Alice-in-Wonderland Justice: DOJ Promotes ‘Trauma-Informed’ Techniques to Law Enforcement

Article here. Excerpt:

'The City of Charleston, South Carolina recently settled a lawsuit with a college student wrongfully charged with rape. Following the canons of trauma-informed techniques, the prosecutor accepted the poorly investigated claims of the purported victim at face value, at the expense of the rights of the accused.i The student was later acquitted by a jury after only a few minutes’ deliberation.

Sadly, this case is but one of many examples exposing how a trauma-informed approach to criminal investigations is unethical and reckless. Similar tactics have been used on college campuses for years, leading sexual misconduct disciplinary proceedings to be ridiculed as “kangaroo courts.” These biased investigations often have resulted in accused students filing over 200 lawsuits against their schools - lawsuits they are winning more often than not.

What exactly is meant by “trauma-informed”? The basic idea appears reasonable, to create “an atmosphere in which victims feel more comfortable and willing to report an assault and provide law enforcement the information necessary to investigate the case.”

However in practice, trauma-informed investigative methods teach law enforcement to ignore inconsistencies in a complainant’s story so as to avoid re-traumatizing the “victim.” This results in “ignoring investigative paths that might demonstrate that no crime was committed or that it was committed by someone other than the defendant,” according to criminal defense attorney Scott Greenfield.

In its recent report, Trauma Informed Theories Disguised as Evidence, Families Advocating for Campus Equality charged trauma-informed policies have led to “untoward presumptions about guilt and innocence” that are “antithetical to any fair and impartial adjudicatory process.”

But succumbing to the #MeToo movement, police forces across the country are now participating in trauma-informed training. Even the U.S. Department of Justice has jumped on the ideological bandwagon.'