Today we are launching our month-long campaign to rein in victim-centered investigations. Our concern is both legal -- trauma-informed methods destroy the notion of impartial investigations -- and scientific -- trauma-informed theory has no basis in fact.

We have compiled five statements of experts who have looked at the research behind trauma-informed, and concluded these concepts represent "junk science:"

1. Center for Prosecutor Integrity: Review of ‘Understanding the Neurobiology of Trauma and Implications for Interviewing Victims’ -- “The impacts of trauma on memories and recall are widely variable. The stress accompanying and resulting from trauma may produce strong memories, impair memories, have no effect on memories, or increase the possibility of false memories.”
2. ATIXA: Trauma-Informed Training and the Neurobiology of Trauma -- “The truth is that we understand perhaps 1/100th of 1% of which we need to know and may someday understand about how the brain responds to trauma.”
3. United States Air Force: Report on the Use of the Forensic Experiential Trauma Interview (FETI) Technique -- “We believe it would be inappropriate and irresponsible to discontinue the use of a robust, well-studied, effective, and empirically-validated interviewing method that is supported by the latest scientific research (the Cognitive Interview), in favor of an interviewing method that is loosely-constructed, is based on flawed science, makes unfounded claims about its effectiveness, and has never once been tested, studied, researched or validated.”
4. Christian Meissner and Adrienne Lyles: Training for Title IX Investigators Lacks Tested, Effective Techniques -- “A search of the available research literature yielded no published, peer-reviewed studies on the efficacy or effectiveness of FETI.”
5. Emily Yoffee: The Bad Science Behind Campus Response to Sexual Assault -- “The spread of an inaccurate science of trauma is an object lesson in how good intentions can overtake critical thinking, to potentially harmful effect….University professors and administrators should understand this. And they, of all people, should identify and call out junk science.”

The full citations can be seen HERE.

Please help us spread the word, victim-centered methods represent the death of due process.