Subtle Forms of Reluctance in Commercially Sexually Exploited Adolescents’ Responses when Questioned by the Police and at Trial

Abstract

Research examining commercially sexually exploited adolescents’ (CSEA) reluctance has found lower rates of reluctance in court than in police interviews. One possible explanation is that the constrained courtroom questioning environment leads witnesses to express reluctance in novel ways. This study analyzed the responses (N = 4163) of six female CSE witnesses aged 15–17 (Mage = 16.50) who were associated with the same trafficker, interviewed by the same police officers (n = 1660 utterances), and questioned by the same attorneys in court (n = 2463 utterances). We utilized a coding scheme identifying novel forms of reluctance in CSEA (Henderson et al., 2021), and supplemented the scheme with additional types of reluctance, derived from literature examining the questioning of politicians and suspects in interrogations. Supplementing the scheme increased the rate of reluctance in court from 3% to 13% (OR = 4.83), with higher reluctance exhibited in response to the defense (16%) than to the prosecution (10%). The rate of reluctance in the police interviews also increased from 13% to 18% (OR = 1.47). Reluctance was often expressed differently in court than in police interviews, with greater use of altering the narrative (including questioning implicit assumptions of the questioner) and inappropriate diction (including resisting formality).