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There has been little research into what it’s like for police detectives to investigate the death of a child. As bluntly stated in official police guidance documents “children are not meant to die”, and coping with these circumstances, especially as a detective and parent, could involve emotional and psychological demands beyond those experienced when investigating adult murders.
For a new explorative study in the Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology, Jason Roach and his colleagues surveyed 99 police detectives from 23 forces across England and Wales: most of them were white and male, and they had conducted investigations into an average of 30 adult murders and 7 unexplained child deaths. Compared to dealing with adult homicides, the detectives said they felt more pressure to solve cases involving children, found them harder to deal with emotionally, and thought more about them after the cases had ended.
The detectives also considered child cases to be more complex and said they were more likely to handle them by turning to formal guidance, such as the Murder Investigation Manual, which was published by the Association of Chief Police Officers in 2006. This suggests they wanted to do things by the book rather than relying on intuition, which seems sensible given the relative rarity of such cases.
Some of the emotional effects of child cases were weaker when detectives had experienced them within the last six months. This seems counterintuitive, but the researchers speculated that while dealing with any violent crime can deliver an emotional load in the short term, the impressions of a case involving a child are harder to shake, so its severity becomes more obvious over time.
digest.bps.org.uk
For a new explorative study in the Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology, Jason Roach and his colleagues surveyed 99 police detectives from 23 forces across England and Wales: most of them were white and male, and they had conducted investigations into an average of 30 adult murders and 7 unexplained child deaths. Compared to dealing with adult homicides, the detectives said they felt more pressure to solve cases involving children, found them harder to deal with emotionally, and thought more about them after the cases had ended.
The detectives also considered child cases to be more complex and said they were more likely to handle them by turning to formal guidance, such as the Murder Investigation Manual, which was published by the Association of Chief Police Officers in 2006. This suggests they wanted to do things by the book rather than relying on intuition, which seems sensible given the relative rarity of such cases.
Some of the emotional effects of child cases were weaker when detectives had experienced them within the last six months. This seems counterintuitive, but the researchers speculated that while dealing with any violent crime can deliver an emotional load in the short term, the impressions of a case involving a child are harder to shake, so its severity becomes more obvious over time.
Detectives on the toll of investigating child deaths: it only gets harder
Psychologists surveyed 99 police detectives about their experience of investigating child and adult murder cases. By Alex Fradera
digest.bps.org.uk
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