squad dealing with stranger rapes. Lots of detectives, but a very small percentage of what’s really happening in sexual crime. Because as you know, most people know each other in some form or another. And there was an organized child sexual abuse squad looking at people who were abusing children together. And as you know, most child molesters is a solitary activity. So the focus, just a basic focus of where the work was, was in the wrong place. And it wasn’t really until 15, 20 years ago that policing began to look at the volume of sexual crime, what was really happening, who was offending, who they were doing it to. And since that time, there’s been a significant shift, I think, around the world and I’m sure we’ll talk about that later. And for me, it came out of the treatment field, really in the middle 80s, beginning in earnest to look at sex offenders and discover who they were. like there’s a famous study in the middle 80s from Gene Abel and his people looking at men who defended against children, hundreds of offenders who were given immunity from prosecution for participating in the study. So how they got that, I don’t know. But what they found from that is just how much offending they were doing and other really important elements like, I think it was 19%, that’s it, one in five who were there for abusing children, they’re on prison and parole for abusing children, admitted to raping adults as well. Well, that was unheard of at the time, because everybody thought they’re specialists. 

They only do this, if they abuse children, it’s this. Well, now what do we know? You know, 30, 40 years later, what we know is they’re generalists, not specialists. They cross over all the time. They’ll cross over age and gender. And we’re finding in Operation Satiria in the UK, 30 % of the rape and serious sexual offence cases come in as domestic abuse related. So there’s that link into family violence, as we call it in Australia. So we’re beginning to see a picture of relationship-based crime as a whole that’s interconnected in so many ways. 

And so back to the beginning of your question, this all started with an understanding of who offenders are. And then when we get to talk about how you investigate them and how you interview them, for us, it’s a combination of knowledge and attitude and skill. And for me, the beginning of that is in knowledge, understand who they are, what they do and how they do it and why they do it. And then what happens is you begin to see the impact they’re having on other people. And what we’re finding everywhere that when you put good training into police forces, victim blaming attitudes dissolve really quite quickly. Assumptions and misconceptions. If you understand grooming, and I’m sure we’ll talk about that in a minute, if you understand grooming, then most victim reaction is explainable. If you don’t, you’ll go with what’s out there in the community. Why did she wait so long to report? Why would you stay in a relationship with a man like that? Why has she got no injuries if she says she was raped, why does the child keep going around to the guy’s house? All those questions will be there. How do you answer those questions? Understand offenders.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

So what you’re saying is that at least for a majority of cases, me experiences victim blaming. That is a result or is an effect of the offender.  

Patrick Tidmarsh: 

Yes. And put the other way from policing. So Chief Constable Sarah Crowe, who’s the head of operations to the UK for policing said a couple of years ago she thought policing the UK got so poor that in effect what they were doing was investigating victims. 

And think about that for a minute. Well, how did you get that far? It’s actually a product of what I was talking about before, not understanding who the offenders were, but also where this sits in our adversarial justice system. Because all investigating officers know what’s coming when it meets a defense barrister, what’s coming when it meets the arguments of what evidence is probative and what’s prejudicial, what will and won’t be allowed to be a part of this story when it gets into that frame. 

So, they’ve become adept at trying to work out where the problems are in the story that are going to affect us as investigators, rather than actually listening to what she’s telling you. And it nearly always is she, but not always. Listening to what the complainants are telling you and seeing where your breadth and depth of evidence is. And that’s where the whole story comes from, because the models set up to investigate were for volume crime. 

Rude robberies, murders, and not for a relationship-based crime where essentially, more often than not, you’ve got one witness. Your story is it. Your story is everything when she comes in and tells us that. So we have this riff that we do in training about talking about old school evidence and new school evidence. And that what we were looking for prior to our new methodology is evidence with a capital E. CCTV, independent third party witness, forensic evidence that proves indisputably that a sexual act took place, even though it hardly ever tells you that it was consensual or not. so that’s what they were looking for. And of course, more often than not, wasn’t there, particularly the witness. And that’s when we started saying, actually, you’re misunderstanding the nature of this crime fundamentally, that it’s not about the acts themselves. It’s not about how she behaves afterwards. It’s about what he’s doing beforehand and during and how that relationship for want of a better word, has been manipulated by him. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

And that means evidence with a small e.  

Patrick Tidmarsh: 

Evidence with a small e. Thank you. It does. So we’re saying in the story, in the grooming, however long their relationship lasted, whether that was two minutes of a stranger attack, it’s still him trying to make her behave in a certain way, or 30 years of child sexual abuse, moving on into adulthood, you will find in the breadth of that relationship, evidence of what’s taking place between those two people. And we call that evidence with a small e and that’s what we’re now teaching people through Whole Story to look for. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

So where I understand this, that doesn’t become evidence until you’re kind of able to put it into the right story. So the whole story comes from that, where information that previously wasn’t understood. 

Patrick Tidmarsh: 

It was considered irrelevant, really. actually, I told the story many times before about how to cover it up with that. So I worked with a colleague, Mark Barnett. We both worked in treatment. And Mark and I moved across to policing. And in the first few months, we were there. Our job, he was there to improve their interviewing of children and vulnerable witnesses. And I was there to improve their interviewing of sexual offence suspects. And both of us were there to redesign all the training programs because there’d been a commission and the usual criticisms had come up. And when we looked around, we found all these people who knew what to do. They were great with complainants or they knew how to talk to child molester suspects. And so on, but they weren’t there in the training, they weren’t there in the structure. And we also went to the courts and watched trials. And there was one particular case, it was a stepdad who had been abusing his stepdaughter for, well, since she was 12 or 13, I think. And as we listened to the trial, as I listened to it, I’d worked with lots and lots of men like that in treatment. So I knew exactly what should have been presented to them, what’s likely to have taken place there. 

And not much of it was presented to the jury. And I was really frustrated. And I went back into the office and I said to Mark, I thought that trial was really unfair. That jury didn’t get to hear the whole story. And from that moment, both of us kind of went, ooh, right. Well, how are we going to do that? How are we going to make it so that they do get a real understanding of the breadth and depth of what’s taking place between people? And we’re working on it ever since. How do you help people who almost certainly will have some assumptions and misconceptions that are wrong about sexual offending, who probably don’t have any experience of it, who are going to be persuaded by a very clever person that there’s a doubt here or multiple doubts here. How do you give them sufficient information to make their mind up about what’s taken place? 

Ivar Fahsing:  

You said something to me the other day, Patrick, that first of all, we have to stop damaging people in interviews. What did you mean by that? 

Patrick Tidmarsh: 

I think the most important skill in policing is listening. And I don’t think we train people very well to listen, except in certain pockets. And if you don’t do that, what you’re probably doing is talking or acting. And what we were doing is bringing people into our system. And so, you know, there’s that, here’s this person who’s been traumatised, who finally decided to come and tell their story. And we say thank you very much. 

We might build rapport for a little bit, but our expectation is that they can simply tell us the evidence. And I’m not here talking about the misogyny or the not finding the right people, any of the like the big ticket items of what was wrong with police. You’re just talking about the fundamentals of how do you get good at listening to what people have to tell us and preparing them for what a court’s going to need for what evidence is and think in a way, probably because interviewing started more around suspects than it did, at least that concern for what was wrong with interviewing, know, like false confessions and so on. It isn’t until the focus on children in the late 80s, early 90s that we got better interviewing children. And for some reason, most of the improvements there have not until recent times translated across to adults. And we’re finally realising that traumatised people who’ve been abused in relationships mostly by people they know over significant periods of time need a process of rapport building and understanding of what an interview is going to be all about and an ability from us to shut up and listen to their story that has been quite significantly absent in policing until, you know, relatively recent times. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

And I guess also what I take of you saying damaging is a misunderstanding then, evidence with small letters.  

Patrick Tidmarsh: 

It’s a misunderstanding of where the evidence is. But it’s also, you know, the age old thing of you’re interviewing someone and they say blah blah blah. Yeah, we went to the house and then Tommy was there. And the interviewer, rather than shutting up and letting the story come out, will go with, who’s Tommy? And suddenly you’re off in a different part of memory in a different time. it’s sometimes just those fundamental things. Mainly what we’re teaching people in that first bit, once you’ve done your preparation, once you’ve explained to people what detail is and how detailed you need them to be, once you’ve done a practice interview about some sort of neutral topic, you’ve built rapport, you’ve explained to them how you’re going to go through that, most of what we should be doing in the first, well, that’s… phase of free narrative, whether that’s five minutes or 50 minutes, is not talking. Minimal encourages maximum. Then what happened? That’s it. Nothing more than that. And if you get what people typically, what you get in sexual offence cases is people know what it is you want to hear about. So they’ll tell you the circumstances of that. And then you’re going to do to say, that’s great. But remember what we talked about before about take me back, tell me everything. You should be able to expand that free narrative. 

And so for the most part, when you watch, you know this better than anyone, when you watch really good interviewers, they appear to do hardly anything. But doing hardly anything is extremely difficult. And then in relationship-based crime, you have to have an understanding of the evidence that’s going to be required, the breadth and depth of that. And then you have to have an understanding of what the offender did, where that evidence is likely to be. 

And after that, you’re to have to have an understanding of what a defense barrister will do with that and call what doubts they will attempt to prompt so that you can cover that in the interview. That’s a lot of different levels that you’re having to work on. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

Patrick, first time we spoke about this, was another thing that your project, when you introduced this and suggested it as a trial project in Melbourne, Australia, you also started to do, you monitoring effects of it and you involve not only detectives and the police, but also prosecutors and you looked at effects of this. 

Hopefully you can expand a bit of what you found, but first of all something that I, if I’m not remembering it wrong, you also started to look about how did the victims experience the meeting? I don’t know if you call it satisfaction rating or whatever it was, but am I remembering correctly?  

Patrick Tidmarsh: 

Yeah, you are, yeah, you absolutely are. So at the time of the Law Reform Commission report, I don’t know whether they were the lowest, but the satisfaction rates are… There’s a victim support agency in Victoria and they take testimony and do surveys with victims of crime. And when the Law Reform Commission produced their report, I think at that time victims of sexual crime were the least satisfied with their experience of policing of any of the groups that they spoke to. Ten years later, after the sexual offence and child abuse investigation team reformed, so we had specialists side-sweet, we trained over the 12 years I was there, we trained six or seven hundred investigators, know, with the throughput of people. So with a dedicated people, attention to the subject matter, and of which whole story was a part, when they ran their survey again, victims of sexual crime were the most satisfied with their experience with police. Most of that was what we try and get our investigators to do. At the end of training, you should come out feeling confident and competent. And the best, I like the best things they say when they finish this: Thank you. I now know what I’m doing, you know, and in a way, I think that’s a tip to policing really up until not that long ago in terms of sexual crime did not know what it was doing. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

So after all, where we can talk about what is the important part of policing or investigation to be more correctly. And you talk about justice, sometimes you talk about conviction rates and clearance rates and all that. A good friend of mine, I think policing is about reducing harm.  

Patrick Tidmarsh: 

Yeah, I would agree with that. I think the most important phase of any process is before an investigation starts, including someone coming to us and saying, this is what’s happened to me, but I don’t know what I want to do about it. And we spend whatever time we spend with them and they said, thank you very much. That’s enough for me. I don’t want an investigation. Now, how frustrating is that in one sense? I can’t imagine that I’ve been dealt with very well, not that long ago, but now we would see that as an important part of the service the policing provides. Now far more often than not, if you get that right in that first phase, people do want to then turn telling into reporting and reporting into being part of an investigation. And they do want to do a complaint interview. And not only do I think listening is the most important skill in policing, I think complainant interviewing in relationship based crime, particularly sexual offending is the highest level skill set in policing. And I’ll fight anyone that says different. And so that for me will be the focus of whatever time I’m still spending on this. And the other thing I’m obsessed with is grooming. Because along with evidence with a capital E to evidence with a small e move, the other thing that we’re finding investigators really respond to is us breaking down the processes that offenders are operating so that they can see the evidence within each element of that process. And so when Mark and I first started, we realised there were a few things that investigators got wrong in our typical person who came to training. They’d been a police officer for a while. They’d been a uniform member. They just started being a detective. They had some interest in the field. So they were relatively new, most of them. We got some salty old sea dogs as well. mostly they were the newbies. so they would see, they thought grooming was something that only happened to children by and large. Not all of them, but a significant group. you think, well, okay, well, actually, happens to everybody. So we fall through that. And then they tended to focus on the sexual element of the grooming. And I think that that’s partly connected to the child sexual abuse because it’s so obvious when child molesters moved to that sexualised phase of their abuse and the abusive relationship. Anyway, so what we did is then think, well, we need to break this down for you so that you can understand grooming better. And then the more we’ve worked on it, the more we see that that’s actually a clear marker of where you should be inquiring in an interview. 

So we break it down into four phases now. Grooming one, two, three, and maintenance grooming. One is power and control and authority. So he will try in some way to establish that. Now in some cases, that’s just a simple act of, simple act of power and control, it sounds so blase. It’s an act of violence and threat. Way more often than not, it is controlling and coercive, abusive, manipulative, bribery, giving people what they want, gaslighting, you name all the modern words, all that stuff, until, yeah, so someone’s incapacitated with that. And for me, grooming one is, has been the most underdeveloped part of what we’re listening for and what we’re investigating, because that’s where he’s beginning to operate. That’s where he’s establishing a vulnerability. And as we know, offenders target vulnerability or they create vulnerability. 

Then in grooming too, you might get in relatively short time after he’s buying the drinks, he might start making compliments that are clearly of a more or less lovely color on you, you know, or, or why don’t we have, I tell you, let’s move from gin and tonics. Let’s, let’s have a slow, comfortable screw against the wall, you know, some sort of ghastly cocktail sleazy joke as they’ll move into that sexualised phase. And then with children, the other end of the spectrum in a while, you’ll see basic things like the introduction of pornography, questions like have you ever had a girlfriend? Have you ever had sex? So there’ll be some kind of move into him framing it as the relationships moved into this kind of orbit. And then we kind of, we used to say then the offense takes place. Now really we’re saying the offense or offenses in and of themselves can also contain grooming. So if you’re holding someone down at that point, that is a demonstration of power and control and authority. If you’re saying you’re enjoying this, aren’t you? You’re attempting to make them frame what’s happened to them in a particular way. So we ask investigators to really pay attention to what’s being said and done in the offense itself, not just the act, but what’s happening in and around that act. And then in the maintenance phase of grooming in child sexual abuse, for example, you might have continued deception of the child’s parents in order to maintain connection. You might have even after there’s no abuse, you’ll have any anymore. You’ll have constant contact, gift giving, reinforcing of the messages of silence that are required and so on and so forth. And I mean, a typical one that we get in rape cases would be texting or social media connection following that where he is either occasionally apologising, but more often than not would say, was so hot last night, I can’t wait to see you again. Which would be completely against her experience of a violent, threatening, intimidating, non-consensual act or acts that took place. So we’re teaching our investigators, first of all, if you didn’t get the interview right and you didn’t listen to the breadth and depth of what she’s telling you, and you didn’t understand assumptions and misconceptions so you didn’t cover off on the maintenance, there’s a way he said afterwards, then you’re going to miss where your evidence is. So understand those phases of what he’s doing and make sure that when you’re listening to her, you’re prompting into those parts of that memory. And if you can’t do that, we’re not going to get enough to help our police prosecutors. I think the last thing on what you said before, I should say is it’s really important that police forces see prosecutors as allies and that wherever possible, the training matches up. 

So with Operation Satire in the UK now, there is a national operating model for all 43 forces in England and Wales. And the Crown Prosecution Service also has a new national operating model. They also incidentally produce very good materials on assumptions and misconceptions and how investigators and prosecutors should be able to handle that. So there’s the beginnings of a much better relationship in the way we train and think about relationship based crime. in Satire’s case, it’s RASSO what they call rather rape and serious sexual offenses. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

Thank you. It’s definitely making me think about what I haven’t done in all my years as a detective and how much evidence that passed through my ears without even being understood. know, the topic of this season’s Beyond a Reasonable Doubt is the Investigative Interviewing. So how does that relate to this?  

Patrick Tidmarsh: 

Well, let’s come back from Beyond Reasonable Doubt. If you think about what we’re jury members to do here is to understand the story that took place between two people behind closed doors who’ve known each other probably for a while, at least for a night or a week or more, 20 years, to understand the breadth and depth of what’s taken place to overcome all those social scripts and sexual scripts and assumptions and misconceptions to be able to absorb the trickery of the defense. And there’s a lovely article incidentally. I can’t remember the of the authors now, but you can look it up. They matched. Zydefeld, Zydefeld et al. 2017, 2016, 2017. They looked at 50 matched cases from the 1950s and the 2000s, rape cases. And they asked the question. Is defense doing anything differently in the 2000s than they were doing in the 1950s? And the short answer was no, because their job is to undermine the credibility of the complainant. Usually the only witness, right? But there was some really interesting detail. If I remember it rightly, there were things that you could do in the 50s. You could say, well, ladies and gentlemen, he’s a really lovely fellow and he wouldn’t do a thing like that, you know, and we don’t really think like that anymore. I mean, look at what’s in the papers at the moment. Al-Fayyad. 200 women and counting. Jimmy Savile, Rolf Harris, Harvey Weinstein, and on and on and on. So you can’t run that in the same way anymore. We’re more cynical. They’d run the chaste woman defense that because she has no injuries, she didn’t attempt to defend herself. Therefore, it must have been a consensual act. Well, you can sort of get away with versions of that now, but you couldn’t run it in the way that we’re running in the fifties. 

So what were they doing in the 2000s when they looked at it? They were delayed complaint being suspicious. Mark and I did some, these are very, rubbery maths, right? But we got frustrated with that in a group once we thought, right, well, let’s just do the numbers. So if one in seven women report about one in 10 children report in childhood, those people who report child sexual abuse and adult weight on average 20, 25 years before they report. 

We looked at our figures and about a third of people reported to us within 72 hours, which is the criterion of Vigpol for an immediate report. Put all those numbers together, only about 5 % of people who’ve been sexually abused will report that to the authorities within 72 hours. 95 % of people won’t. So where’s the credibility of delayed complaint in undermining someone’s story? 

So lack of injury, they’ll still run, they’ll run memory issues. And here’s where we come to where interviewing is particularly important because any prior inconsistency created by the way we talk to people, any misunderstanding, or if we, if there are memory issues in the interview that we have not properly explored and explained, they’ll run that. So we know these stories will be pitched in to an adversarial system, a fight essentially why we put traumatised people into that. And that’s a whole other question. Are there better justice systems here? Yes, there are. But for what we’re doing right now, our interviews, their stories go into a hostile environment. We need to be utterly prepared to help them navigate that process. And the key to it is back to that. Do we listen? Do we understand our subject? 

And do we listen enough so that we can put those two together? What he’s likely to have done, the breadth and depth? Are we suspect focused in the way that we listen? And have we got everything that she knows about what’s taking place between her and him that’s potentially relevant evidence? Pretty hard job. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

Pretty hard job, but as you said, the good interview looked quite effortless. So what would you say if you could say a few words? How would you think hope it looked? How should you do it?  

Patrick Tidmarsh: 

Well, funny you say that because Becky Milne, who I think you also interviewed, were working with Stiri on a project looking at first contact, initial account and VRIs and looking at the different trainings and different interviewing. 

Questioning that we’re doing of people across that point. So creating inconsistencies and we’re also then looking at what would be a model to help investigators in relationship based crime get better breadth and depth of evidence. Now, now the UK’s got ABE achieving best evidence. Pretty, pretty good, you know, and in UK been, they’ve been leaders in all sorts of interviews for a long time. So that the structure is, is fine, but it needs some tweaking for relationship based crime back to all the things that we’ve been talking about today. And what we’re working on really is a format where you do the preparation, you explain the detail, you do practice interviews, you’ve built rapport, someone’s ready to move from telling to reporting to interviewing, so they’re mentally prepared for what’s coming. And then we really see it in three phases. Two people, three phases. The two people are, the person in the room is technique, listening and questions. And yes, they’re going to hear the evidence and they’re going to have their views and so on. 

But it’s a lot to remember and a lot to focus on if you have to think about defense and you have to think about breadth and depth and you need to be maintaining rapport and so on. So we feel as the other interviewer, Becky doesn’t like the word second interviewer. I call them the second interviewer. She likes co-interviewers, but co interviewer, but so we bicker about that. But so the other interviewer is there to listen and understand what it is that’s required of the investigation and what has not been sufficiently explored, that’s definitely going to be important. And we, we sort of see it in three phases. The first is free narrative, that idea of getting everything that’s there without treading on, as Becky would say, the freshly fallen snow of memory as best we can, we get what’s there. We break, we discuss, we look at grooming one, two, three, four maintenance, whatever she’s told us. look at where, what are the key marker points that need to be gone back to. So then we come back in phase two is taking you back to the part where and tell me more about. So all the bits that we think are important, however long that takes break. Now of all the things we’ve got, if somebody’s coming to this story, who doesn’t know anything about this, what needs further explanation or put another way, what’s defense going to use against us here? So, there’s a story that I wrote about in the book, of a woman who went for a massage, very, very common case that we get through the door. goes for a massage and in the course of that massage is raped by the masseur and she waits two weeks to report it. Also very common. So it was one of the first jobs I got moving across to policing and in that job, she actually withdrew her complaints, but it got us thinking about what’s, what, what could we do better with all of that? And in the interview, it wasn’t particularly, just to say it wasn’t particularly well handled, but talking to her about it later in that two week wait, well, in an interview, we would know the defense is going to make something of that. They’re going to suggest the weight in that period of time is suspicious in some way. Well, actually what she said about the two weeks is that she couldn’t believe it had happened to her. She felt she was in shock. She phoned her sister immediately. Good statement. The first complaint, her sister says, go to the police and she says, I don’t even know how to explain this. How am I going to tell them? You know, she’s completely jumbled and we know the trauma impacts people on a physiological level for quite some time after the traumatic acts have taken place. So she said in her brain, I’ll just put it behind me within a very short space of time. She can’t eat. She’s not sleeping. She, when her friends are calling, she’s knocking back the call. Even her sister isn’t getting through. She still maintains her job, though, which she loved. She’s going into work and this becomes an increasing issue of isolation, her mental health declining, not eating or sleeping. It isn’t until the last straw is she can’t go to her work. She gets to the car park at work. She she starts shaking. I think she has a panic attack of some kind or other trauma. And and in that moment, I’m going to swear on your podcast right now. She said, you know, I thought, fuck it. I’m going to the police. 

Now, old school, we either didn’t get that information or we thought it was a problem. So we kind of skirted around it. Now we would say, tell us about the two week wait. Now also let’s talk about the culture of policing that like, not that long ago, we’d have gone, bloody hell love. You’ve waited two weeks to report. You’ve really tied our hands behind our back here, you know, or we’d have said, why’d you wait two weeks to report? Now we’re also teaching them. We’ve done the prep. We’ve done the the, you know, the rapport building, we’ve prepped them for what we’re going to say at this point. And we’re going to come back to a question like, okay, so this happened a couple of weeks ago, but something’s brought you in today. Tell me about that. Or we’d say, so this happened a couple of weeks ago, take me through everything that’s happened between then and you coming in here today. We’ll want to explore the breadth and depth of that period of time, because I don’t know about you when, when she explained it like that, I went, yeah, that makes perfect sense to me. 

So phase one breadth, phase two depth, phase three, go back and explore everything that you think she still has to say or is potentially going to be used, you know, by defense against us in some way or another and put that in with what is already quite good established practice around the world. That needs to be slightly shifted and upskilled to meet what relationship based crime investigation needs. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

You make me think, Patrick, on one of the most misunderstood concepts I think in Investigative Interviewing is the phrase keep an open mind. Because you can’t just keep an open mind. There’s like tabla rasa, there is nothing. If you don’t have the knowledge that you and your whole storybook is providing to relationship detectives, investigators, you don’t know what to look for.  

Patrick Tidmarsh: 

Yeah.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

So, and open mind, as one of my men, Kyle Arkes, asks work on how to think like a detective, it requires actively having an open mind. So that requires knowledge about what you should look for. What can you expect? What are you up against here? What could this story be? And if you don’t have these concepts actively in your head, how can you actually look for it? 

And as you say, put the light on it and get the details of it and put it into a context.  

Patrick Tidmarsh: 

Yeah.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

So this is also one of the things that this taps into what I think the whole idea of doing any form of investigation is that you actually have this fundament of deep insight in what you’re investigating.  

Patrick Tidmarsh: 

Yeah.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

And without that evidence will just fly by and you will not even see it. 

Patrick Tidmarsh: 

I totally agree that there’s a caveat there I think which people sometimes think there’s a trickery in all of this. But we’re not changing the fundamentals of investigation. There’s still a fairness to the accused, is still explore every avenue of inquiry whether it leads towards or away from your suspect. None of that shifts. Our view is that whole story should get you the stories that are not quite right as well as the vast majority of stories that are. And whilst we’re on that, let’s talk about false reporting. 

One of the reasons Mark and I got jobs in policing is because of investigators thinking false reporting was 50%. No, and they really need to change that culture. What we know now from decades of research is the false reporting rate in sexual crime is somewhere between 2 and 10%, probably closer to 5 than 10%. And I think for me, even more important than that kind of headline number is that both from our own experience and from the research of those roughly 5 % of people who come in and say something that’s provably false, the majority of them are still trying to tell us something that either has happened to them historically or is happening to them contemporaneously, but for some reason they’re not telling us what’s really happened. An obvious one that we would get quite commonly is they’ll say it’s a stranger when actually it’s a family member because it’s too hard at that point to say. So malicious false reporting in that way is much, much less common than most people in communities think it is and certainly even now as investigators think it is. 

So, but even then, when you know that 95% plus of people are coming in telling the truth, there is supposed to be an investigative process that will find the things that are problematic as well as the ones that are not. And so then I want to come back to your point, because I think the much bigger issue is how many people are not reporting to us because they lack faith in the judicial system. They lack faith in policing’s ability to listen and understand their story. And then we come to the point that is I think fundamental to what you said, we need to prepare our investigators so they know where the evidence is likely to be. And 95 plus times out of 100, they will find it there if they know how to interview properly. And occasionally they’ll find a story that isn’t quite right. So they can then explore that and see, well, is this a genuine false report in some way or another, or is this actually something that you might want to change your mind in? If we’ve got rapport, you’ll tell us what really happened to you. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

Patrick, this is a podcast episode and there isn’t time to explore the whole story around the whole story. I would like to round off with one last topic and the reason you’re in Oslo this week is to share some of your insight and experiences with us at the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights, who you know work, we’re trying to introduce more fair trials, more better investigations and you know human rights through interviewing mostly in what we used to call third world countries. They’re not that anymore at all. They are emerging strong economies but some of them are stuck in old cultures and old governance systems. So I know you’ve been teaching this not only in England and Australia. How do you think this theory applies to two countries that are you said, old term, not Western old democracies.  

Patrick Tidmarsh: 

So let’s talk about offenders first and then talk about policing. And with offenders, they are highly predictable, whether they’re domestic abuse, family violence perpetrators, stalkers, child molesters, the rapists, they are highly predictable and yet also unique. Each of them is going to do what they’re likely to do slightly differently. And policing needs to catch up with the predictability of them and a way of capturing the evidence there that’s unique for each particular one. So we need to know more about who offenders are. And they do, you know, there are differences in different parts of the world. There’s more types of one kind of offending and another, but by and large, they’re everywhere in every community, in every culture. It is the violence against women the most significant issue in policing women and children and men because we haven’t talked lot about men but you know men report even less than women do and there is a significant group of men out there experiencing sexual violence too and we are not good enough at getting them to come to us and say we’ll be able to hear your story. in policing, policing has the same issues all around the world. 

It doesn’t matter what kind of country or culture I’m teaching in, you will find assumptions and misconceptions. You will find, I’m afraid to say, misogyny and patriarchy there that has made this a non-issue up until relatively recently. It was not seen as proper coppering, know, taking doors off and catching thieves, all that was the stuff. This stuff was relegated to, you know, well, when we let women into policing, they can do this sort of thing. 

It’s moving, it’s shifted, but you’ve got those cultures are still there in certain places and across every country and culture that I’ve worked in, there has been a lack of understanding of who offenders are and an inability to investigate them effectively. There have been low reporting rates. And so the reason that we have found a whole story beginning to be more effective is linked to the skill of listening and interviewing. It gives complainants a way of giving a breadth and depth of that evidence. 

And we are finding wherever it’s been put in place, increase in charge rates, decrease in victim blaming attitudes amongst investigators. Interestingly, in some cases, better use of mental health services by investigators, because this stuff’s pretty difficult to deal with on a day to day basis, especially in the hurly burly of policing with too many jobs and not enough money and not the right kind of interview suite and all the other pressures that they have and so on. So I would say across the world, there is a shift towards better policing here, but we have a long way to go. And it doesn’t matter where you are, you see the same types of problems and challenges to get investigation. But also I think both of you and I care really deeply about complainant interviewing and improving investigative interviewing here. We have a long way to go make people in our communities feel that they can come forward and be, listened to, understood and have, if they wish, cases thoroughly investigated. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

Patrick, there’s another thing that you can’t… Well, hopefully there will be listeners to this podcast who will learn from this really nice conversation about what we actually can do to protect and to reduce harm. In the meanwhile, before the right people actually get to meet you and get your training, at least they can get your book.  

Patrick Tidmarsh: 

Yeah. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

Which is now finally available and you can get it on Kindle and you can order it. all I can say is thanks a lot for being our guest today and to the listeners, get the book.  

Patrick Tidmarsh: 

Thank you.